Philomena by Martin Sixsmith
This story illustrates a life-long search journey of the value of one’s existence, a helpless and hopeless query of self, loaded with a destructing mental state of self-disgust and self-loath.
Actually, this story smartly depicts two parallel excursions of a mother and a son, both of whose hearts were severely damaged by a forcibly fatal and uncontrollable act of adoption when the mother was only 20 and the son three. Not knowing God’s plan, the mother and the son spent almost their whole lifetime (nearly 50 years) searching for each other but getting no luck at all. Your heart wrenched each time their hopes ran thinner and thinner; your protest and squawk against the Irish church during the 50s grew stronger and louder. The only and last place they went for help was a convent where the mother gave birth to the son out of wedlock. The church had seemed to render the mother enormously great help by taking her in, for she was literally rejected by her own father because of the shame happening in those days in 1950s when sex before marriage was not accepted by society and certainly a serious violation of God’s commandments. And the son, though being adopted by a rich American family which supported him with a good economical environment and affluent mother’s love, constantly, if not explicitly, rejected himself by the belief that “I am no good, so I am deserted.”
Though entitled “Philomena Lee,” the mother’s name, the entire book, except for the beginning and the ending, was actually a biography of the son, Anthony Lee, who experienced a far greater damaging impact on himself as a person. I have never imagined that children being adopted and taken away from their own mothers at a tender age would develop such a profound yet dubious and pathetic self-image that a slight dose of happiness or a potential felicity for life would call out the evil of doubt from within to destroy it at their own hands. This story, following the truth as much as it could and written with the author’s craft in writing, was presented to a subtle nicety, sincere, reliable, and deeply heart touching.
In addition, the reason this story fascinates me so much is Anthony’s story echoed the then-situations of politics in the US during the 80s to 90s as well as religion in Ireland, a country with its bishop a greater power over its government. Anthony’s sex interest and the burden he had to always hide the fact, in the meantime, brought up to the front the issues acutely sensitive as homosexuality and AIDS. The thread of AIDS among homosexuals and non-homosexuals, the government’s (the Republican Party) ignorance of this issue, and the trepidation of AIDS becoming an incurable epidemic in the US were all honestly described in this story. I think this book is more important than how most readers regard it.
Compared with its movie version, the book presents a great deal of more facts and more emotional charges for its readers. The movie somehow is shadowed by the crown of Judie Dench, a highly recognized Irish actress, focusing the query of the mother only and leaving the juicy parts about the son out of the theater.
I certainly didn’t tell you all, for there are just too many for you to discover for yourselves!
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