Product Description

Reissued to tie in with the publication of John McGahern’s new memoir, All Will Be Well

One of the preeminent writers of our time, John McGahern has captivated readers with such poignant and heart-wrenching novels as Amongst Women and The Dark.

In The Pornographer, Michael creates an ideal world of sex as a writer of pornographic fiction, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt’s slow death in a hospital tolerable. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but above all, sex and death are never far from each other.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #881065 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
A marvelous novel, deep, moving, rich and resonant, about love, lust, life and death. -- Sunday Express

An admirable book, one of the finest I have read for a long time...I cannot recommend Mr. McGahern too strongly. -- The Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
John McGahern was born in Dublin and brought up in the west of Ireland. He is the author of three collections of short stories and six novels, including Amongst Women, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Customer Reviews

A vivid and textured novel
The Pornographer is a complex novel, wonderfully vivid and textured in its mining of the human condition. It is a disturbing and yet calming warm bath of words, swirling with components of love, lust, loss, disenchantment, duty, and denial. Above all, however, I'd say this is a novel about growth.

Michael is a young man who writes pornography for a living, although he doesn't particularly enjoy the writing. His life experiences and trysts, however, mirror his stories in their shallow sex-based origins. He meets 37 year-old virgin Josephine, and their affair, in which she craves and he obliges sex every time they meet, mirrors Michael's stories. But Michael's feelings for Josephine do not run beyond the physical, and when she gets pregnant, his apathy and life choices are put to the test.

The great irony and juxtaposition of the work is that in the midst if Michael's indifference to Josephine and the child she carries is his devotion to his dying aunt, whom he visits every week. Michael's visits and emotional pain are suffused with a felicity that opposes his personal life. While he deals with his aunt's dying, he also faces the growth of a new life with his love child, and the possibility of a new life as a married father. Despite his apathy, love slowly burgeons in Michael's life from an unexpected source, showing him that loss can lead to discovery and growth. Michael learns he must resurrect the corpse of his tattered heart, shattered by lost love, and allow it to love again.

McGahern's writing is as resonant and stirring as always, proving again his mastery of English prose. He deals with the realities of life, its disappointments and hardships, in a way that a great novel should: without pulling any punches or emotions, but leading you deftly by the hand into a world rich in meaning, emotion and irony. Despite the wonderful content, the great allure of McGahern's writing is its poeticality. It lulls you into another reality, enmeshing you in its fictional world in so smooth and comforting a way that you must shake your head and remind yourself where you are every time you close the pages.