A splendid and generous story of one man’s life as a reflection of a time
Will he find the pieces of the puzzle that put Cyril Avery back together again?
woman, Catherine Goggin arrives in church in the small Irish town she lives in with her family. This is not the prelude to a joyful Sunday at church, because Catherine is about to be excommunicated from her church, her family, and her home town because she is pregnant.
The opening scene of this marvellous epic book about one man’s life in a rapidly changing world begins with being rejected by society before he is even born.
But Catherine, who will not name the father of the child she is carrying, carries with the steely determination not to fall by the wayside. She goes to Dublin and finds herself a job working in the canteen of the Irish parliament.
Her boss is Mrs Hennessy and she has a shrewd idea what has brought Catherine to work for her, she also sees through the story that she is a young pregnant widow, but she is kind while expecting the best.
Catherine has her baby boy and puts him up for adoption.
His adoptive parents are the Averys, a strange couple who show relative little interest in the interior life of their adoptive son; his father insists that he is “not a real Avery”. His mother Maude writes books, she hates being an author, but she can’t not write.
Cyril Aver (not really Avery) grows up and goes to the right schools and the right university.
He falls in love, realising that he is gay. Gay in a country where into the 1950s the church and its many joyless priests rule the roost in terms of the meaning of sin.
This is a book that takes the story of Ireland in those times and sets them against the life of one small, different, and often lonely boy.
He meets his mother by chance, but has no idea who she is for the longest time.
He works, he travels to Holland where he falls in love with a doctor, the son of the family he is living with.
Cyril lives a life of happiness and unhappiness, but it is a life that is circumscribed by two things, the fact not having been particularly wanted, and the times that he lives in, and in particular the country of his birth.
It’s a story of a time in society and, yes, it covers themes of abuse, of irregularity in the church posing as virtue. But, on a lighter note, tells the story of a life lived well, if not stratospherically.
You will come to love Cyril Avery, as he looks back on his life. Like most of us I suspect as he gets older the ghosts around him gather, more and more of them.
Will he find the last pieces of the puzzle that put the real Cyril Avery back together again?
To know this, you will have to read to the end of this splendid and generous story of one man’s life as a reflection of a time in parts, but in other ways his own unique story. It’s a lovely book and has the added benefit of being fine literature.