The Dark

John McGahern

John McGahern would seem to be another of those authors whose talent is lionized in his native land, but who never quite had Americans get the hang of his work (q.v. Margaret Laurence). The Dark, McGahern's second novel, is a fascinating portrait of adolescence that deserves far, far wider appreciation than it seems to have ever received.

McGahern's homeland of Ireland may have something to do with that. The Dark was banned not long after its release for its rather cavalier treatments of both sex and religion, and so a novel published almost forty years ago has actually had something less than that to make a name for itself. Someday, Oprah will discover this book and feature it in her book club, and well, McGahern will have it made.

Oprah couldn't not love this book. It's dysfunction central. The home depicted here won't be found in the bucolic emerald landscapes on sees in movies of the time. Here, we have the poor Depression-era Ireland, where the family burns peat and straw because it can't afford coal, instead. The nameless protagonist's mother is dead, presumably in childbirth. The father is both verbally and sexually abusive to his (uncounted, in the novel) children; explicitly to his son, implicitly to his daughters (though whether there is anything to this forms the crux of a scene much later on in the novel). There is much here to lay the groundwork for the main character of this novel to hate his father, but McGahern isn't going to take the easy way out, building a complex love/hate relationship between the main character and his father, complicated by both their feelings for Joan, the oldest daughter.

The book has rightly been compared to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, though McGahern's prose is far clearer and less florid, almost minimal. His characters are beautifully drawn, real in every sense of the word, and it is impossible not to at least empathize with them. McGahern takes on the daunting task of telling a story with one main character and many different points of view, while keeping all those points of view sympathetic, as if he were telling the story from everyone's perspectives simultaneously. He pulls it off with great flair.

This is an uncomfortable book, to be sure, but it is a very good one, perhaps even a great one. Certainly one of the finer coming-of-age novels I've run across.