[In the following review, Foster offers a negative assessment of Two Moons, criticizing the inaccuracies in Johnston's description of modern Ireland.]

A new work [Two Moons] by Jennifer Johnston is always an event. The literary generation to which she belongs has produced some of Ireland's most ground-breaking fiction. Unspoken rules and invisible lines laid down by history, religion or family ties have supplied plenty of material for those writers raised within the peculiar straitjacket of de Valera's newly independent nation. And their acute awareness of convention, whether to stay silent or speak out, is their only common theme.

Born in 1930 as a southern Irish Protestant, Johnston has written fiction which has caught much of that strangeness and inhibition. But whereas her contemporaries, such as John McGahern, Edna O'Brien and Brian Moore, set their characters against conventional wisdom, often widening their field to examine the effects of memory and tradition, Johnston has always seen things from a different angle. For her, the struggle for personal freedom is what counts. Battles are fought in country houses and suburban homes. And, as with William Trevor or Aidan Higgins, the focus is on the wounds which simple misunderstanding and a patriarchal order can inflict. With the huge changes going on around them, her characters often feel as remote from their own families as from their Catholic neighbours. Despite their own liberal values, they are sometimes dismayed at the emergence of a brash and classless society and at the unspoken distance which old political associations have left behind.

Johnston's earliest Big-House novels like The Captains and the Kings described the isolation of the Anglo-Irish psyche within the new revolutionary order. Later, her middle-class Protestant heroines often find the contradictions of history too much to bear. For them, raking over old ground does more harm than good. So when the liberated Helen of The Railway Station Man advises her English lover to stop looking back, she might as easily be instructing her fellow countrymen to: “Stop conjuring up nightmares. Leave the past alone. That will be your freedom.” Johnston's work has moved away more and more from analysis of her country to questions about self. As the country she describes has evolved from Free State through banana republic to Celtic tiger, her awkward, independent women seem to fight ever more fiercely with convention, abandoning husbands, throwing off children, rejecting the old story-book answers for female happiness.

In Two Moons, three generations of women sum up those different struggles for liberation. Indeed, each woman's attitude to marriage, career and love might be read as a measurement of how Ireland has changed in the author's life-time. Religion and politics are no longer relevant; appetite is paramount; and our heroine peels off her clothes for a naked midnight swim with as much ease as she opens another bottle of red wine or dresses a salad.

Grace is a middle-aged Abbey Theatre actress. She shares a house beside the sea near Dublin with her aged mother, Mimi. Her daughter, Polly, lives in London. Like most of the children in Johnston's fiction, she has a difficult relationship with her mother, and finds more in common with her divorced English father. When she comes to visit with a beautiful young actor called Paul, the relationship becomes even more fraught. Paul and Grace find they are sexually attracted. They struggle to keep their hands off one another while Grace rehearses a new production of Hamlet. Meanwhile, Mimi is being visited by her guardian angel, Bonifacio. In their long, uninhibited conversations together about life and art, Mimi uncovers the reason for her late husband's sexual coldness towards her. He was a closet homosexual, a condition which she realizes she might not have understood in the early years of her marriage and now finds quite unshocking. Her forgiveness of her husband's silence and her own youthful ignorance help prepare her for death.

Grace and Polly do not appear to share the grandmother's delight in the brave new world. Indeed, the questions about whether or not Grace and Paul might have an affair, or whether a mother should tell her daughter about her philandering fiancé are never really dealt with; Grace bats off the man with a lot of Shakespearean quotations, as she pours down even more red wine and throws herself into the sea once again. Polly whinges down the telephone, a pathetic creature with a primary interest in clothes and marriage. And Mimi, despite her recent insights about the importance of sharing, watches her daughter's suffering without saying a word about it. The effect is frustrating and ultimately unbelievable. If Grace is the strong, selfish creature Johnston has written, then her self-control is unlikely. And if her society has changed in the way she describes, then her high moral line would be judged ridiculous rather than fine. For independent women of her generation, sex is not such a big deal; the 1960s reached Ireland, too.

In choosing such a problem, and solving it with such improbably large helpings of denial, Johnston reveals more about the morals of her own generation than of theirs. She has somehow written a more old-fashioned Irish novel than she may have intended. Perhaps her unique and disciplined literary voice is less attuned to the “new” Ireland than to the disappearing country which she helped define.