'the Day Set Alight in the Mind': Notes on John Mcgahern's Late Style (Critical Essay‪)‬

Twelve years elapsed between the publication of Amongst Women in 1990 and the appearance of That They May Face the Rising Sun. The earlier novel presents the isolated farm of Great Meadow, where the Moran family is dominated by the aging and embittered father, a disillusioned hero of the War of Independence. This family lives in 'a completed world', (1) 'their own closed circle' (Amongst Women, p.171), which the conservative patriarch guards against all influences, 'the whole world shut away outside' (Amongst Women, p.129). The house is the symbol of that self-enclosure, a kind of fortress built to defend Moran from the second-rate world and from the passage of time. Yet towards the end of his life, he undergoes a radical realization: The light was beginning to fail but he did not want to go into the house. In a methodical way he set out to walk his land, field by blind field [...] It was like grasping water to think how quickly the years had passed here. They were nearly gone. It was in the nature of things and yet it brought a sense of betrayal and anger, of never having understood anything much. Instead of using the fields, he sometimes felt as if the fields had used him [...] He continued walking the fields like a man trying to see (Amongst Women, pp.129-30).