I read this one ten years ago. When he died in 2006 I wrote a little about it for the website of the bookstore that employed me at the time:I was very sad today (March 30, 2006) to learn of the passing of the Irish writer John McGahern. I would like to take this small corner of cyberspace to remember this man who was not well known in North America, despite often being cited as the greatest living Irish author. Of all McGahern's great works, I would personally recommend his 1979 novel The Pornographer. It is the story of a young man who makes his living writing the most outrageous (and therefore, most typical) pornographic stories. This pornographer deals with the same sort of issues any young man might deal with- he gets involved with a woman and he behaves cowardly, yet he behaves with great honour to his dying aunt, who he visits regularly. In short the protagonist of this novel is a great man and an awful man- as fully human as any character in any novel. I have often pondered how we all do sordid things to get food on the table, and yet how great our capacity for love can be despite all our terrible actions. This novel has haunted my memory almost constantly since I read it over three years ago. I think of it more often than any other book I've ever read- in fact I had just thought about (and ordered a copy for the store) not an hour before hearing of the author's death.I believe John McGahern wrote the kind of books that made us better people for having read them. He will not be soon forgotten.
This was my second McGahern book. Having read "That They May Face the Rising Sun," I had to read more of McGahern's work. The first one to arrive in the mail was, "The Pornographer." Not considered among his best, it was, nonetheless, engaging from beginning to end. Darker and more troubling than TTMFTRS, "The Pornographer " explores the layers and shades of our emotions and our relationships. His eye is keen and his pen works with the precision of a surgical knife, as he lays open our fears, our doubts and our hopes, always bounding them, never letting us expect to much. There is bright light and night but most of the book is in mist and grey and apartment light. Most of the dilemmas are simple but the options complicated. As in TTMFTRS, there is no fast pitched action or grand dramatic event but unlike TTMRTRS, this book revolves around a single protaganist with a central dilemma, so you read on to discover the resolution, and in so doing, you, yourself are opened to the wounds of love, of life and of death in your own life. McGahern doesn't let you alone as a reader. Thanks to this, I emerge from each reading more sober, more reflective, prepared to be better...but the mist is still on the ground.
What do You think about The Pornographer (2006)?
A while back a friend of mine looked at a story I’d written. ‘See there,’ she said. ‘Where?’‘There. Where you say she sips her drink. I don’t like it when people write ‘sips’. It’s such a cliché. And who really sips a drink? I mean, really sips. Sits there going sip, sip, sip until the drink has been sipped away.’‘I get you.’So I don’t write that people sip their drinks anymore. And when someone else writes it, I notice it. I say this because a lot of sipping goes on in John McGahern books. Port and lemons, whiskeys, tea, coffee, pints of stout and lager—all of them are sip, sip, sipped away. And I notice every time. But that’s about the worst you cold say about this book. Aside from the rash of typos that have been let slip in (I read the Kindle version. Perhaps the hard copy edition is better proof read).This is a wonderfully dark tale of a thoroughly modern selfishness played out against the backdrop of dying tradition.
—Martin Tyrrell
