Wild About Writing

The surprise win by Linden MacIntyre of the Giller Prize, at $50,000 the richest award in Canadian books, has been something of a stunner in the literary community.

His book, The Bishop’s Man, tells the story of a priestly fixer, Father Duncan MacAskill, who has been serving his church in the capacity of trouble-shooter, covering up the sexual aberrations of other Roman Catholic priests in the Cape Breton district of Nova Scotia.

I’ve not yet read The Bishop’s Man. It sits on my coffee table, along with the four other Giller short list nominations. I’m looking forward to getting into it. I’ll be making it my next read.

Anyone watching the Bravo TV cast of the Giller Awards Tuesday night must have been as surprised as those in the room that the judges chose it as this year’s winner.

After all, McIntyre is a broadcast journalist, host of the fifth estate on CBC-TV, and while he has written one previous novel, he’s not been regarded as an icon of Canadian literature.

Was the jury carried off by the topicality of McIntyre’s subject, some might have wondered. Did journalism triumph over literature?

Ironically, the page devoted to McIntyre’s win in the Globe and Mail this morning provided space for a second story: Catholic priest released on bail one day after sentencing for sexual abuse.

How do these things happen?

My take, allowing that I’ve yet to read The Bishop’s Man, is that it’s a powerful narrative of the human forces at work in the corruptive and oppressive environment in which many good priests try their best to serve their flocks.

I’ll be interested in learning how McIntyre addresses the fundamental problem — the dogma of celibacy.

It is here that the problem lies, of course.

McIntyre and others may rightfully point to the failure of leadership in the Catholic Church that has seen abusive priests shifted from parish to parish, ostensibly to protect its own good reputation as well as the careers of its erring priests.

But to my mind, celibacy is an affront to the genetic reality of human beings. Practised as it is within the Catholic church, it becomes a perverted and pervasive lure that forces some priests to find alternative forms of sexual satisfaction. The problem will never go away.

I heard Linden MacIntyre this evening in a delightful interview with his wife Carol Off on CBC Radio’s As It Happens.

He allowed that he felt like a grate crasher at the Giller, and magnanimously wished that all five short listed authors could have shared the prize. He hadn’t expected to win, he said, short of recognizing that he had a “mathematical possibility” of coming out on top.

Then Carol let the cat out of the bag. Linden lost the $50,000 check handed him by Jack Rabinovitch! Happily, she recovered it this morning, crumpled into a tiny ball in an inside pocket of his suit.

Congratulations, Linden. You’ve demonstrated that journalism and literature can share the same coin.