Anyone who grew up​ in a small Irish town knows what it feels like to live under surveillance. Tech autocrats have nothing on the curtain twitchers of Irish villages. In The Pilgrimage, first published in 1961 and recently reissued by McNally Editions, John Broderick writes that ‘the city dweller who passes through a country town and imagines it as sleepy and apathetic is very far from the truth: it is as watchful as the jungle.’ Broderick was born in Athlone in 1924. The Irish Midlands has few spectacular views and he knew the place inside out. He found his subject early and wasn’t dissuaded from it. He remained committed to the two big Irish themes: death and property. I grew up about 45 minutes from Athlone. Broderick must have visited the village where I lived; he may even have sat in the church where I was once an altar girl.

In the opening chapter of The Pilgrimage, Michael and his wife, Julia, sit in their living room with Father Victor, the local priest, and Michael’s nephew Jim, a doctor. The group is organising a pilgrimage to Lourdes, a destination not only spiritually enlightening but which also, in 1960s Ireland, with its limited travel opportunities and asphyxiating atmosphere, had the allure of a party cruise. Michael, a religiously devout property developer, is hoping to be cured of his crippling arthritis. Prayers are said and everyone blesses themselves. Father Victor has three glasses of whiskey and needs to be driven home. Julia retreats to her bedroom where Jim, the good doctor, is waiting for her.

Julia is starved of affection and Michael is either gay or bisexual, although it would be several decades before this could be mooted as a possibility in Catholic Ireland. The Pilgrimage is a chamber piece: most of the scenes take place in Julia’s bedroom, where sex and emotional grievances unfold. As a young woman, Julia worked for a short time in a hotel in Dublin. ‘It never struck her as incongruous that the life most of her friends lived was very far removed from the religious sentiments they professed.’ She falls in love with an American who eventually abandons her. When she sees his engagement announced in the society pages, she determines that she will never love again. She takes up with Jim, but feels awkward with his bohemian friends, and turns instead to his older, wealthier uncle. She marries Michael for money and to satisfy her ego. Only after they marry does she realise she’s his beard. Michael couldn’t have chosen anyone better suited to the role: Julia is detached, pragmatic and without self-pity. After some painful, empty years she resumes things with Jim. The two sinners still go to Mass; they crowd into rooms that smell of ‘misery and whiskey’; they are, in the eyes of their fellow Catholics, perfectly respectable. Then Julia starts receiving letters that describe her affair with Jim in pornographic detail. Someone has been watching.

The letters set off a chain of events both absurd and (in this hotbed of repressed sexuality) not unrealistic. ‘Everything happens in real life,’ Julia says. ‘It’s only in novels that it doesn’t.’ After Stephen, Michael’s loyal manservant, attacks Julia one night, they begin a strange, tempestuous relationship. Then Tommy Baggot, a boy in the town, kills himself. It turns out that Baggot has also been sleeping with Stephen. Baggot’s roommate has incriminating letters which offer proof of the dead boy’s affair with Stephen, and he threatens to go to the police unless Stephen pays him a hundred pounds. Julia begins to reflect on the concealed half-truths that underpin life in the town: ‘For the first time in her life she felt completely helpless; as though she were beating her fists behind a prison of thick, plate glass outside which people walked without turning their heads.’

At its best, the novel’s simmering moods and atmosphere of squandered potential and sexual deception recall Tennessee Williams. Julia stalks around like Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She has nothing to lose; the worst has already happened. Why not have an affair with her husband’s nephew? And when that ends, why not carry on with Stephen? When she discovers that Jim, like her American lover, has got engaged to a nice girl from a decent family without saying a word to her, she sizes up her rival: ‘Well brought-up, good-mannered, virtuous … She was entitled to all the respect that money can buy.’ Julia is driven only by appetite. If a woman like this lived in your town she’d develop a scandalous celebrity. You’d sit through Mass and several decades of the Rosary just to look at her.

Julia is just one of Broderick’s melancholy outcasts – the product of an imagination that dwelled determinedly on the fringes. He wrote twelve novels, as well as reviewing regularly for the Irish Times. His criticism was as fierce and argumentative as his fiction. He called Edna O’Brien ‘a bargain-basement Molly Bloom’ and Seamus Heaney ‘a lame Northern Catholic’, an ‘Irish agricultural Rupert Brooke’. Yeats, meanwhile, was an ‘old poseur’ who ‘spent his life fooling the mob with mystical roses, most of them artificial’. Broderick’s family ran a successful bakery business, the proceeds of which allowed him to write full time. He didn’t protest when The Pilgrimage was banned by the Irish censorship board: ‘I don’t think you can appeal to people who are as stupid and narrow-minded as that.’ In the introduction to this reissue, Colm Tóibín remembers seeing Broderick in the bar of Buswells Hotel in Dublin: ‘He was wearing a beautifully cut three-piece suit with elaborate stripes. He was alone and he looked desolate.’ He remained a Catholic throughout his life and even considered a late vocation to the priesthood, but instead descended into alcoholism.

In 1976, Broderick published The Pride of Summer, a novel that satirised the new emerging Ireland and took to task high-ranking members of Fianna Fáil. It’s remarkable that the book didn’t attract a libel case since Broderick used the real names of politicians and other public figures. Although he projected an air of weary cynicism, his novels often revolve around the solace two outlaws can provide each other. When Julia offers to pay Stephen’s blackmailer, he’s overwhelmed by the gesture: ‘Nobody has ever done anything for me in my life.’ In An Apology for Roses (1973), the girl from the good family gets her taste of rebellion in the form of a travelling salesman from Galway. Marie’s previous affair was with the local priest, ‘whose lovemaking was matter of fact, slightly brutal in its lack of tenderness’.

