You might expect a novel about a Catholic orphanage in St. John’s in 1960 to be a grim tale of religious bullying and physical and sexual abuse. The powerful first chapter in Brother McCann’s classroom, as he straps hands and bloodies noses, seems to bear this out. But McCann is more bizarre than threatening, and the boys learn to head off his outbursts and exploit his enthusiasms. Moreover, the school is surprisingly ecumenical: a Jewish boy says Kaddish at a child’s funeral, and Brother McCann passes on an unholy interest in Zen and sumo wrestling.

This is a first novel for Furey, who in his day job is executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation. His “norphans” are boys, not victims. Despite spells of despair, they are as resilient as dandelions pushing through concrete. They wage a lively guerilla campaign, swilling sacristy wine, stealing bread, plotting escapes and revenges. Any faith they might have had has been largely extinguished by experience of God’s priests. The book’s strength lies in its depiction of the boys’ solidarity and strength, and in the broader question it raises: how could the human spirit go so wrong?

“There’s always a million things happening at the Mount,” a boy says, and many of them are hilarious or thrilling – the marathon race, “Diefenbaker meat” stews, summits at the Bat Cave hideout, fantasies of girls. Unfortunately, that same mass of detail is one reason the book is slow to engage the reader. Aiden Carmichael, its narrator, is no Holden Caulfield; his long-winded backgrounding hobbles and obscures the plot. The boys often seem both too childish and worldly-wise.

Boys are like that, of course, but as with many incidents here, possibly grounded in actual events, that doesn’t necessarily make them credible in fiction.