The Loney Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Content warning: Abuse, suicide
Perhaps the most Catholic book I’ve ever read, Andrew Michael Hurley’s unsettling 2014 debut novel The Loney is about an Easter week, church-trip-gone-awry along a particularly violent stretch of the UK coastline: called the Loney. In the 1970s, a small parish journeys to Coldbarrow, where a shrine to Saint Anne is to be the stage for one of God’s greatest miracles: healing the sick— one of their own— a mute teenager named Hanny. Our protagonist, Smith, Hanny’s brother, cares for him with patience and tenderness their parents don’t show or even possess. Smith must help take care of Hanny the week leading up to the healing ritual, even though he isn’t sure Hanny needs to be cured. But when Hanny stumbles upon something he isn’t supposed to see, the two brothers must navigate the adults’ mounting tension as the pilgrimage falls apart around them AND ominous threats from locals who do not want them there— hiding and profiting off a dark secret. Strange occurrences frighten the group, tainting their mission and raising doubts. A baby is born to a teen mom in a mansion nearby, and one-by-one the afflictions of the locals are mysteriously healed. Is healing really possible for Hanny? Or for anyone? Either by witchcraft or God’s grace? Does Hanny want it? Does he need it? The Loney’s prose mesmerizes as it swallows you up. Though not without an abundance of grim, it’s a story with a tender heart about superstition and ritual, miracles, suicide, the Troubles, and Catholicism’s hypocrisies, like its hatred of and impression of witchcraft for its own benefit.
Our story begins grimly. A landslide in Coldbarrow uncovers a baby killed years before. Our main character, Smith, knows what happened, though Hanny can no longer remember. Smith recalls that momentous Spring decades ago and we return to the Loney “… a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Colbarrow— a desolate spit of land a mile off the coast— into an island… every year a few people drowned.” Smith later notices, “The night crept in at the Loney, in a way that I’ve never known anywhere else… There was nothing to keep it away.” As tension builds throughout the narrative, the Loney acts as a ticking clock— a foreboding monster on a schedule, though fickle and bloodthirsty. While Smith and Hanny go to the beach one day, the fog is thick and hanging low, so they can’t see where the ocean is. “I picked up a stone and pitched it into the fog. It landed with a single thud, and walking a little further I could see that there was only a thin wash of water. The tide was receding.” And once that tide comes back in, it swallows everything in its way. The Loney is also the site of Father Wilfred’s downfall.
The congregation the Smiths belong to recently lost their priest to a mysterious accident (rumored suicide), so a new priest, Father Bernard, joins them for the first time. In a sense, The Loney is really about a death: Father Wilfred’s and how it affected his small flock. In flashbacks, we see Smith as an altar boy for Father Wilfred and how the priest would treat the young boys. He had a side that liked to punish them. After one of the altar boys was found masturbating by his mom, Father Wilfred confronted him, berated him, then hurt him. “Henry gently closed his hands [around the nettles] and Father Wilfred suddenly clamped them tight. Henry cried out, but Father Wilfred only crushed them harder until green juice seeped out from between his fingers and ran down his arms.” He later confesses to Smith, “When will he realize that I give these lessons out of love? Because I do love him. If I could only save one, it would be him.” But for all the abuses, the community is floundering in his absence. If his death was a suicide, it raises questions about his faith and his relationship with God as a priest. What could have possibly happened to turn a good priest into a suicidal one? It was after a walk at the beach that Father Wilfred became a changed man. Just a walk to the Loney, where he accidentally falls into the water and nearly drowns. “It was shock, he supposed, the cold that was making him shiver, but he was terrified. He had almost been dragged into the sea, yes, but it wasn’t the sea that he was afraid of. He felt alone… He had been wrong about everything. God was missing. He had never been here. And if he had never been here, in this their special place, then He was nowhere at all.” Not long later, he is found dead at the bottom of the belfry stairs.
The story is about Catholicism, more than anything else. The text is full of terms, holidays, saints, bible verses, traditions, rituals, all of it. Interestingly, witchcraft is Catholicism’s companion, at first a superstitious fantasy, then later blooming into something tangible. “How you church people can have more faith in something that can’t be proved than something that’s standing right in front of you? I suppose it comes down to seeing what you want to see, dunt it?”
When we first arrive at Coldbarrow, we see superstitions amongst the locals. “… the Loney people still clung to old superstitions out of conviction, it seemed, rather than nostalgia.” Later, one of Smith’s mummer’s beliefs surfaced, “There was an old saying in her village that [the birds] prevented the sick from getting better, and that when they gathered in numbers a death was imminent.” Father Bernard is later spending time with Smith and he talks about bullauns, “They made them hundreds of years ago to collect rain. They thought the water was magical if it didn’t touch the ground… My granny used to make the cows drink out of the one in our field… And if I ever had a fever, she’d take me down there and wash me in it to make me better.” Though, when Smith asks if it works, Father Bernard replies, “No, Tonto, it didn’t.” While at the estate the pilgrims are staying in, they find an earthenware jar, which later breaks open, revealing unsettling contents. “They’re meant to keep witches away from the house. But you have to keep them sealed. And now it’s been opened…” The rites of Catholicism and the rituals of witchcraft mirror one another in The Loney, both offer protection and routine. And, most importantly to us, healing.
Will Hanny be healed or won’t he? The Loney’s subversion leaves us with a sense of dread. Despite the characters’ strong devotion, when we first start reading, the idea of God’s intervention seems unlikely. Most readers probably assume Hanny will not be healed. But then, in the end, he is healed. The healer isn’t God, though, it’s the local men, profiting off of witchcraft they don’t fully understand. Though ambiguous, the story tells us without telling us: it’s the baby— the baby born of the pregnant teenager— who is used and abused for the gain of others. The pregnant teen, Else, was “One of those girls that every school had. Even the Catholic comps. Girls that Mummer and the other ladies at Saint Jude’s pretended they didn’t like to talk about.” When Hanny and Smith meet her, they find an injured gull on the beach that they consider killing because it was suffering. But, under Else’s touch, the gull rose up and flew away. But, by the book’s end, we are reminded that these miracles don’t last. “Whatever it is, it’s not real, Tonto. It doesn’t last.” We wait for the other shoe to drop, but it never does— not yet. We are left wondering what will happen to Hanny— will his healing be taken away somehow? Will he lose his family? And we’ll never know. Just like the parish will never know whether Father Wilfred died by suicide or by accident. The story has prepared us already to not know.
For readers who are interested in Catholicism (either from the outside or in), it’s a heavy load, but might be worth a read. And for those who crave naturalistic writing— enjoying those beautiful and terrifying landscapes— Hurley’s writing delivers.
I just have to add: The parish praying over Hanny during his healing rituals was giving the cult at the end of Hereditary.