THE DEPOSITION OF FATHER MCGREEVY

‘O’Doherty has created a vivid narrative voice. His Ireland is primal, menacing, chthonic; the story is strange and compelling’ – Stephanie Merritt, Observer

‘There is an eerily poetic quality to his prose which makes his bleak fable of rural Ireland quietly compelling’ – Sunday Telegraph

‘A vivid, dark tale’ – Simon Jenkins, The Times

‘O’Doherty’s story of rural hardship produces an abiding sense of compassion and resilience’ – Robert Potts, Observer

‘Passionate, deeply felt and utterly compelling’ – Robert McCrum, The Times

‘The best fiction of the year’ – Francis King, Spectator

‘This is a wonderful novel. Some reviewers have called it haunting, and for once the epithet is deserved’ – Evening Standard

‘The most interesting and original book on the Booker shortlist. It is the language of the priest that weaves the most potent spell’ – Metro

‘Touching and evocative’ – Liz Thomson, Publishing News

‘Has the cool, affectless authority of J. G. Ballard. O’Doherty, with his painterly eye, has a keen instinct for the memorable image’ – Sunday Independent

‘Great power and beauty … a lyrical minor masterpiece’ – Irish Edition

‘A leisurely, atmospheric tale … absorbing’ – Sydney Morning Herald

‘Metaphors sacred and profane spring readily from the rocky soil that is bringing McGreevy’s flock to such grief. They are grabbed back from oblivion by a novel that is both terrible – in the true sense of the word – and tender’ – Daily News

‘McGreevy’s voice is as mesmerizing, ancient and lyrical as an extended song, albeit a lament … an evocative, memorable book’ – Newsday

‘Another captivating read from Brian O’Doherty. Anchored in the very texture of a hard life lived by real people in real places, his novel of a village has more in it of a true Ireland – and world – than many a dozen others’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘O’Doherty tells his story with exquisitely suggestive detail. Highly recommended’ – Library Journal

‘Father McGreevy’s plea for solitude and preservation of a vanishing culture is haunting and finely wrought’ – Booklist

‘O’Doherty’s elegant, lyrical prose is mesmeric’ – Good Book Guide

‘County Kerry, with its wakes and fiddlers, paganism and Catholicism, wild coast and illicit alcohol, is enshrined in this magnificent, terrifying, beautiful tale. Destined to become an Irish classic’ – South China Morning Post

‘An absolutely magical book, reminding me at points of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a ‘chronicle of a death foretold’, but this time not merely of an individual, indeed not even of one small village, but a way of life’ – Race & Class

‘It is the elegant prose, involving the reader deeper and deeper in the strange, unreal situation that truly mesmerises’ – Crime Time

The Deposition
of
Father McGreevy

Brian O’Doherty

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

The Priest’s Story

William Maginn

Old Biddy

Muiris

Epilogue

Ackonwledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

For Lyn Chase 
and
For Rudolf Baranik

PROLOGUE

IT’S A MYSTERY why a pub draws a set of people and gets a name for itself. Suddenly, it’s the place to be – until some other pub replaces it. The Antelope in London has had a bit of a shine to it for several years now. The beer, apart from the Guinness, was as good as you’ll find, and the owner decent enough, though he wasn’t too keen to see me after he’d had to call a taxi a few times to bring me home.

I was well on that day when Augustus John came in. He always came in as if Lear had found a door on the heath. He had some Polish fellow with him by the name of Felix. It was Felix this and Felix that and by the end of the night we were all drinking toasts to Felix, who was as convenient an excuse as any. John, a large, shaggy animal, presided as he always did, always the centre of attention. He’s a fine looking man, and if I looked like him, I’d think the world owed me its attention too.

‘Oh my God, I don’t believe it, is that Augustus John himself?’ said Séamus when John came in. Séamus is my wife’s cousin from Listowel. He’d been a medical student at University College, Dublin, for ten years, a dark, thin fellow with a pale face and a taste for painting. I always looked him up for a drink when I went back to Dublin, even after my wife got tired of picking me up and bringing me home. When she left me for good, he never held it against me. Séamus had peculiar drinking habits, pale sherry after pale sherry. He drank in that determined and careful way that some Irishmen do, including myself, I suppose. The story he was telling me was beyond belief.

