Jon Doyle’s debut novel, Communion, follows Mack O’Brien, a young man who left the priesthood after being asked to leave the seminary for lacking a true calling. He returns to his family home in Wales, where he lives with his ailing, deeply religious mother and a father struggling with grief after the recent deaths of his own parents. Mack finds himself drawn into a local theatre production, playing a disciple in Owen Sheers’s Passion of Port Talbot, a community-led re-enactment of the crucifixion that took place in Port Talbot in 2012.
Mack is recruited after a steelworker from the plant where he works as a security guard drops out of the show. On the same night he agrees to be in the play, he meets Siwan, a young woman he was close to at school. Siwan’s mother was an environmental activist who went to prison for her protests. Siwan had visited Mack at the seminary on the day he agreed to leave the priesthood and said, “forgive me father, for I am about to sin”. The nature of that sin becomes the focus of the novel.
Siwan and Mack were never a couple; they shared only nights at the Plaza cinema, where they would sit together in the dark and Siwan would let her leg rest against his. This was their only point of connection, and Mack’s interactions with his parents suggest it may have been his only real human connection. Siwan’s present interest in Mack seems linked to his job as a security guard at the Port Talbot steelworks, which she plans to blow up during the weekend of the play. The works will be shut for a strike to draw attention to proposed lay-offs; Siwan’s plan is to set a bomb off without killing anyone. To do that, she needs Mack’s help to get the bomb on site.
The novel is rich and emotionally charged, though some elements ebb as the narrative unfolds. Mack’s mother’s illness and his grandparents’ deaths remain off-stage sorrows; the strike is never revisited; the play stops mattering. The novel becomes a story of a man who made a wrong start in life, revisiting the boarded-up site of his youth and haunting it, unable to enter back in. Confronted by colossal loneliness and manipulated by the one person who seemed to offer a route out of his solitude, Mack decides to help Siwan blow the place up, simply because he cared about her once. It is a devastating via dolorosa.
