Compelling debut exposes our national shame
It’s almost impossible to have grown up in Ireland during the 1980s or 1990s without, at the very least, knowing someone who suffered some form of abuse at school. In recent years, multiple institutions have been forced to explain their inaction when complaints were brought to them while many trusted teachers have found themselves paying for their crimes with lengthy prison sentences.
It’s a subject that’s been written about often, but in her debut novel, Dublin author Fiona McPhillips brings fresh insight through that most compulsive of genres: the literary thriller.
The book opens with the middle-aged academic Louise Manson being contacted by a solicitor about an allegation made against a swimming coach accused of improper conduct with a teenage boy at her former school, Highfield Manor, a place that continues to haunt her.
Highfield, in Louise’s time, was an all-girls establishment, most notable for its swimming programme, run by one Maurice McQueen, still lionised by the media for his success in training young swimmers towards the Olympic Games.
We quickly learn that Louise’s decision to transfer there for her final year is to bring McQueen to justice for raping and effectively causing the death of a childhood friend.
Louise is a terrific narrator. Calm and measured now, she is a spiky, combative teen in the scenes set in the past, more than able to stand up to the mean girls who mock her Ballybrack accent. She’s also coming to terms with being gay and the tentative relationship she builds with another student is drawn with great skill, as is the trauma of its aftermath.
The couple explore their sexuality in a manner that is tender but never titillating, at total odds with the brutal abuse suffered by many of their circle at the hands of a much older man.
Louise has built a successful life – she’s a university lecturer in a loving relationship, negotiating the dramas of bringing up a teenage daughter of her own – but the experience of that year has never quite left her.
Deciding whether or not to get involved in this new case risks reopening wounds that might cause her further damage or, perhaps, heal them forever.
The manner in which McQueen grooms his young charges is incisively portrayed. He knows the power he holds over them and exploits it without conscience.
Complicit in all of this is the school itself, and the nuns who not only refuse to entertain even the slightest whiff of an allegation against their star employee, but threaten any girl who dares to expose his malevolent behaviour.
When We Were Silent contains echoes of the work of Tana French, a writer I consider to be the finest contemporary writer of literary thrillers, and this book is as gripping and intricate as her best work, reminiscent of The Secret Place, a work also set in a Dublin private school. But McPhillips’s story is very much its own creation, overflowing with contained anger and narrative compulsion.
This is an outstanding debut, combining page-turning appeal with complex questions about responsibility, history and the nature of the baffling Ireland in which many of us grew up.
Sensitive to the experiences of her central character, McPhillips is alert to how it feels to grow older wondering how different one’s life might have turned out had the education system of that time placed the welfare of its students over the reputations of the institutions it managed. A writer’s job is to tell a compelling story while also being fearless in exposing the darker sides of society. In When We Were Silent, Fiona McPhillips achieves both.