Book description
A hilarious and satirical debut novel exploring religious hypocrisy
in an Irish grade school.
Combining the spirit of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim with a bawdy
evisceration of hypocrisy in old-school Catholic education, The
Brothers' Lot is a comic satire that tells the story of the Brothers
of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means, a dilapidated
Dickensian institution run by an assemblage of eccentric, insane, and
often nasty celibate Brothers. The school is in decline and the
Brothers hunger for a miracle to move their founder, the Venerable
Saorseach O'Rahilly, along the path to Sainthood.
When a possible miracle presents itself, the Brothers fervently
seize on it with the help of the ethically pliant Diocesan
Investigator, himself hungry for a miracle to boost his career. The
school simultaneously comes under threat from strange outside forces.
The harder the Brothers try to defend the school, the worse things
seem to get. It takes an outsider, Finbar Sullivan, a young student
newly arrived at the school, to see that the source of the threat may
in fact lie inside the school itself. As the miracle unravels, the
Brothers' efforts to preserve it unleash a disastrous chain of events.
Tackling a serious subject from the oblique viewpoint of satire,
The Brothers' Lot explores the culture that allowed abuses within
church-run institutions in Ireland to go unchecked for decades. The
novel inhabits a space where Angela's Ashes meets the work of Flann
O'Brien and Mervyn Peake, while providing a look at a regrettable era
that still haunts many countries across the globe.
Kevin Holohan was born in Dublin. He is a graduate of University
College Dublin and a veteran of a high school education at the hands of
the Christian Brothers in Dublin. His short stories have been published
in Cyphers, the Sunday Tribune (Dublin), and, most recently, in Whispers
and Shouts. His poetry has been published in Studies, Casablanca, Envoi,
and Poetry Ireland. He has reviewed fiction for the Irish Echo in New
York. For two years he was reader for the literary department of the
Abbey Theatre, Dublin. The Brothers' Lot is his first novel. He
currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
