Facebook X Email Print Save Story In May, 1965, two hundred and sixty copies of “ The Dark ,” a novel by the Irish writer John McGahern , travelled from London to Dublin, where they were seized by customs officers and forwarded to Ireland’s Censorship of Publications Board. No one knew who tipped off customs; the nation’s finance minister eventually admitted that it would not have been “physically possible” for officers to have read the book before it reached their hands. A month later, the censors formally banned “The Dark” from sale and distribution in Ireland, presumably for its depictions of adolescent sexuality—the teen-age protagonist, like most boys his age, masturbates a lot—and also of sexual predation: the narrator is molested by his father and, at one point, a Catholic priest gets into bed with the boy.
McGahern was then thirty years old; “The Dark” was his second novel, and, in being suppressed by Irish authorities, it joined a club that includes works by such prominent Irish authors as Brendan Behan, Seán Ó Faoláin, and Edna O’Brien (but not, oddly enough, James Joyce) along with Graham Greene , Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and many others.
At the time of the seizure, McGahern was in Spain, on a leave of absence from his job, at a Catholic boys’ school in Dublin. That fall, McGahern writes in his memoir, he returned home and attempted to resume his teaching post, but the headmaster barred him from entering his .