The Dark

Product Information

Mahoney in fact aspires to the priesthood, but as a world class masturbator, feels these “private orgies of abuse” would preclude him. His father’s dim view of the world colors the story, and the son’s view. He desperately wants to get away from his father yet seems to be afraid of doing so.

The Dark by John McGahern | Goodreads

John, you wrote: ”I can guess that The Dark would have been controversial in Ireland when first published.” The book is very well written and can be almost lyrical at times in its descriptions despite its darkness. In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. Bristling with the threat of violence from the outset, the opening chapter is one of the most disturbing and claustrophobic I have read. The father in the book is a bitter man, his moods uneven and extreme, and as a consequence his children live in fear of him and punish him the only way they can- by shutting him out of their lives as much as possible. His feeling of isolation is something that compounds the misery within the farmhouse walls; it begets isolation in each of his kids, although the book concerns itself chiefly with the son's perspective. A prominent theme is the difficult relationship between father and son, and there is certainly a feeling that Mahoney (the father) is clinging to the strength of youth, and the power over his son, when it is slipping away. His son is strengthening as he himself is becoming older and tired. It is a power struggle that blights many father and son relationships at the time when sons become young men.

Ireland has changed more in the last 20 years than it did in the preceding 200 years,' he says. 'From 1800 until 1970, it was a 19th-century society. It was only then that the Church started collapsing. I think that it is by focusing on the local that you can best capture that change. If you were to focus on the universal, you'd end up with vagueness. John Donne said, "Let us make one little room, and everywhere." That's what I believe, really, that everything interesting begins with one person and one place.'

John McGahern | Faber John McGahern | Faber

The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. [17] After crushing the fleas, Mahoney urges the boy to “try and get some sleep like a good man.” [47] T his last rhetorical move by Mahoney finally repositions the narrator as an emerging peer of his own father, a fellow man—but one whose gendering and knowledge of adult masculinity has been socialized through Mahoney. As Young Mahoney matures over the course of the novel, the dysfunctional gendering that he has suffered at the hands of his father appears as a manifestation of his memory of abuse, his traumatized uncertainness of self, and his deep distrust of other men. This is due not only to the distorted relationship between Young Mahoney and his father but, as Siobhán Holland comments, by Young Mahoney’s own persistent awareness that his identity will be subsumed by the inescapable patriarchal social matrix that formed him. [48] I t should be added that his father is also a victim of that same patriarchal system of meaning-making. The ideological base of mid-century Ireland was so keyed to produce culturally conservative gendering that its resultant superstructure had no way to make coherent sense of non-traditional households. McGahern expresses this by speaking to his own experience, but this same theory could be applied to any Irish family that broke from the two-parent heteronormative binary.Lccn 65081008 Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18261 Openlibrary_edition Well, it's a deliberate attempt to deal with a whole society,' he says, sipping on his mineral water, and looking both flattered and uncomfortable at my praise. 'One of the problems a writer always has with material is how to dramatise it. In a way, I thought that the act of taking drama out of it, if it was consciously done, could be dramatic in itself. My whole idea was to take plot and everything else out of the novel and see what was left.' Amongst Women (1990), Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991), GPA Award (1992), nominated for the Booker Prize (1990). It's often the case with autobiography, especially the kind that honours a young child's point of view, that the writing texture thins as it moves into adulthood. The structure of time becomes more coherent, the sense of comparison and trajectory grows more developed, the immersion in things is replaced by the appeal of story. That's all true of Memoir as McGahern remembers his first visits to England, his first marriage, his early publications, then his second marriage and the eventual return to Leitrim. But the circular journey of the book proves that McGahern knows he can't ignore - or, imaginatively speaking, do without - the scenes of his childhood. In this sense his book is an act of healing, perhaps even of forgiveness, as well as a probing of deep wounds. In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye. McGahern was a member of the Irish Arts honorary organisation Aosdána and won many other awards (including the Chevalier dans l' Ordre des Arts et des Lettres). He was visiting professor at many universities including Colgate University and the University of Notre Dame (United States), University of Victoria (Canada), Durham University (UK), UCD and NUI Galway (Ireland). His other awards included:

John McGahern - Wikipedia

Aber ganz entkommen kann er nicht. Nicht nur, dass er weitere Übergriffe durch einen Priester erleben muss, es scheint auch, als ob der Vater eine unsichtbare Fessel geschaffen hat, die ihn an sein altes Leben bindet. Und da sind auch noch die jüngeren Schwestern, die er beschützen will. There is something of a problem here too, however, for the reader as well as the character. Did McGahern really need to tell us twice that the son knows Mahoney wants him to stay and work in the fields? For a short book, with admirably brisk movement through its story, there is a lot of detail which the reader could probably work out unaided. There is also an odd switching between first, third and even second person in the narrative for no obvious reason (the story is always from the son’s viewpoint).

How, then, did he structure the narrative? 'Oh, the day, the seasons, the community. The rhythms of the everyday. In a way, nothing happens, and everything happens. You have to follow your own life. That's what I wanted to do, anyway.' One thing you find out while writing a memoir,' says John McGahern, 'is what an uncertain place the mind is.' I am sitting in the half-dark of a Soho bar listening to Ireland's greatest living writer of fiction describe some of the unexpected difficulties he underwent while writing his first factual book. His soft voice and carefully wrought sentences echo the cadences and craft of his prose so much so that it is as easy to be mesmerised by his spoken words as his written ones. So began the infamous “McGahern Affair”, which would have far-reaching consequences for Irish public life and the book’s author.

The Dark by John Mcgahern, First Edition - AbeBooks The Dark by John Mcgahern, First Edition - AbeBooks

The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights…

John McGahern (12 November 1934 – 30 March 2006) was an Irish writer and novelist. He is regarded as one of the most important writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. McGahern is clearly at home in Ireland, and seems to have experienced none of the problems of belonging peculiar to many returning exiles. It was not always so. His second novel, The Dark, published in 1965, was banned in Ireland, and denounced from the pulpit as pornographic. He was forced to quit teaching and left the country that had damned him. He lived in England, France and America before returning five years later. Forty years on, his best-known book, Amongst Women (1990), is taught on the syllabus of the Irish Leaving Certificate. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990. Does he feel vindicated? 'No. I don't think about it in that way. For me, all that matters is whether a book is well written or not. Once a book is published, the less a writer has to say about it the better. That's why I never protested the banning. I thought it was a joke, the Censorship Board, and by protesting I would give them too much honour. Besides, a book has a life of its own. Once it is written, it belongs to its readers. Without readers, it won't live. Without readers, a book is a dead thing, just a bundle of words between covers.' I'm not sure how I fell into the abusive Irish Catholic genre, but I think I might need a break from it for a while after this one. The Irish and the Catholics have combined here for a truly horrific story full of abuse, molestation, guilt (no one does guilt better than the Catholics), and general horribleness. It's bleak, dismal, depressing, claustrophobic, sad, and most of all, DARK.