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Product Description
Book Description
Beautiful new paperback Faber Firsts edition to commemorate Faber's 80th Anniversary
Product Description
The first novel by John McGahern, originally published in 1963.
Elizabeth Regan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining against his job in the police force; and her own life, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, The Barracks is a novel of haunting power.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Brilliant review below says it all. However, I could not believe this book held my attention, it is all about the trivialites of everyday life & all the little rituals that give it structure. It also highlights the inner life that is within us all & about making sense of the boredom we suffer daily in striving to make sense of our existence. Found the book very moving & as in all good literature there are fundamental human truths that hit home and I could relate to Elizabeth slowly dying & Reegan trapped by his occuaption. Both equally desparate & ultimately alone facing a seemingly futile struggle.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
John McGahern's brilliance comes in the weaving of the mundane things of life - the domestic and working daily routines, the weekly patterns, the farming year, the seasons, church rituals and so on - into a compelling narrative.
For Elizabeth Reegan, a former nurse and now wife of an police sergeant, her home at the RIC barracks seems like a prison. But what emerges is an immensely affectionate tale that reveals her husband is equally trapped and desperate for escape from life as a policeman in the Shannon lowlands.
As in many of McGahern's book death figures heavily in the story, and as so often with him, it is through death and the prospect of death that characters begin to find their personal redemption.
If there has been a better writer about death, in the English language, in the last 50 years, I haven't found him of her yet.
If you enjoy this book, Shane Connaughton's 'A Border Station' while completely different in tone, also deals with some of the same material - life in an RIC station in the 50s/60s.
For Elizabeth Reegan, a former nurse and now wife of an police sergeant, her home at the RIC barracks seems like a prison. But what emerges is an immensely affectionate tale that reveals her husband is equally trapped and desperate for escape from life as a policeman in the Shannon lowlands.
As in many of McGahern's book death figures heavily in the story, and as so often with him, it is through death and the prospect of death that characters begin to find their personal redemption.
If there has been a better writer about death, in the English language, in the last 50 years, I haven't found him of her yet.
If you enjoy this book, Shane Connaughton's 'A Border Station' while completely different in tone, also deals with some of the same material - life in an RIC station in the 50s/60s.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
John McGahern's first novel, The Barracks, is very much a story of his own Irish childhood. His father was a policeman, and his mother died of cancer and in the novel, the father is a sergeant in a rural barracks house, whose wife, Elizabeth, dies of cancer. The novel is largely narrated by Elizabeth, who reminisces about an earlier love affair with a doctor, when she worked in London as a nurse. Elizabeth is not happy, although her relationship with her husband, Reegan, is tender at times, the hard slog of continual daily chores and the obligations she has to feed and care for her husband's three children (he was married before, and his first wife died of cancer too) and manage the house becomes a deadening burden to her, especially when she becomes ill. Her husband is much exercised by the contentious relationship he has with Superintendent Quirke. He is a forthright man and hates the servile attitude he is forced to assume with Quirke.
A novel about a woman dying of cancer - a woman burdened, depressed, miserable. Why would anyone want to read it? It is written with brisk, unpitying, remorseless realism, and yet there are many gentler moments. Elizabeth is good with the children and her husband. She retains a kind of innocence, in spite of her affair in London and she maintains a distance with the local women. Her every instinct is to avoid conflict, although when the local priest tries to insist that she join a women's organisation (from whom he exacts small obligations of work in the church), she resists him. She has a brave self-sufficiency that means more to her than merely fitting in with the rest of the community.
A sobering read about a woman with little to be happy about and a dragging grind of obligation, condemned to a life of unending domestic toil, this book is profoundly depressing; though the writing and the realism lift it high above the level of the average misery memoir, it is a book difficult to enjoy.
A novel about a woman dying of cancer - a woman burdened, depressed, miserable. Why would anyone want to read it? It is written with brisk, unpitying, remorseless realism, and yet there are many gentler moments. Elizabeth is good with the children and her husband. She retains a kind of innocence, in spite of her affair in London and she maintains a distance with the local women. Her every instinct is to avoid conflict, although when the local priest tries to insist that she join a women's organisation (from whom he exacts small obligations of work in the church), she resists him. She has a brave self-sufficiency that means more to her than merely fitting in with the rest of the community.
A sobering read about a woman with little to be happy about and a dragging grind of obligation, condemned to a life of unending domestic toil, this book is profoundly depressing; though the writing and the realism lift it high above the level of the average misery memoir, it is a book difficult to enjoy.
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