TORONTO — Linden MacIntyre is better known for his decades of investigative work with the CBC rather than his more recent foray into book writing, so he fully expected that readers would ask him about the real-life inspirations for “The Bishop’s Man,” which is one of five novels shortlisted for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The story details the life of a priest, middle-aged Duncan MacAskill from Cape Breton, who’s nicknamed the “exorcist” for his ability to snuff out sex scandals committed by his colleagues before they can become public and bring shame to a church.
When he first set out to write the novel, the controversial subject of sexual abuse committed by priests had drifted somewhat from public awareness, MacIntyre said.
But just as the book was released, news emerged about a $15-million settlement for abuse victims in the Roman Catholic diocese of Antigonish, N.S., and weeks later, Bishop Raymond Lahey turned himself into police on child-pornography charges.
MacIntyre was soon fielding questions about the real stories that influenced his novel, but the plot and characters are all his own inventions, he said.
“This storm of circumstances, I think, sharpens the focus of the book a little bit, although the book is basically about the inner life of a priest who has some nasty work to do,” he said, adding that the story is about more than sexual abuse.
The idea for the book originally came from a story he heard about a young man’s suicide in a gossipy small town. Rumour had it that there was a note in the victim’s pocket detailing how he’d been abused by a priest, and that the powers-that-be ensured it disappeared. Despite the lack of any official evidence of a note, the story persisted in the community.
“(The novel) is a meditation on suicide, as a consequence of things that happen to people in other parts of their lives,” he said.
“I could have easily made my principal character a school teacher, or a journalist, or a hockey player, but I thought it would be an interesting experiment to get inside the head of a priest, and to explore this very sensitive issue from his point of view.
“And I must say I did so with my heart in my throat a lot of times because I knew I was going to places that perhaps a reader or audience wouldn’t particularly want to go with me.”
MacIntyre fully expected that the type of small-town folk he grew up with in Atlantic Canada and wrote about wouldn’t be receptive to his book, but was surprised to find that wasn’t the case.
When one woman he knows asked about the subject of the book, he thought she’d recoil in horror and perhaps get defensive about her faith.
“She told me, ’What makes you think it won’t go over around here?’ And I said, ’This place is more Catholic than Rome, and people around here don’t believe that stuff goes on,’ ” he recalled.
“She laughed at me and said, ’Do you know my brother ... and why he’s such a mess?’ And she proceeded to tell me a horrifying story about how he was serially molested by a priest — whom I knew and I didn’t know he was like that.
“We’re talking mainstream, conservative Catholic people, and I suddenly realized there’s a lot of little secrets around here.”
MacIntyre said he has plans to keep writing books and has considered giving up his day job at CBC-TV’s “The Fifth Estate” to do so.
“I’m coming to the conclusion that to do justice to fiction it does require almost a full-time commitment,” he said.
“I’ve been a journalist for over 40 years so maybe it is time to (write books) exclusively. But I haven’t made a decision yet.”