Port Talbot has waited a long time for the novel it deserves. Now it has one: Communion, the first long work of fiction by Jon Doyle, who was brought up in the town, and still lives there.
If you know Port Talbot you’ll soon recognise many of the places that feature in the book – the central streets and districts like Sandfields and Margam, the bare hills above, St Joseph’s School, the Plaza cinema. Above all, the once mighty steelworks, the largest steelworks in the world at their peak. The works sit at the heart of the novel and act as an additional, near-human character within it. ‘The furnaces growled behind them, those dull metal bodies hiding ferocious pressure and heat’. ‘But it was the blasts that left the lasting impression. Twin beasts blind and atavistic.’ ‘It still felt like a primeval thing stumbled upon, not so much built as tamed towards the benefit of the town.’
Doyle twists real time by linking two separate Port Talbot events, a strike by the steelworkers, prompted by fears of the closure of the works, and The Passion, the large-scale community drama of 2011 starring Michael Sheen as Jesus Christ (Sheen is referred to throughout as ‘The Actor’). These themes mirror the twin motivations of the book’s main character, Cormac (‘Mack’) O’Brien: the urge to belong to a human community and share its concerns, and the search for an inner, theologically-driven direction for his future life. The novel’s title, Communion, unites these twin poles, of human solidarity and self-searching. So does the book’s striking cover design, by Anna Morrison, which fuses fumes spewing from the works chimney with smoke rising from a communion candle.
At the beginning of the story Mack is a lost soul. Many years before he’d entered a seminary, determined to become a Catholic priest. But he’s recently been told that his idealistic commitment to social justice and helping the poor, rather than directly serving God, made him an unsuitable candidate for the priesthood. And so here he is, back in his parents’ home, trying to decide ‘the sort of man I want to be’. In the meantime, he takes a job in the steelworks as a security worker.
The first chapter finds Mack in a working men’s club, wholly uncertain how he should integrate himself with the steelman (including his father) and their hard-drinking, tough-talking camaraderie-culture. They’re discussing taking parts in the passion play, and one of them asks Mack whether he’ll have a role. The very first sentence reads, ‘His father answered for him, when they first asked the question.’ This lack of agency and an inability to commit to action dog Mack’s steps around the town during the run-up to Easter. Hesitation and introversion hobble him. His father, retired but still steel-obsessed, and his mother, her life dominated by religious observance, are little help. His relationship with his fellow security worker, Denzil, is awkward: ‘He wasn’t quite sure how to act in Denzil’s company, what version of him he wished to project.’
The one person who’s important to him is Siwan, with whom he shared visits to films in the Plaza when they were children. Now he meets her again. He’s both attracted and wary, especially since she went to see him, late in his seminary career, to confess to a serious sin she intended to commit. It’s Siwan, a mysterious and not entirely attractive figure, who finally sparks Mack’s late commitment to act (though some readers may find his cause less than admirable) and to taste what he calls ‘the singular pleasure of submitting to his own convictions.’ At last the clouds surrounding him – the cloud is a key motif in the novel, from the toxic exhalations of the steelworks to the mystic Middle English text The cloud of unknowing – start to dissolve.
In his conversation about Communion in the Mumbles launch of the book, Jon said that your interpretation of Mack, his problems and his solutions, will naturally vary, according to your stance on religious belief and duty. This is true, I think, especially in your reaction to the two climactic moments in the book. Both of these are narrated in a semi-hallucinatory way that adds to their ambiguities. Mack had agreed to take on the role of one of the apostles in the passion play – which he finds ersatz and in poor taste – and there is talk of which of them he is. He finds himself arguing in favour of Judas, ‘the perfect disciple’, without whose betrayal the necessary crucifixion would never have happened.
Communion is a complex work – a working-class fiction, a novel of ideas, a psychological portrait, and a tribute to a special town. It’s open to multiple readings. What no one can doubt, though, is the quality of the writing. Doyle has a highly distinctive style. Take the first two paragraphs:
His father answered for him when they first asked the question. Words flat and weighted like pebbles dropped to the bottom of a pond. Mack didn’t correct the statement. Just wiped at his nose, sipped at his drink. Sat with his face lowered as the men stared in his direction.
That’s fair enough, Curley said, waving away the idea. Bald Curley from down the sinter plant, sorry now he’d ever asked. Just thought it might’ve been up his street.
The sentences are short and paratactic. There aren’t any quotation marks. Third-person narration, speech and internal thought are all melded into a single flow of words. The effect is to pitch you straight into the middle of the scene. The number of words is economic in the extreme. But together they reveal so much: about Mack’s embarrassment and reticence, his relationship with his father, the steelworks context and the workers’ interactions (Curley’s apology, immediately half-withdrawn).
Then, in similar style, you’re caught up in the parallel dramas that follow – the strike, the passion play, and Mack’s slow journey towards the dawning of self-understanding (or possibly, depending on your reading) a hallucination or self-deception. The original title for the book was Tenebrae – but that would have been a misleadingly dark term for a novel whose language sparkles with invention and wit.
Communion is that rare thing, a novel that’s totally rooted in place and time but that tussles throughout with universal matters of belonging, commitment and action. It will be a while before Port Talbot finds a better novelist.
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