He’d been down in Kerry on his holidays with another medical student from Dingle, who’d picked up this story about a dead village up in the mountains. ‘There’s more than a few of those,’ I said.

‘This is different,’ he said. ‘There was a trial that shamed the town. They still won’t talk about it.’

Once he’d got my interest, neither would he. He sat there leaning forward, surrounding his drink, cuddling the details he wouldn’t share with me.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Years ago,’ he said, ‘at the start of the War.’

‘But that’s only fifteen years ago,’ I said.

‘So?’ he said with a shrug. He waited for me to order another drink.

‘This priest was defrocked,’ he said. ‘A lot of women died. They never got to the bottom of it.’

He wouldn’t utter another word, only nursing his damned sherry and nodding sagely and mutely at my questions. Well, as sure as my name is William Maginn an editor is an editor and closer to his magazine than to his wife. I was taking the night train the next day to Holyhead and the boat to Dún Laoghaire, so I thought there would be no harm in looking into it. I meant to go over for a week but as it turned out I spent a month traipsing around. I was born near Dingle – Irish was the first language I spoke – but I’ve no great love for it. When I got the whole story it wasn’t right for the magazine, and I’m not sure who or what it’s right for. But everyone can make of it what they will. You can tell the same story to five people and if you asked them to tell it back, you’d have five different stories.

I hadn’t been back in Kerry for years – the family moved to Wicklow when I was sixteen, and I was never happy at the thought of going back to it. As they say, home isn’t where the heart is, it’s where you understand the sons of bitches. I made my life, such as it is, here in London, and I’m lucky to be doing what I want to do, editing a ‘literary’ magazine, pushing young poets uphill, squeezing novelists for a part of their next opus, and soliciting occasional political and social commentary from those addicted to it, while making a show that the very epicentre of the world was located precisely where my desk met the floor. I had no notion who this mysterious priest was until I got to Dingle, where many genealogical inquiries – everyone in Ireland is related to everyone else – converged in the photograph on my mother’s side-table. She used to dust that frame lovingly, hug it to her bosom, and say what a lovely man he was, so handsome and a near saint. Never a word out of my father, of course. Fr Hugh was a second cousin of my mother’s once removed, but he lived vividly in my mother’s emotional past.

‘I hope he’s happy down in Kerry,’ she’d say. ‘Wouldn’t I love to see him again!’

A necessarily sublimated passion, I imagine. Sometimes the dark passions of Irish housewives come right up against the white circlet of the Roman collar, and stay there. My mother, now that I can think of her from the ruins of my own untidy passions, was man-crazy and a devout Catholic. In another culture she’d have afforded a great deal of pleasure – as well as mischief – to many. I’m glad she’s not alive to hear the story of Fr Hugh’s fall from grace.

The answers were mainly voiced from the shards and fragments of my mother’s family scattered in the vicinity of Dingle and North Kerry. The family wasn’t very forthcoming with details, and those outside the family met my questions with a variety of stares, with – from the more sociable – mumbles that ‘some things are best left alone.’ The pub is a great place for unlocking a few secrets. With my desire for real draught Guinness, it was no hardship to take my place at the same stool in the same Dingle pub every night. I was anxious to find Fr Hugh, but no one knew a thing about him. ‘He’s somewhere up north’ was the closest I got. He was up north sure enough when I found him. He was also down under six feet of earth, his name on a small marker let into the ground. No headstone.

Putting facts together out of rumour and silence isn’t easy. I found out where two of the mountain people – Muiris and Old Biddy – had been put away. I was giving up when I got my hands on Fr Hugh’s deposition, if that’s what you’d call it. It was lost and I found it by accident. I’d been long enough in the town to have made no friends. Questions are never welcome down in the country. I’d made a sort of a friend in the local doctor, a Dr McKenna, and after I met him we took our drinks into the snug every night for a week. A powerful force seems to propel some men away from their wives and towards the warm proximities of the pub. We walked back together each night after the pub closed. There was still light in the sky well after ten. Once he stopped and pointed up towards the mountains.

