Loose Leaves: Literary critic Denis Donoghue, born in 1928, and writer John McGahern, born in 1934, may be close contemporaries but seem to have different perceptions of the sexual mores of a bygone Ireland.
"If you believed McGahern on the evidence of his novels and stories (and I don't, in this particular), you would conclude that any able-bodied lad in Ireland who went to a dance hall emerged from it a couple of hours later with a girl - often a nurse - who took him to her bed for a night of unprotected sex," writes Donoghue in a lengthy review in the New York Review of Books of All Will be Well, the American edition of McGahern's autobiography Memoir. "In The Pornographer (1979), the young man has sex with practically any woman he meets and, in London, makes one of them pregnant," writes the critic. He quotes Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium - "That is no country for old men,/The young/In one another's arms, birds in the trees", with its reference to "sensual music", and surmises that maybe Yeats was right if he was referring to Ireland; "though little of that sensual music caught my attention in Ireland as it apparently caught Yeats's and McGahern's." More testimonials on this intriguing subject are obviously required from those who lived in mid-20th-century Ireland so posterity can get a definitive picture of what went on.
In his three-page review, Donoghue also points out the experiences he did have in common with the writer. His father, like McGahern's, was a police sergeant and he finds McGahern's memory of life in the barracks chimes with his own, including the ordinary tasks their fathers' jobs entailed - though "My father carried out these minor tasks more equably than McGahern's did: he didn't rage at necessities," says Donoghue, who wrote about his own childhood and his father, a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the North, in his memoir Warrenpoint (Cape, 1991).
Of the harshness of McGahern's early life, Donoghue says it has taken him many years and four novels to write his anger out of his system to some degree; "good riddance is slow work". But then there is the release of landscape, where McGahern's characters find peace and where his prose achieves remarkable beauty, he adds. "The risk of ennui in the quiet life is clear, but it is a risk McGahern has very impressively negotiated," Donoghue concludes.
The New York Review of Books Vol LIII No 5, March 23.
Franz in Dublin
Chilean novelist Carlos Franz will give a talk in English on The Irish Simile: Tradition and Irreverence in the Chilean and Latin American Contemporary Narrative, on Thursday at 7pm in the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin. As a young writer, Franz was a member of the literary workshop conducted by José Donoso who, like Isabel Allende, spent time in exile during the Pinochet dictatorship. Franz, who now lives in Madrid, won the International Prize La Nación-Sudamericana 2005 in Buenos Aires for his third novel El Desierto.
Tóibín papers acquired
The papers of writer Colm Tóibín have been acquired by the National Library. The archive includes letters from fellow writers John McGahern, John Banville and Paul Durcan, manuscripts and material relating to his novels, three travel books and non-fiction works. Hopefully, some material from his journalism days is in this cache too - particularly from his time as editor of Magill when he often instigated ground-breaking copy.
Bisto shortlist announced
Children's author Kate Thompson is becoming synonymous with the Bisto Book of the Year awards. The three-time winner of the main (€6,000) award is on this year's shortlist, announced during the week, with her book The New Policeman (The Bodley Head) which earlier this year scooped the Whitbread Children's Book Award and the Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction. The other nine books on the shortlist are Deirdre Madden's Snakes' Elbows (Orchard Books); Kevin Kiely's A Horse Called El Dorado (O'Brien Press); Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and the Opal Deception (Puffin); Oliver Jeffers's Lost and Found (Harper Collins); Fancy That! by Gillian Lobel and illustrator Adrienne Geoghegan (Francis Lincoln); Oisín McGann's Under Fragile Stone (O'Brien Press) Bríona ag Brionglóideach by Dairíne Ní Dhonnchú and illustrator Maria Murray (An Gúm); Penny the Pencil by Eileen O'Hely and illustrator Nicky Phelan (Mercier Press) and Bill and Fred? by John Quinn (O'Brien Press). The winner of the main award and the ancillary awards will be announced on May 31st. The total prize fund is €15,000.