He goads McQuaid, his last friend, to the point where the latter concludes:Īs on all the other Monaghan Days stretching far back he had come intending to stay the night. In his view, many of the men who fought got nothing - the Republic has been taken over by a version of traitors to the point that he even rejects taking up the IRA pension for which he is eligible. While the IRA “won” the war and the Republic was established, it represents no victory to Moran. All his dealings had been with himself and that larger self of family which had been thrown together by marriage or accident: he had never been able to go out from his shell of self. He had never been able to deal with the outside. His (Moran’s) fascination with McQuaid’s mastery of his own world was boyish. It will give the only clues the author will provide to what has produced this abusive creature: McQuaid actually did get the hang of it as we discover when McGahern flashes back to the last Monaghan Day that Moran and McQuaid shared.
You were all great girls to travel such distances to see one sick old man.” I think we never rightly got the hang of it afterwards. Things were never so simple and clear again. “For people like McQuaid and myself the war was the best part of our lives. As this later re-enactment unfolds, Moran remembers:
McQuaid, one of Moran’s subordinates during the war, now a successful cattle dealer, would show up for remembering, story-telling and whiskey drinking. Monaghan Day came each end-of-February after the fair in nearby Mohill. In that opening section, the three daughters are planning a reprise of “Monaghan Day” to cheer him up - the author uses it to set the story of Moran’s final withdrawal from the non-family world. He led a column with some distinction during the Irish war of independence it was only when the Republic was established that he began an inexorable retreat from the real world, eventually limiting himself to a notion of “family” where he could practise his bullying behavior on his second wife and the children borne by his first. As a youth, he was quite the ladies’ man and a superb dancer to boot. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and London. As for the abusive, bullying part, McGahern wastes little time, opening the novel with:Īs he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. He has a first name in John McGahern’s Amongst Women but, since the author rarely uses it, neither will I. If there is a shortlist of abusive, bullying fictional fathers, Moran deserves to be on it.
0 kommentar(er)
