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Summary
Summary
'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth . a sight that cleanses us even as it saddens and frightens.' - John Updike
Author Notes
John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934. He has received several awards for his writing, including the AE Memorial Award in 1952, for the manuscript of "'The Barracks," and British Arts Council awards in 1968, 1970, and 1973. His other books include "The Dark" and "Amongst Women," nominated for the Booker Prize in 1990.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A lyric lament for Ireland, McGahern's lovingly observed family drama is dominated by an almost pathetic paterfamilias. Gruff, blustering Michael Moran, former guerrilla hero in the Irish War of Independence, is a man ``in permanent opposition.'' Now a farmer, he vents his compulsion to dominate, his cold fury and sense of betrayal on his three teenage daughters. Yearning for approval but fearing his flare-ups, they periodically beat a path back to the farmhouse from London and Dublin, then take flight again, both proud and dependent. Moran's second wife, Rose, much younger than he, displays saintly patience in her attempts to heal this splintering family. Moran also claims a renegade son in London who is ``turning himself into a sort of Englishman,'' and another son driven away by Moran's threats of beatings. McGahern ( The Dark ; The Pornographer ) has crafted a wise and tender novel whose brooding hero seems emblematic of an Ireland that drives away its sons and daughters. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
McGahern is one of the most highly regarded contemporary Irish fiction writers, and anyone who picks up his latest novel will immediately understand why. It's an uncompromising yet ironically endearing tale of a curmudgeon--Michael Moran by name. "Daddy is old now," say his daughters to each other, and he is a frustrated, angry oldster. Back in his prime he fought the British in Ireland's war for independence; in his dotage he now fights with his wife and daughters, who, despite the abuse he heaps on them, continue to feel it is their job to give the old guy positive stimulation. Oddly enough, regardless of Michael's inability to reconcile past and present, to let himself show and be shown love, he remains the core of his wife's and daughters' existences--a fact that most poignantly comes home to them upon his death. This is not a novel of plot, but one of character, of psychology. And McGahern, in a style at once tough and lustrous, beguilingly insinuates a comprehension of Michael's fears and will. --Brad Hooper
Library Journal Review
One joke about the Irish War of independence is that several weeks' negotiations only reached the Middle Ages. McGahern's character Moran is an aging veteran of that war whose brooding on the past obscures his present. The novel is in form and style much like McGahern's first, The Barracks (1963). A male protagonist whose extreme state of mind could be called patrimania abuses the women who sustain him and refuses to acknowledge the obsolescence of his mind, body, and convictions. Such is Moran's obstinacy that he manages to traumatize his family by the mulish application of the ``family-that-prays-together-stays-together'' theory. McGahern's work vindicates obsession with the past and reexamination of fictional landscape by extracting new power from familiar predicaments. A most satisfying addition to a very distinguished body of work.-- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.