Fionnáin reviewed The Barracks by John McGahern
Rural Ireland as Comic Tragedy
3 stars
John McGahern remains a relatively low key figure internationally, but is well celebrated in Ireland. His deeply visceral and poetic reflections on rural Irish life are unparalleled in my own reading. The Barracks was his debut, written while he was a teacher in Dublin, and mostly an autobiography of his childhood when his mother had breast cancer, essentially a terminal illness in the 1950s. While the book pokes fun at power structures in the Irish police, the best moments are in the deep descriptions of day-to-day life, or in the moments that McGahern brings to life with extraordinary power of words.
The main character is Elizabeth, who realises early in the story she has breast cancer, and who remembers throughout the book her past life in London before settling in rural Ireland. She lives in a barracks with her husband, a guard, his children from a previous marriage, and …
John McGahern remains a relatively low key figure internationally, but is well celebrated in Ireland. His deeply visceral and poetic reflections on rural Irish life are unparalleled in my own reading. The Barracks was his debut, written while he was a teacher in Dublin, and mostly an autobiography of his childhood when his mother had breast cancer, essentially a terminal illness in the 1950s. While the book pokes fun at power structures in the Irish police, the best moments are in the deep descriptions of day-to-day life, or in the moments that McGahern brings to life with extraordinary power of words.
The main character is Elizabeth, who realises early in the story she has breast cancer, and who remembers throughout the book her past life in London before settling in rural Ireland. She lives in a barracks with her husband, a guard, his children from a previous marriage, and the other guards and their families. The movement of these people through this space is the device that leads the storytelling.
The story and the writing is not perfect throughout, but it is also a debut. A standout is the chapter where husband and wife visit Dublin: she is tested and probed at hospital while he walks the streets and observes with a countryperson's eye. His descriptions and keen expression of thoughts and motivations is spectacular, and only improved in his later books.