Amongst Women
John McGahern
faber and faber, 1990
Understand Your Man, Part 2
Star of the Sea author Joseph O'Connor calls John McGahern's novel Amongst Women a masterpiece. He admits copying out McGahern stories longhand, to learn The Writer's craft. Dozens of articles, news items and promotional campaigns in the last year have placed John McGahern high on a pedistal labelled "Ireland's un-Nobelled literary master."
Critical Mick says: fuck that.
John McGahern is Ireland’s Johnny Cash.
Shared by both men:
Rural origins
Poor upbringing under harsh fathers
Poetic souls
Early promise and hard work
Stark, stripped-down sound
Failed first marriages
Long periods between hits
Half the cuts on their albums/short story collections fail to hit
Banned/bleeped
Concept albums/collections
Movies made of their stuff
Wrote memoirs
Major works shortly before death
Subsequently, universal praise and recognition
Amongst Women is a novel with so many awards pinned to its puffed-up chest, it's difficult to open the covers to discover the book itself. But Johnny C's music has been spinning on my CD player ever since reading Stephen Miller's insightful biography. Right beside it, John McG's Amongst Women has sat brooding. Forget the hype surrounding them. Lyrics and prose are still speaking to any who care to listen. I in my cheap, critical heart figured it's time to take Amongst Women on down, ignore the accolades and see if the novel can whirl on its own merits.
Moran, the patriarch at the centre of Amongst Women- and those black turtleneck type critics wag their fingers disdainfully in my direction, all classic novels are ultimately family stories- is a veteran of Ireland's war for independence against Britain. Is this contemporary times? Early to mid 20th century? McGahern avoids dating his tale with an ease that calls Eugene McCabe to mind. It takes talent to make pulling off such a difficult task feel so easy. My father in law (like Moran, a Mohill, Co. Leitrim native) entrusts that Monahan Day, the town fair that opens Amongst Women, faded from practice years ago.
This veteran is worlds away from Roddy Doyle's brilliant Henry Smart. He could be one of Henry Smart's comrades whose onset of disillusionment came only decades after. A veteran too proud to collect his pension from the government, and yet too proud to bow to converse as equals with his neighbors, he stands apart, lording alone over his motherless family in the tiny holding of Golden Meadow.
Amongst Women is the tale of how this widower came to re-marry, and what happened when a fresh, vivacious force enters a world rooted Jesse Helms deep in the past. Is Moran a statement of post-colonial Ireland, whose comfort was the household ritual of the nightly rosary and whose sons had to flee to England for work and free breath? Maybe. I don't know, I'm not really Irish. The consice 184 page novel reads well as a story of how a bunch of chicks cope around a shotgun-weilding skinflint too cheap to buy himself a sofa. Moran spends decades in the fireside bench seat ripped out of some old auto, raging and regretting and clinging to something that was never really there in the first place.
McGahern paints an interesting story of how Moran's anger chases off his war buddy and sons, then drives his new wife and many daughters into unusual corners. There is a lot of truth in Amongst Women. In one long chapter the novel sweeps from present to past to conclusions. It also portrays life in the rural west of Ireland: tending crops, minding traditions, school and sex and cannons. There is a rhythm and rhyme to it that Johnny Cash would have been proud of.
Finally, another uncanny point, a topper to the last occasion where what Moran's grown children who would come home, came home to reap the old man's final harvest:
As Rose and the girls were crossing the swards to the tractor they almost stumbled over a hen pheasant sitting on her nest. They were startled that she didn't fly until they saw feathers on the swards. The legs had been cut from under her while she sat. Her eyes were shining and alive, a taut stillness over the neck and body, petrified in her instinct. (pg 159)
Does this image of heart-touching accidental brutality symbolize Moran's domination over the women in his Golden Meadow?
Or is the strikingly violent image- otherwise unconnected to the solid, memorable novel's plot or progress- a secret message comprehensible only to those knowledgeable about the Internet's Most Secret Conspiracy Theory?
Johnny C and John McG. Both sadly departed. The power, the mystery! Yet the absorbing battle- the stark beauty- lives on.
John McGahern gets a secret message here!
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