John McGahern
Paperback | Pages: 192 pages Rating: 3.92 | 3191 Users | 258 Reviews
Identify Appertaining To Books Amongst Women
| Title | : | Amongst Women |
| Author | : | John McGahern |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 192 pages |
| Published | : | May 18th 1998 by Faber (first published 1990) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. Ireland. European Literature. Irish Literature |
Representaion Conducive To Books Amongst Women
This tale of a curmudgeonly Irish father and his effect on his five children was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1990. While reading it, at first I thought of A Man Called Ove, another curmudgeon. But Ove was not a father and he softened up over time. Michael, this father, did not. As the story went along I thought more of Stoner; even though no one would call Stoner a curmudgeon, but, I thought: this is his life, this is the way he is; this is the way things are; it is what it is; he’s not going to change; what do you expect?
Michael is a farmer. He has small pension from having been in the Irish Army, but money is tight. He spends his days in backbreaking work dawn to dusk on his family farm, bringing in hay, tending the animals, mostly cattle. We learn quickly that he is the master of his roost. His wife and three daughters wait on him. He is served food first at a separate table and the rest of the family eats together afterwards.
He is stern and has ‘black moods;’ “…silence and deadness would fall on them” when he walks into a room. If a dish is dropped in the kitchen everyone freezes and looks to him for his reaction. His wife feels “inordinately grateful when he behaves normally” and “inordinately grateful for the slightest goodwill.” Yet his girls and youngest boy love him especially in those rare moments when he might dance around the room. Perhaps he is manic depressive?
The father says grace before and after meals. He leads the family in Catholic prayer every evening – a full rosary on their knees. His blackest moods come about most often when he thinks of his prodigal son, the oldest boy who ran off to London and never came back. (view spoiler)[ The son keeps in contact with his brother and sister but never comes back home. He sees his father once at one of his sister’s weddings and they speak politely for a minute. They exchange one polite letter. That’s it. He does not attend his father’s funeral. (hide spoiler)]
The girls and his wives accept his dominance; the boys rebel. All his children will eventually leave home to get work. The prodigal son owns a business renovating houses in London. The oldest daughter is a nurse in London; she visits home two or three times a year. The two younger girls get civil service jobs in Dublin and they come home every weekend until they both marry. The youngest boy, spoiled by his three older sisters and the second wife, rebels in a big way. (view spoiler)[When he is only fifteen, he takes up with an experienced 22-year old girl visiting back home for the summer from New York. The boy stops attending school and flees to London with help from his sister and brother living there. But unlike the oldest son, he makes up with his father and frequently returns home. (hide spoiler)] One daughter also rebels a bit as she gets older; she resents her father discouraging her from taking a scholarship to go to university.
The story is a wrap-around. It begins with the family gathering for what may be their last get-together with their father. It ends with that gathering, his death and funeral.
There’s good writing: “She was as far from ugliness as she was from beauty and she was young and strong and spirited.” There’s humor: When he lets his second wife set the wedding date, she notes that “…he was more like a man listening to a door close than one going toward his joy.” And “The man’s head was designed to keep his ears apart.”
Most of the story is told by an omniscient narrator with focus alternating on the characters. For example we get his courting of his second wife from her point of view (or, I should say her courting of him) and the young son’s escapades are told from his from his perspective.
The author has an easy, understated style of writing, quite a bit like his countryman, William Trevor. The story is slow at times and a few scenes get repetitive – such as too many weekend visits by the daughters -- but all in all a first-class read. The Guardian considered Amongst Women one of the all-time 100 best novels in a 2015 list. McGahern’s first novel, The Dark, was banned in Ireland for its content related to family sexual abuse.
The geographical setting is in northwest Ireland near Sligo, near the coast and close to the border with Northern Ireland. This is near where the author (1934-2006) grew up, in Ballinamore, County Leitrim.
Top photo, Sligo, from cloudfront.net/originals/erasmus-expe...
Landscape painting by Charles J. McAuley from woolleyandwallis.co.uk
The author from /i.guim.co.uk/
Main street in Ballinamore, the author's home town, from wikimedia commons
Particularize Books Toward Amongst Women
| Original Title: | Amongst Women |
| ISBN: | 0571195261 (ISBN13: 9780571195268) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Booker Prize Nominee (1990), The Irish Times Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991), The Hughes & Hughes Literary Award, Guinness Peat Aviation Award (1990) |
Rating Appertaining To Books Amongst Women
Ratings: 3.92 From 3191 Users | 258 ReviewsAppraise Appertaining To Books Amongst Women
I read this as part of The Mookse and the Gripes visit to the Booker shortlist from 1990.Amongst Women is a carefully drawn study of local community and an insular family (the Morans).There's lots to applaud, and my only reservation is that I don't feel that McGovern brings any deeper or original insight to the realities and dynamics of close knit family life than the great D.H. Lawrence did in many of his classic works some seventy years before.There are some memorable descriptions of MichaelI thought that this was written superbly neat.Really, this is a good polished book. A character study of an aging father (okay, like me). Then the women (thus, the title and of course with Ireland in the 60's as a setting, the man prays the rosary) around him. Michael Moran served as a guerrilla in an Ireland War of Independence and he is proud of it. Now that this glory days are gone, he is left in his old house with his second wife and his three daughters visit him occasionally. His two sons
This is a wonderfully written account of a family that lives a brittle, tense existence due to a father who feels marginalised, bitter, an outsider. The way his unpredictable moodiness (which seems almost bi-polar) infects the house, stressing the women (his wife, daughters) and breaking his relationships with his sons, treads the same ground that John McGahern's The Dark did with such aplomb- in fact I think The Dark is a better book, although there is very little in it.I particularly liked the
Really top notch. I only say underrated (McGahern has won several noteworthy prizes) just because I hadn't heard of him and didn't think he'd gotten the recognition he deserves this side of the pond.The writing is beautiful- humane, poised, distant, appraising, tender, complexly simple, Chekovian, minutely realized, lucid, almost translucent in its knowingness, and the characters are drawn as near to life as you can get. They have inwardness- McGahern shows, he doesn't tell, and you see them as
I'm really busy, you guys! I'll review both this and Blindness by tomorrow, or latest by the day after, I promise!
Many significant Irish novels published during the 80s and 90s (I think, in particular, of Colm Toibin's wonderful The Heather Blazing) seem to feature characters and plots that struggle to reconcile the revolutionary ideals of the early twentieth century with the soullessness and disenchantments of some aspects of the new state that finally came into being. McGahern's memorable patriarch and former IRA man, Moran, is emblematic of such characters. Although rarely likable, Moran is nevertheless
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