Like The Pilgrimage, An Apology for Roses was censored, but only after it sold 30,000 copies in the week of publication. It’s a sharp, bitter book, less controlled and spirited than The Pilgrimage. At times, it’s hard to tell if Broderick is depicting the misogyny of the period or simply engaging in it. Brian, Marie’s lover, demeans her ‘as the bitch, oh the false, cunning whore’. The priest doesn’t extend his holy charity either: ‘Privately he could not help thinking that from the masculine point of view Marie was a slut; and this thought comforted him somewhat, as it always does when a man has taken his pleasure of a woman and tired of her.’ Marie marries Brian, though it means sacrificing some of her inheritance. This passes for a happy ending – at least she’s claimed her independence.

The extremes of emotion depicted in Broderick’s fiction have shades of melodrama, but his novels are social criticism too. The protagonist of The Waking of Willie Ryan (1965), ‘who never fitted in anywhere’, returns home from the asylum where he was kept for 25 years. He had fallen in with a bad crowd, formed a relationship with an older man, taken up drinking heavily and humiliated himself in pubs all over the town. It turns out that he was sexually abused by his brother, but this part of the story is strangely underdeveloped. We learn most about Willie’s character from his frank conversations with his former nurse, Halloran, who isn’t a character himself so much as a plot device. Broderick’s novels are full of such devices, and he needed them because his plots are constantly thickening, becoming more salacious. (‘Boredom,’ Julia says in The Pilgrimage, ‘people do die of it, you know.’) The climax of The Waking of Willie Ryan is a long confrontation between Willie and Father Mannix, the priest who was partly responsible for having him committed. Broderick never casts his caustic eye on faith itself; instead, he reserves his ire for the Catholic Church and the hypocrisy (a word that appears countless times) of the country he lives in.

‘If you establish yourself as normal,’ Halloran tells Willie, ‘it’s extraordinary what you can get away with.’ Priests in 1960s Ireland didn’t have to work hard to establish themselves as normal: they were already in your community; they were often in your home. In The Pilgrimage, Father Victor is characterised as a fool and a pedant who belches in company and counts every penny on the trip to Lourdes. He makes pronouncements that sound as if they were cut from a sermon for being too trite: ‘We think we know a lot, Julia, but we know very little about anything. That’s why people go on pilgrimages.’ The bishop is ‘an excellent if somewhat inflexible administrator … he ran his diocese with the smooth, ruthless efficiency of a successful business corporation.’ Broderick’s most dangerous provocation was to suggest that money and the Church were deeply entwined. To control people, you first had to control their land. Brian in An Apology for Roses says people aren’t property. ‘No?’ Marie responds. ‘I think the whole point is that they are.’ Broderick reserves his most sly joke for the last page of The Pilgrimage: finally arriving at Lourdes, Michael the property developer is miraculously cured.

Father Moran in An Apology for Roses is more reflective, and therefore more relatable, than the other priests in Broderick’s fiction. (In The Waking of Willie Ryan, Father Mannix tells Willie that priests are human too. ‘Yes, very,’ Willie replies.) Father Moran dislikes the power the dog collar gives him and, after observing it on a fellow priest, thinks: ‘He represented in his cloth a terrible antique power, mute and mysterious; the long, lingering shadow of Rome.’ An Apology for Roses features a chorus of sorts in the form of Father Moran’s housekeeper and her gossipy friend. They see everything. ‘It’s disgusting the way young sluts like that will go to any lengths to tempt an honest man,’ the housekeeper says of her boss’s affair.

Broderick’s criticism of the church is especially discomfiting because there’s no single menacing priest or sadistic nun. He describes not individual acts of brutality but the effects of a culture colluding to preserve the status quo. (In The Pilgrimage, Julia asks Jim if a man can cut his wife out of his will. ‘He can in this country,’ Jim replies.) Sometimes this works to comic effect, as when a character in The Waking of Willie Ryan describes celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary: ‘So we opened a bottle of champagne, and I went upstairs to have a good old weep, and Ned went out and got drunk. Ah sure, it was a lovely anniversary altogether.’ Broderick’s portrayal of his characters’ unhappiness can be merciless, but he also demonstrates the full extent of their rebellion, not just outwardly, but inwardly. His characters are anarchic; they refuse to give up on the pursuit of pleasure. Julia in The Pilgrimage is promiscuous and voracious. She is also shrewd. Of Stephen, she says: ‘Like many men who resort to violence in practice or in imagination he was incurably sentimental.’

What’s left for Broderick’s characters after so much sex on mahogany furniture? An overwhelming sense of loneliness and determination to make a different life at any cost. Willie tells Halloran about the start of his affair: ‘You see at the beginning Roger was more or less like a father to me. I never had anybody like that. I suppose that was what I was looking for. No music, no books, no one to talk to – you have no idea of what it was like in those days.’ I’ve no idea either. I was born in 1989, the year Broderick died. Like any good gossip, I can only repeat what I’ve heard. My aunt, a former nun, was given money by her order to go and speak to someone during a crisis of faith. Instead she went to Dublin and spent the money on a miniskirt. Broderick, the laureate of the Midlands, the cynical outsider, made it to the heart of Athlone in 1999, when the town named a street after him.