Angry young man

With apologies to Antic Hay, if you can have biography and biology, why not biosophy? Or biolatry, biotomy, bionomy and biogamy? The need for these neologisms is prompted by this extraordinary childhood memoir which combines adolescent intensity with a search for salvation, a hot glorification of life with its cold dissection, and the trade and eventual marriage of two separate existences. Apart from its beautiful writing, what stamps Seminary Boy as a classic story of growing up is the kaleidoscope of perspectives it offers on the mystery of being.

The narrative concerns the first 17 years of John Cornwell’s life during the 1940s and 1950s when he was sent to boarding-school, technically a minor seminary, to be prepared for life as a Roman Catholic priest. Critical to that experience were his background as the eldest son of a working-class East London family, and his rape by a paedophile at the age of 11.