To any aspiring writer, learning that The Bishop’s Man is only Linden MacIntyre’s second novel is surely nothing short of depressing. MacIntyre’s story of one priest’s journey through the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals reads like he’s a writer who’s had lots of practice. He has, in a way. In the non-fiction realm, Linden MacIntyre is a well-known, award-winning investigative journalist. The host of Canada’s The Fifth Estate on public television and the often guest host of The Current on public radio, MacIntyre clearly has a prowess for fiction too.
The Bishop’s Man follows a priest as he lives, works, and survives through the abuse scandals that rocked the clergy in the early nineties. The story is set, in large part, in picturesque Nova Scotia. It’s here, in the details, that MacIntyre first impresses. His descriptions of the bleak maritime harbors, harsh maritime weather, and the lonely, solitary existence of his priest is the kind of stuff usually reserved for poets. It is, if I can put it plainly, remarkable use of language and imagery.
For his part, MacIntyre’s approach to scandal and abuse isn’t a finger-pointing or a blame-laying. Instead, he casts his main character as a kind of tragic hero, and this is probably closest to reality. MacIntyre’s priest is the bishop’s man, the man who’s job it was to fix a range of unpleasant situations within the church, but he is as much a regular man as anybody else. He’s troubled by what he’s done, and what he does. He’s a victim, often, of situations and of his calling, his vocation. He doesn’t like the men he’s charged with disappearing or the issues he’s charged with addressing, and struggles with what to do. The Bishop’s Man isn’t a book about laying blame or about easy answers but a book about messy life. It’s a book about real struggles and it’s here that the real power of MacIntyre’s message lies. The message that life is complicated, life is messy, and often life is hard.
MacIntyre explores the issues in The Bishop’s Man with a certain poignant clarity. His narrative moves effortlessly through time, drawing on situations and events from the past and weaving them into the present. His characters, as a result, live in a world rich with meaning and history. Like ourselves, like our realities, MacIntyre’s characters understand the importance of the strings that bind them to their pasts, their personal demons. MacIntyre’s flashbacks, often woven right into present-time narrative, are interesting and so fluid that, set against the backdrop of the snowy, frozen Maritimes, give his novel the feeling of a waking dream.
MacIntyre’s book follows in the long tradition of Canadian fiction: stories about our cold, foreboding winters and vast empty landscapes. But in that lineage, it deserves an important place. The Bishop’s Man is a well-executed piece of fiction, nearly, I argue, a piece of poetry. It takes us, along with its characters, deep into the human spirit—the spirit of suffering—and asks important questions. With the Catholic Church, again, entering a time of potential crisis this novel is more important, more poignant, than ever. It doesn’t offer easy answers, it doesn’t seek to pacify or lay blame, instead, MacIntyre offers us the human condition; life, in its coldest, hardest form. And to understand, this is where we must begin.
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