5/9/2023 0 Comments Amongst women by john mcgahern![]() ![]() ![]() At the same time their contemporaries, in these same cities, read about how rich and wonderful their lives might have been had they been part of country communities. ![]() They are incapable of losing their country ways, no matter how hard they try. As I delivered groceries, I got to hear first-hand all the village gossip and discovered exactly how destructive it could be.Īs boys and girls in rural Ireland grow into men and women, some of them will be lured by the big city. I grew up in Magherafelt, a similar village, and was a messenger boy for a grocer shop. ![]() I set my current novel, The Lonesome Heart is Angry, in Castlemartin, a fictitious Mid-Ulster village, because doing so allowed me to observe the rural pace of life and examine in great detail people who are too busy living their lives to be preoccupied by them. From William Trevor’s poignant The Story of Lucy Gault to the fear and violence of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, the rural landscape is always there, as much a character as the protagonists themselves. Its landscape, characterised by stone walls, green fields and unforgiving coastlines, is redolent of mythology, folklore and magic. It is at once foreign but familiar, rich in resources yet impoverished, bucolic yet violent. R ural Ireland has a unique place in English literature and has served as a backdrop to untold great novels. ![]()
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