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In Whom We Trust by John Clanchy

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January–February 2020, no. 418

In Whom We Trust by John Clanchy

Finlay Lloyd, $28 pb, 246 pp, 9780994516558

In Whom We Trust by John Clanchy

by
January–February 2020, no. 418

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed systemic mistreatment of vulnerable children over decades. Though these crimes have not been the exclusive province of the Catholic Church, its education system has brought more children into intimate care by religious orders, and even those never abused have observed the tics of brutality in some of their teachers and mentors. In a note at the end of his new novel, In Whom We Trust, John Clanchy mentions James Joyce’s hell-fire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the recurrence of these ‘tropes of terror’ in the rhetoric he heard as a Catholic schoolboy in 1960s Melbourne. The system has long-standing practices of psychological control.

Susan Lever reviews 'In Whom We Trust' by John Clanchy

In Whom We Trust

by John Clanchy

Finlay Lloyd, $28 pb, 246 pp, 9780994516558

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