Communion
by Jon Doyle
Jon Doyle’s debut novel Communion is set in the southern Welsh town of Port Talbot in the recent past. It opens with the protagonist, Cormac “Mack” O’Brien, out drinking with his ageing father and a group of current or retired workers from the steel plant that dominates the town’s economy. “Fitting in with the boys” does not come easily to Mack. He has just spent several years at the seminary training to become a priest, but his activism and questioning faith did not sit well with his superiors, who effectively sent him away. He has now taken a job as a security guard at the steelworks – and indeed, where else could he find work in Port Talbot, where life revolves around the steel industry?
Trouble, however, is brewing. The unions are increasingly at odds with management and are planning strike action. An upcoming community passion play scheduled for Holy Week, featuring a famous Hollywood actor from Port Talbot, might offer the unions an opportunity to broadcast their message to a wider audience.
Mack, still finding his feet in the outside world, faces further unexpected moral crises when he reconnects with a childhood friend, Siwan Roderick. Just before he left the seminary, Siwan visited Mack and made a confession to him, binding him to secrecy. Although, as Mack repeatedly points out, he was not ordained and therefore was not technically bound by the seal of confession, he honours the promise. Yet this vow, coupled with his renewed involvement with Siwan, forces him into a series of difficult and consequential decisions.
Communion was one of the first novels I read this year, and will likely prove to be among the best. It is a realist working-class novel, rooted in the heat, sweat, toil and grime of the steel industry. Small wonder that in 2023, then a novel-in-progress provisionally titled "Tenebrae", it won the Writers & Artists Working Class Writer’s Prize. The novel draws much of its authenticity from the author’s own background as a (Catholic) son of Port Talbot: two generations of Doyle’s family worked at the steelworks, while the passion play at the centre of the narrative is inspired by a real-life event, Michael Sheen’s 2011 production The Passion of Port Talbot.
Yet Communion is also a deeply philosophical novel that asks searching questions about community, faith and social expectations. What does it mean to be called to the ministry? Are religion and social activism complementary or fundamentally at odds? And does priesthood require a renunciation of masculinity?
This tension between the worldly and the Godly, the secular and the religious, the material and the spiritual, is reflected in the novel’s style. Doyle adopts a close third-person perspective centred on Mack, conveyed through pared-down, direct and matter-of-fact prose that suits the novel’s social realism. At the same time, the narrative is punctuated by moments that invite a more symbolic or mystical reading, at times edging towards magical realism. One thinks, for instance, of Mack’s conversation with a would-be suicide tied to a railway track; of his mother rewatching videos of past tragedies while praying for the victims’ souls; or of the final scene, in which Mack, dressed in priestly robes, encounters a centurion on the beach – who may, or may not, simply be a participant in the passion play. I was also struck by the description of the Good Friday ceremony attended by Mack and Siwan: the religious atmosphere is conveyed not, as one might expect, through lush or opulent imagery, but through the same restrained, minimalist prose that Doyle employs throughout the novel.
Doyle also maintains a firm grip on the plot. The secret at the heart of the novel is never explicitly revealed, although by the end we have a fairly clear sense of what it might be, and this withheld revelation lends the story a certain narrative tension, at times giving it the feel of a thriller.
This is an impressive debut.
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