(Novel reviewed for the “Shadow” square of CBR Bingo.)
“What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our johnnies in the top jobs
instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family working in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.”
I’ve studied (and taught) a good bit of Irish poetry and drama, but I’ve come to feel that Irish fiction represented a nagging gap in my knowledge. So I decided that this summer, once I was done teaching, I’d work on fixing that. Behold! My summer of Irish fiction commenced. And while I’ve been bad about writing reviews, I’ve been tearing through Irish novels from 1929-2019. (And through 2022 once Emma Donoghue’s latest comes out soon.)
Anyway, the latest was John McGahern’s Amongst Women, which focuses on the rural household of Moran, a former Irish guerrilla fighter in the Irish War of Independence, who laments the way the social forces who now control the country he fought to free, and who takes out his disappointments on his five children, alternating between beloved and loving patriarch to merciless, forever angry abuser. McGahern cannily sets up the novel so as to explain but never excuse Moran’s behavior: we meet him once he is widowed, and his first wife is almost never mentioned; he marries a somewhat (but not inappropriately) younger woman, the determined and socially deft Rose Brady, to whom his worst behaviors are new, as opposed to his children, who are accustomed to his changing moods–and the eldest, Luke, has fled the family home near Sligo for London before the novel ever begins. His absence is a continual source of tension, one that Rose is constantly trying to smooth over, particularly once the house gradually empties as Moran’s daughters gradually leave for work and to build their own lives, leaving only Michael, the youngest, around.
This is a novel in which, ostensibly, not much happens. There is no climactic blow-up between Moran and his children that changes him or them; at the novel’s end, Moran has arguably not changed at all. McGahern has sympathy for this stingy, disappointed, forever estranged man (estranged from his neighbors and community; at times estranged from his wife and children; certainly estranged in many ways from himself) given that so much has not gone as Moran planned. The fact that neither Moran nor his children ever speak of the death of his first wife hints at the profundity of the loss; the disappointments of Ireland itself, combined with that loss, suggest how a man once handsome and popular could become so embittered and unkind. But, again, McGahern does not excuse Moran’s cruelty to those who love him; when Moran first lashes out and insults Rose, brutally cutting her down after she has brought a great deal of warmth and order to his house (and freed his teenaged daughters from their struggle to keep house with no instruction), it’s Rose’s shock we empathize with most, and the ways she toggles between cajoling and assertiveness are nimble. When Moran prevents his brightest daughter, Sheila, from studying medicine, we side firmly with her and are heartbroken when she caves to her father’s will. And it’s heartbreaking, too, to see how none of the Moran children can really get out from under their father’s shadow, not even Luke, who left first and who most steadfastly refuses to return.
The tension that McGahern constructs here is remarkable; the reader comes to breathe the same anxiety as Rose and the Moran children whenever the patriarch appears in the novel, and he dominates even the scenes he does not appear in. The man is ordinary and petty, and yet McGahern deftly captures how that can warp and transform lives, for good and for ill (Luke seems much like his father despite resisting him; Sheila determines to bring the optimism she never experienced into her children’s lives).
My dissertation director loves this novel; I can now see why. (Bonus: it clocks in at a trim 184 pages. Caveat: if you have a complicated relationship with an overbearing father, this novel might be A Lot.) The summer of Irish fiction continues! I…just have to pick what comes next.
