The Dark

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I’ve looked at Amongst Women (although not The Dark) a number of times an always put it back: Did I really need another exploration of the Irish question and what would I learn from it?

modern Irish Bildungsroman: a narrative of resistance and The modern Irish Bildungsroman: a narrative of resistance and

His second novel, The Dark, published in 1965, was banned in Ireland, and denounced from the pulpit as pornographic.It is an absolutely heart-breaking read, but one that firmly established him as my all-time favourite author.

The Dark by John McGahern | Waterstones

As Tim Cresswell remarks, “looking at the world as a set of places in some way separate from one another is both an act of defining what exists (ontology) and a particular way of seeing and knowing the world (epistemology and metaphysics). At the very start of the book, this arrangement seems merely unconventional but within a few pages it becomes much more than that - sinister in its unsettledness, then frightening, then actually terrible. McGahern's mother died of cancer in 1944, when John was 10, resulting in the uprooting of the McGahern children to their new home with their father in the Cootehall Garda barracks.Affects of societal malady and personal isolation pervade McGahern’s writing in The Dark, staunchly refuting the mythos of rural Ireland as a place secure in its cultural virtue and its ascendant historical narrative of progress. If I decide not to read the book, I am certain that your review will provided me with all of the information I would have got should I have read it. Sometimes, I've spent three months writing them down only for them to come to nothing, to disappear into the page.