AN ABUSIVE PAST
Susan Doherty says Monday Rent Boy is a book she `needed to write'
The seven-year-old boy had attacked a classmate, biting a chunk out of his victim's cheek so large that stitches were required. A subsequent psychiatric evaluation revealed that the troubled youngster had suffered severe abuse — emotional, physical and sexual.
That incident has haunted Montreal author Susan Doherty for more than three decades. “Some stories follow us around for a long time,” she writes in an afterword to Monday Rent Boy, her lacerating new novel about child sexual abuse and its aftermath. “So yes, this is a book that I needed to write — and hopefully it will need to be read.”
Her indictment covers a wide swath — ranging from a Roman Catholic Church, determined for decades to cover up sex crimes by its clergy, to today's powerful digital universe and its failure to act effectively against online child pornography.
Doherty's new novel, focusing on the continuing trauma of two teenagers first abused as altar boys, has been a long time coming. The shocking case of that seven-yearold child had stayed with her from the beginning. And as the years passed, and she continued her research into child sexual abuse, she knew she had to write about it.
“It's kind of like a car crash where you do slow your car down but you don't look because you're too afraid of seeing the mangled faces,” she tells Postmedia. “Yet if you don't talk about these things, the situation never improves.”
Doherty, a former Maclean's magazine staffer, has devoted a good part of her career to writing about mental illness. Her acclaimed non-fiction success The Ghost Garden took readers into the world of the schizophrenic. Her award-winning young adult novel, The Secret Music, was a Depression-era story about a young piano prodigy whose challenges included a mother in psychological distress. Her volunteer work includes a 15-year association with Montreal's Douglas Institute, a psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with Mcgill University. And she currently teaches creative writing to people struggling with psychosis.
The book that would become Monday Rent Boy would have happened sooner had she not been floored by a rare, near-fatal blood disorder. “I needed a stem-cell transplant, so although the story had been following me for a very long time, I was only in a position to write it during these last few years,” she explains.
“I'd been afraid to write it — and then wasn't afraid to write it. Surviving a rare blood disorder gave me courage — it made me brave. But now I have some trepidation as this book is about to roll out because I'm afraid people won't pick it up if they hear about the subject matter.”
She has dealt with these fears by giving the reader two teenagers who are abundantly — and, yes, fallibly — alive. Arthur and Ernie, whose alternating first-person narratives keep the story moving, are in many ways exceptional. Both are intelligent: Arthur is writing book reviews for a local paper; Ernie, an animal lover, has an innate mathematical brilliance. But, now in their mid-teens, they remain scarred by the sexual abuse they suffered as altar boys at the hands of their popular and charismatic parish priest. He's the menacing presence they have privately nicknamed The Zipper, and his adoring adult parishioners see him as destined for greater glory as he rises in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
When Arthur and Ernie grow older and become less interesting to a predator who prefers younger victims, they remain wounded beings. And if they are becoming known in the town as troublemakers — did they really set a church pew on fire? — it's because they are acting out their emotional isolation and anguish.
Achieving long-term survival is a challenge, and so is the moral dilemma that arises when Ernie realizes that children are continuing to be recruited and groomed for sexual purposes — with the dark world of internet porn now part of the equation.
By the time she had completed the novel's second draft, Doherty was euphoric about the way Arthur and Ernie were coming to life. “You couldn't help rooting for them because of your empathy as a reader for children who suffered injustice.”
Yet it's touch and go as to how things will work out for these kids. Are healing and survival possible for either of them?
“They steal from parked cars and from department stores, they smoke dope in the backroom. I tried to make them living, breathing human beings who are trying to navigate from childhood into adulthood. What does it take to rise up rather than be crushed by the past?”
The novel is set in England, in the ancient Somerset town of Glastonbury, a place so steeped in spirituality and mysticism that it has been long celebrated as the site of Arthurian legend's fabled Isle of Avalon. The ruins of its once great abbey are among the most mysterious in Britain, and legend has it that the grounds contain offshoots of the holy thorn planted there by Joseph of Arimathea more than 2,000 years ago.
But evil also lurks in the Glastonbury that the novel gives us — making it an appropriate setting for the struggle between the sacred and the profane. Doherty was comfortable saddling herself with an English storyline, given that one of the novel's most despicable characters is based on notorious BBC personality Jimmy Savile. “He abused a thousand children over 59 years,” she says angrily, adding that people close to him knew that Savile was a pedophile but chose to look the other way — just as her own Church has long been covering up sexual abuse by its priests.
“I grew up Catholic and we were taught that everyone who wore a Roman collar was above us. That's a prime principle of clericalism, a shattering principle, so the coverup becomes more damning. The real reason I threw my shoe at the Catholic Church rather than, say, the Boy Scouts, or the Jimmy Saviles of this world is its absolutely hypocritical stance on homosexuality.”
Doherty, still a practising Roman Catholic, takes it as a given that many “celibate” priests lead active sex lives in private — lives that do not involve preying on children. “I applaud that,” she says bluntly. But what of those who end up pedophiles? “If we deny human beings their sexuality, it leads to a distorted life, to dysfunction. And who are their most vulnerable prey? Altar boys ... or young children who are swept up and groomed to suffer in secrecy and shame for the rest of their lives.”
Doherty found a common factor in the victims of sexual abuse interviewed for this novel. “I'm talking about extreme sex abuse, not a one-off thing.
“They all had addictions in their adult lives — whether narcotics, alcohol or sex addictions or suicidal thoughts.” As for those who were healing — they were the ones who had forced themselves to talk about it. But it doesn't happen quickly. “The average man waits 20 years before talking about what happened to him in the past.”
Her afternote to the reader is blunt in its language. “The disgrace of protecting the priesthood, `the oldest boys' club in the world,' instead of the children they targeted and abused, continues to be front and centre as cardinals, bishops, deacons, priests and lay people face ongoing public scrutiny.” And this, she adds tartly, is an organization “that claims to represent God ...”