Honesty In Maeve Binchy's A Silver Wedding

Honesty is the fundamental underlining of all relationships. Most people would rather be told the dour truth than to be told a sugarcoated lie. In reality, most people tell the truth, but what if telling a lie would protect the ones you love from a reality that they could not bare? In Silver Wedding, Maeve Binchy tells the stories of eight people who are all closely linked to each other in various ways. Anna Doyle is in charge of planning her parent’s 25th wedding anniversary, or more commonly known as a Silver Wedding. With many secrets throughout the group of family and friends, the Silver Wedding may be the time where all the truth finally comes out and that honesty truly is the best policy. While reading this book, I had many questions

A decision that I question was the secret that Anna had kept from her parents for a long time: “Anna Doyle, who had to keep his arrival very secret indeed from her mother and father, who lived in Pinner and in a world where daughters did not let married men come to spend an evening , let alone a lifetime” (Binchy 10). Anna Doyle is the eldest daughter to Deirde and Desmond Doyle. Anna and her parents have a very close relationship. Although Anna’s parents extol her choices in life, she has yet to tell them that she let Joe Ashe, her boyfriend and a married man, come and live with her in her flat. One possible reason why Anna has not told her parents about Joe is because he is a married man. When Anna asked Joe to move in with her, he was still legally married to his wife. Anna may have been afraid that her parent’s would think less of her if she was to be romantically involved with a married man. Another reason why Anna may not have told her parents about Joe Ashe is because she is afraid that he might pack up and leave her just as easily as he did with his wife, and Anna does not want to introduce a man to her parents if she does not think it will work out. I also wondered why Father Hurley did not report his nephew, Gregory, to the cops for drinking and driving: “‘ I thought it was safer to come back that way, less chance of being stopped. You know, breathalyzed.’ Gregory looked up, like the way he had looked up when he had forgotten to to take one of the dogs for a walk or hadn’t closed a gate in the far field. But this time a bicyclist lay on the road in the dark” (Binchy 185). One possible reason that Father Hurley would not have reported his nephew is because Gregory’s parents think so highly of their son and think that he could do nothing wrong. In the eyes of Gregory’s parents, he has never done everything wrong and he never will and Father Hurley does not want to adulterate