The Passion of Jon Doyle

Jon Doyle’s debut, Communion, is a precise, delicate novel about the complexities of belonging, which gradually and powerfully builds in spiritual intensity. It explores heightened, almost-sacred feelings about community and industry through Mack, a young priest-in-training who has hung up his robes and returned to his Welsh home town, where the identity of men is still cast within the steelworks that sprawl along the coastline. He gets a job there as a security guard. “He could work ten thousand days like this one,” Doyle writes, with a shimmering economy. “Submit to the patterns and the history.”

A homegrown Hollywood actor has also returned to the town to stage an Easter Passion play, in which some steelworkers are cast as apostles. Job cuts are threatened, strikes imminent, the building blocks of local identity exposed and elevated. Refreshingly unromantic in his approach, Doyle – who was named an Observer debut novelist of the year in January – gets under the skin of where he grew up, and still lives, in Port Talbot. The south Wales town houses one of the world’s largest steelworks. At its peak, it employed 18,000 people. Now only 2,000 remain.

I grew up knowing what Doyle calls the “heavy sulphur thread” – the distinctive smell – of these works well. My stepfather worked there for nine years after a career as a tinplate and steel clerk. In October 2001, he drove past the plant’s No 5 blast furnace a few minutes before it exploded. “They saw the fireball in Blaengwynfi,” Doyle writes. Three men were killed.

The terror and drama of the steel industry is ever-present in Communion, and Doyle, who writes with low-key authority, conveys it as a magnetic background hum: “You’d likely never experience danger in forty years of work, but you had to see it everywhere. Envision the worst if only to ensure it never happened.” He adds, with the slag-black humour that slurries through the book: “The best security guards were imaginative.”

Mack, short for Cormac, is from an Irish Catholic family. His mother, Clara, replays disasters from recent history on her TV in order to pray for the fallen, while his father, Jackie, made redundant from the works, busies himself with carpentry, and still sets his alarm in the morning.

Doyle is brilliant at evoking Jackie’s generation of West Glamorgan men, communicating in a dialect both soft and sharp-edged, with nicknames like Dai Eighteen Months (a “local legend” who has only one-and-a-half ears after losing part of one in a rugby match). But these portraits aren’t ever patronising or reductively local. Doyle is as concerned about the dynamics that shape working-class industrial communities as he is about Welshness, and his characters are accessible and expansive.

Two women ramp up the tension, both sexually and politically: a journalist reporting on the strikes and the play, and the headstrong Siwan Roderick, with whom Mack spent time in his youth in the local Plaza cinema. Their simmering relationship, a mysterious visit she made to Mack in the seminary, and an act she is planning, drive the narrative. So does the build-up to the Passion play, and its performance over Easter weekend, clearly inspired by National Theatre of Wales and Wildworks’ 2011 three-day production across the town, starring Michael Sheen as Christ. Doyle places sentences about his lead actor waiting for the applause to finish like tiny bombs. “The blood was not quite convincing,” Mack observes later, when the actor approaches the cross for crucifixion. “A little too luminous. Lacking the shadow and rust.”

Several memorable passages – a protester breaking into the works; a trip to empty the house of Mack’s late grandparents; flashbacks to Mack’s life in the seminary – underline Doyle’s gifts for creating worlds with gentle colours, until the final sections stoke brighter fires. The book’s ending, heavy with metaphysical power, moves beyond reality itself. In prose both quotidian and mystical, Communion expands the possibilities of its title in every dimension and marks the arrival of an explosive new talent.

Communion by Jon Doyle is published by Atlantic Books (£17.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Suki Dhanda for The Observer