[In the following review, Wall offers a positive assessment of Amongst Women, calling the novel “one of the great works of Irish fiction.”]

John McGahern and Brian Moore are pivotal figures in a quintet of Irish fiction writers (with Edna O'Brien, Aidan Higgins, and William Trevor) that emerged in the fifties and early sixties and who, by mixing modernist influences with native realism; have produced a new kind of Irish fiction. These writers have published some remarkable novels over the years, and have excavated Irish experience to depths that had remained unexplored since the death of Joyce. Both McGahern and Moore, in these new works, consider themes that have been present in earlier novels, though through slightly different lenses this time, and the results, in both cases, are remarkable.

Amongst Women, like The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), is concerned with patriarchal dominance. Here, the husband and father, Moran, though he is often cruel to his children and to his second wife, Rose, stands at the center of their lives. The novel begins with Moran near death, and from here weaves its way backwards into Moran's (and his family's) past. Amongst Women is a kind of critical elegy, both for Moran himself and for the revolutionary generation that he was a part of. It is McGahern's best novel to date because here he has managed to extend the psychological landscape to include not just Moran's story, but also the stories of the lives of the other members of his family. One senses as one reads this work that it is complete—that McGahern has distilled from these lives all that is interesting and important. This is surely one of the great works of Irish fiction.

Brian Moore's Lies of Silence is, like his previous novel The Color of Blood, a political thriller which ends with the execution of the hero. The Color of Blood took place in Eastern Europe, in an unnamed country, but Lies of Silence is definitely set in Belfast. The hero of this work is Michael Dillon, a young hotel manager who, on the eve of leaving his wife, is taken captive, along with her, and forced to drive his car, laden with explosives, to his place of work. Inside the hotel, the Reverend Alun Pottinger, a dead ringer for the Reverend Ian Paisley, is about to deliver a speech to a group of visiting Canadian unionists. If the bomb explodes, the guests will be killed. If Dillon informs the police, the IRA will kill his wife.

From the start, Lies of Silence is a compelling thriller that will rivet you to your seat till you find out what happens to Dillon. It is also, however, much more than a brilliant thriller. It is a love story that affirms, as Moore's fiction has always done, the superiority of love to political activism, and which shows that love is impossible to sustain in Northern Ireland. Here, Moore is also more directly politically engaged than he has even been before, in a novel that is a shout for the end to the carnage in Northern Ireland. Lies of Silence is an impressive and an original work.