John McGahern: landscape and the lost republic

John McGahern was sensitive to the political shape of the communities he imagined in his fiction. These communities were scarred by the violence of historical events, the significance of which remained in recent memory. McGahern often chose the family as the social unit by which to gauge the effect of public events on the individual consciousness, and this rendered mass events, like the War of Independence and Civil War, as conflicts between people who could not escape their aftermath, even generations later. This chapter considers how for McGahern, as well as for the generation before him, the idea of the republic represented not only national separation from a larger power, but was the troubled symbol of a society that was divided uncomfortably between loyalty to community and to the state.