‘That’s where it happened,’ he said. ‘That’s where the village was. Don’t you see it?’ he said, irritated, when all I could see was a whale of a mountain with other ones shouldering into it. ‘See the ridge there,’ he said, ‘and the purple rocks?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said to satisfy him, ‘the very place.’

Next night we were back at the old stand. The doctor drank with a deliberation which slowed as he progressed. It was after completion of a slow-motion circuit from hand to glass to lip to draught to return of glass to table, accompanied by a discreet inversion and savouring of the lips, that I got the goods.

‘There was a whole thing of Fr Hugh’s, poor man,’ he said, ‘a deposition a mile long. He gave it to the local policeman without a solicitor or anyone else around. It wasn’t allowed in court. I don’t know what happened to it.’

Of course I was down at the court house and into the records office the next day, where I didn’t get much of a welcome. There were two people there, a man in double-breasted blue serge and tie, as thin and bent as a question mark with glasses, and his assistant, a young girl also with glasses over bright eyes with a figure of definite pneumatic possibilities. I got nowhere with the court clerk or keeper of records (I never knew his exact title) and before he left at twelve on the dot and saw me lingering, he informed the young woman that he had done all that could be done for me. I changed my story for her. I said I was searching for title to a house my mother had left my oldest brother, and that I wished to contest his ownership.

‘But then it isn’t here you should be at all,’ she said.

We got on so well I asked her if she’d have a drink with me that night. She said her boyfriend would kill her. So we laughed and chatted and I suggested she let me have a peek at the old records downstairs for just a minute before his lordship came back.

‘It’s a mess down there,’ she said. ‘We haven’t got round to straightening it up yet. Anyway, if I let you down there, he’ll kill me.’

‘God above,’ I said, ‘there’s a lot a people want to kill you around here. It’s away with me to London you should come.’

‘Now wouldn’t that be wonderful,’ she said, ‘but that’ll never happen.’

‘Ah, you’d never know,’ I said, and before a minute was gone I was down in the old records room, which was a chaos of unfiled folders, half-open drawers, and sealed boxes. My heart sank. The young one stayed at the top of the stairs looking down at me, then over her shoulder to make sure her boss wasn’t on his way.

‘I told you it was a mess,’ she said. The phone rang and she disappeared.

I found Fr Hugh’s deposition by closing my eyes. It was so hopeless that I did a sampling at each of eight points turning clockwise from the centre of the room, eyes closed. When I opened my eyes at the fourth sampling I had the records of one Peter O’Mahoney, who got six months hard labour for assault while under the influence. Next to it was a thick bent stuffed yellow envelope which I knew was it before I put my hand on it, if you can explain that. I put it under my shirt next to my skin and closed my coat over it and was up those stairs light as a feather. I had a grin a mile wide on my face.

‘Nothing doing,’ I said, ‘but maybe I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,’ she said.

I ran into her boss on the main street coming out of a shop painted an eye-splitting orange, and gave him a big hallo. No response. I was on the train to Dublin within the hour.

Fr Hugh’s long soliloquy is clear enough to me. He was talking to a policeman, who obviously had no experience in taking depositions. Fr Hugh seems to forget his listener more often than he remembers him. He tells his story in his own way, which might be hard for some to understand, so I will assist the reader with comments on Fr McGreevy’s narrative when I deem it appropriate. I leave it to the careful reader to tolerate, perhaps welcome my intrusions which are designed to be useful, thereby avoiding the sententiousness with which footnotes tend to fondle themselves in the page’s basement. I shall not ascend ‘above the line’ until my meetings with two of the protagonists in the final stages of this book. Slothful and careless readers should ignore these footnotes and stay with the good Father, above the line.

I’m not sure what it all tells us beyond the fact that there are some good people, some bad people, and a lot of people who are one or the other depending on the circumstances. And the day that that becomes news, there will be a blue moon. After all this, I should tell you again who I am. My name is William Maginn, editor of Fraser’s Magazine, and a distant relative of the good Father.