He’s a real bastard, no doubt about that. Shelia is the most defiant of the three, and a lot of her motivation comes from wanting to keep her own children away from the poisonous Moran patriarch. These grown daughters are: Maggie, who moves to London to become a nurse and marries a fashionable drunk Mona, the family beauty who returns home most often, holds a civil service job in Dublin and Shelia, who wanted to go to university but ol’ Daddy Moran talked her out of it (boo!). In fact, I’d say the opening scene really just serves as an unofficial prologue, setting up the story. It’s more like a chronological story that circles back around on itself.
From there, the family’s history is told through flashbacks as the Moran women remember their shared past, but it’s not a jumpy timeline (thank goodness!). His adult daughters have decided to re-create an annual event of their childhood, Monaghan Day, in an effort to lift the old man’s spirits. Moran is elderly, weakened by illness and age, and suffering a bout of depression his family fears will kill him. So, consider this a trigger warning if those kinds of family dynamics don’t sit well with you: you’re going to want to give Amongst Women a miss.Īmongst Women begins in the Moran family home, in the rural midlands of Ireland. He’s positively tyrannical in his personal life, cruel and brutal with his wife and children, and controlling in the extreme. Lacking any other outlet for his frustration, he exorcises his demons on those closest to him. He’s super bitter about the “small minded gangsters” that now run his country, and he refuses to accept the government’s solider pension, because he feels they have betrayed the ideals he fought for (yeah, let ’em keep their money, that’ll show ’em!). He’s known to his community as a respectable and devout Catholic, but behind closed doors it’s a different story. Michael Moran is an IRA veteran, a former officer and guerrilla fighter in the War Of Independence and the Irish Civil War of the 1920s.
On the face of it, that assumption was technically correct, but the protagonists are very different, and as such their stories go in very different directions… From the blurb, I thought it might be similar to An Artist Of The Floating World, in that they’re both stories of aging men trying to outrun the fallout from their role in a war in the mid-20th Century. That was pretty much all I knew about it going in. It is widely considered to be his masterpiece, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the year of its release (1990). Amongst Women is the best-known novel of Irish writer John McGahern. Right, enough personal stories – this isn’t a recipe blog! Let’s get down to business.
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