Anna Teekell and Ellen Scheible, eds.

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2025. 98 pages.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-1178-3

This new teaching guide for McGahern’s second novel, The Dark, emerges from a US critical edition of the same novel. It transpired that the publisher, Syracuse University Press, only had the rights for the publication of the latest version of the novel in the North American market, which prompted them to publish the Introduction and the essays on their own, which is a very welcome decision. The editors, Anna Teekell and Ellen Scheible, along with the authors of four excellent essays, Frank Shovlin, Barry Houlihan, Enda Duff and Kate Costello-Sullivan, have come up with an excellent reappraisal of the novel, as well as supplying challenging new ways to read a book that was first published 60 years ago and promptly banned by the Censorship Board in Ireland. This, along with the author’s civil marriage to a Finnish divorcee, Annikki Laaksi, would ultimately lead to McGahern’s dismissal from his position as a national schoolteacher in Belgrove, Clontarf. What is good about this guide is that it gives readers, those who already know the text really well, along with students and readers who may be coming to it for the first time, a great feel for what one should look out for in this rather gloomy novel, to which McGahern originally used the title, “The Pit”.

I have never been able to comprehend McGahern’s oft-repeated view that if The Dark had been better written, it would never have been banned. You see, the problem was not so much the style as the content: sexual abuse in the home and the workplace, along with suspected sexual grooming by a priest of his young cousin – who comes to spend time with him in the presbytery with the idea of discussing a possible vocation –  graphic descriptions of adolescent masturbation as well as of the various sexual fantasies of the main protagonist, Mahoney. These elements were never going to escape the attentions of the Censorship Board at the time. And if that were not enough, the use of the word F-U-C-K on the very first page was definitely not going to go unremarked. It should be understood that a national schoolteacher in Ireland in the 1960s – a situation which still persists today, though to a far lesser degree – was technically an employee of the Catholic Church even though his salary was paid by the State. Consequently, McGahern must have known that the salacious content of his novel could well endanger his ongoing employment as a teacher. When he refused to resign, the Manager of the school, a Fr Carton, under strict instructions from the conservative Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, dismissed him.

The Dark is far from being a perfect novel – the style is unusually jerky in places for a McGahern text, which may have been as a result of the writer’s desire to convey some of the turmoil that young Mahoney was going through – and it is certainly not an easy read. The seedy underbelly of rural Ireland during the middle decades of the last century is exposed in a way that makes readers uncomfortable. Anna Teekell is correct in pointing out in her illuminating Introduction that McGahern felt compelled to write The Dark, and to get it into the public domain. She emphasises “the power and beauty” of The Dark as a novel, noting that “the scenes of savagery are counterpoised against moments of beauty and a heartrending candor of a young man finding his only scraps of love from a father he also hates” (xviii). It is the literary qualities of the book that still attract readers today, and not its rather daring content. Before offering detailed and helpful summaries of the various essays in the collection, Teekell also trawls through the background to the banning and the way in which various literary critics have responded to the novel: she sets the scene extremely well.

The sharp analysis that characterises Teekell’s Introduction is also apparent in the essays, with Frank Shovlin, editor of the invaluable Letters of John McGahern and author of the soon-to-be-published approved biography of the author, providing a type of companion piece to Val Nolan’s definitive account of the banning of The Dark in 2011. Shovlin quotes from the archives of Dáil debates to emphasise the high degree of controversy the scandal engendered in political circles, and the divide between how the liberal Labour TD Dr John O’Connell and then Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance, Jack Lynch, viewed the banning – O’Connell’s left-wing tendencies baulked at literary works being seized by the Customs, whereas Lynch was more supportive of the authorities.[1] Shovlin also cites a letter that his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, wrote to McGahern, asking him to excise the four-lettered word from the opening page and stating that, if retained, it would “almost certainly lead to your novel being banned in the Irish Republic” (7). Around the same time in England, Penguin won a lawsuit that was taken against it for obscenity in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, so publishers were feeling nervous about what they put into print. Shovlin ends by asserting that McGahern’s “reputation is secure with or without the infamy surrounding The Dark” (17), which is undoubtedly true.

Using the invaluable archive materials in the Hardiman Library in the University of Galway, Barry Houlihan explores the various drafts of The Dark. He notes: “The flow of handwriting, the frustrated pauses, even the coffee cup-ring stains present on many of McGahern’s manuscripts and notes, enable the reader and the writer to meet in an otherwise impossible moment” (19). This article brings alive the painstaking manner in which McGahern revisited his texts over and over again, trying to get the exact word or expression to convey exactly what he wanted to say. One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the alternation between third and second-person narration, which is quite different from archive to printed text. Houlihan observes: “For instance, the direct you/your is changed to the indirect he/his in numerous places. Such changes make the experiences of the boy less confrontational toward the reader, reducing the force of a didactic act of witnessing” (29). It would be hard to find a better explanation of how the narrative voice and the point of view employed by the author really do change the dynamic of the novel.

Enda Duffy’s essay argues that The Dark marks out McGahern as being the first Irish biopolitical novelist, by which he means that the book “assumes that the control of bodies is key to the oppressiveness of Irish culture” (37), a perspective that is convincingly proven in analysis such as the following: “The Dark is full of sinkholes, fissures of storytelling into which courageous acts of speaking to power cannot avoid disappearing” (39). Referring to the paternal abuse in the bed that Mahoney Senior and his son share, Duffy opines that the language employed “is characterized by passivity, disembodiment, negativity and repetition – a depersonalized, rhythmic rhetoric of abject horror” (42). Again, this is a wonderfully insightful reading.

Speaking of “horror” segues well with the last essay by Kate Costello-Sullivan, “Reading Trauma in The Dark”, which begins with a discussion of a 2021 article by Clair Wills entitled “Architectures of Containment” dealing with the publication of the official report into the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. Costello-Sullivan notes that McGahern had written about child abuse as early as 1965 in his second novel and yet there appears to have been collective amnesia about what was happening in the Industrial Schools, Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby homes, and particularly in the family environment. In a brilliantly researched essay, which draws on trauma experts such as Judith Herman and numerous McGahern scholars, the author concludes in the following manner: “Reading The Dark in light of trauma does not entail an act of literary excavation or the implementation of revisionist history. It only requires that we see and acknowledge what has been right there before us, in stark clarity, waiting for years to come to light” (75). This is an excellent summation, and one that is perfectly in tune with the arguments put forward in the course of the essay.

I will conclude by saying that it is wonderful that this teaching guide is available on this side of the pond, as that will focus even more attention on what is a significant text in McGahern’s oeuvre and in Irish literary and cultural history. Sincere congratulations once more to the superb work of the editors, Teekell and Scheible, and to the contributors. Kudos also to Syracuse University Press and the irrepressible editor of the ever-expanding Irish Studies series there, Kate Costello-Sullivan, for finding a way to get worthwhile books like this into print. Whenever I next give a lecture or write an article on McGahern that covers The Dark, I will make sure to have this guide close at hand.

Notes

[1] Another Fianna Fáil Minister, Brian Lenihan, in 1967, was the one who put in place a review and potential revocation of book bans after 12 years, a move that took a lot of wind out of the sails of the Censorship Board.