The Barracks

The Barracks was McGahern's first book and in it you can see the themes and style that he used subsequently, and I think to better effect, in two of his later books: Amongst Women, and That They May See the Rising Sun (sold in the USA as By the Lake). The story is simple: Elizabeth Reegan left Ireland to work as a nurse in London during the war; disappointed in love, she returned to Ireland, and against the advice of her mother and brother, she married a widower with three children. Reegan is a police sergeant in charge of a group of three or four policemen responsible for maintaining law and order in a very quiet country area. The Reegans live in the police barracks. Reegan is a bitter man: unhappy in his job, waiting for the day he show more can chuck it, counting his pennies and cutting corners on his police work to raise extra cash, and in a state of constant conflict with his superior officer who drops in irregularly to check-up on the paperwork and appearances of the men.

Like McGahern's other novels, there is not much by way of action. Rather, it is a study of life, in this case focused on Elizabeth who is in poor health first with breast cancer and then heart failure, as she tries to make sense of her life, her past, and her current life with Reegan and the children, how she might have lived her life differently, what unseen points of life changed her directions, whether or not she is happy, and what does happy mean? We enter Elizabeth's mind and are one with her in her thinking, her wondering, her fear but acceptance of death, her hopes, her fears. McGahern was a very fine writer. His prose is clean and graceful. His characters and their emotions and interactions are true. This book certainly showed the promise that he developed in his other novels.

(July/06) show less

Really intimate view into a family home; the ritual of domesticity - the way in which it is at times a saving grace - the threat of sickness and the shadow that looms when it is found out. A simple story full of so much basic human emotion that it lends layers to the darkest depths.

Elizabeth is the central character of this fairly short, intense novel. She is the second wife of a police sergeant who's not happy in his job but doesn't think he can walk away just yet, step-mother to his three children and wondering if the choices she made in her life were the right ones, especially when she finds she has cancer. In the beginning, I wasn't sure I'd get into the story, but I did and enjoyed it.

Pg 26 - the very best of us can be done without

Pg 29 - They all joined him, loving few things better than caricatures

Pg 30 - No man ever born was exactly six feet. It's because Jesus Christ was exactly six feet and no man since could be the same height.

Pg 91 - Only a fool tells everything

Pg 95 - The only real conversations...she ever had were with the people she had loved.
the falls of the humble dices of life
these social exchanges had reduced themselves to the nightmarish vision of the idiotic and barely comprehensible gestures and grimaces of face and head and hand people make when they try to communicate through a closed window.

Pg 101 - hunger is good sauce

Pg 104 - ballsology

Pg 124 - she had been seduced far more often throughout show more her life by goodness than by evil

Pg 126 - being slowly crucified by time and care

Pg 177 - it seemed as a person grew older that the unknowable reality, God, was the one thing you could believe or disbelieve in with safety, it met you with imponderable silence and could never be reduced to the nothingness of certain knowledge

pg 193 - peace was not life, it was death

Pg 194 - the unendurable pettiness and degradation of her own failings raised to dignity and meaning in Christ's passion

Pg 204 - nothing in life is ever resolved once and for all but changes with the changing life

Pg 217 - she wanted to be understood, that was the old craving, but was it not an indulgence? How could anyone have time to understand her, they were as full of their own lives as she was of hers

Pg 221 - after the first shock, the incredulity of the death, the women, as at a wedding, took over.

Pg 222- there was such a bustle of activity about the death, and felt just a puppet in the show

Pg 223 - It's Elizabeth that's being covered and not me and I'm able to stand in the sun and watch

Pg 224 - To get back where we left off...in twenty-four hours the earth'll be back where it is now... show less

Review to follow