Review of The Pornographer: Irish Novel by John McGahern

Author: Tsara Shelton
Author Contact: @TsaraShelton on Twitter
Published: 22nd Jan 2026
Peer-Reviewed Publication: N/A
Additional References: Tsara's Column Publications

Summary: The Pornographer is a novel about a writer living in Dublin making money as a writer of pornography and going out dancing, hoping to meet women to have sex with.

Main Document

The Pornographer by John McGahern is a novel about a writer named Michael. When we meet Michael he's living in a Dublin apartment making decent money as a writer of pornography, visiting his dying aunt regularly in the hospital with gifts of scotch to ease her pain, and going out dancing, hoping to meet women to have sex with.

We are invited along and introduced not only to Michael's attitudes toward this dance between the sexes, but also Josephine. They meet, she agrees to come home with him, they discuss with refreshing honesty their beliefs about what they want and why they want it.

They have sex. Josephine falls in love. Michael does not.

The rest of the story unfolds as each character and their ideas of love, sex, family, and death are brilliantly revealed, explored, and considered.

The diversity of characters and genders in this story, in the hands of this author, allows for an honest consideration of the different ideas and desires between genders, as well as the separate obstacles and expectations experienced by each.

Throughout the novel we are equally gifted with different interpretations, opinions, and actions of each person as individuals.

I love when storytellers give us space and reason to agree with and understand clashing perspectives. John McGahern is one such storyteller. (Amongst Women is another novel by John McGahern that I have read and he does an equally good job in that book.)

The protagonist, Michael, isn't cruel, but he is callous. He is continuously clear with Josephine, telling her he does not love her though he does enjoy sex with her. Meanwhile she feels as though she's in love with him and that he could, were he willing, learn to love her in time. Although she is a little older than Michael, he speaks to her as though she is a student and he is her teacher in all things love and sex. Michael is didactic while Josephine is romantic.

Even though Michael makes it known with clarity he could not love Josephine, his relationship with her continues because, after insisting that according to the calendar they did not need to use a condom (It makes a farce out of it, doesn't it? It's just not natural~Josephine) she becomes pregnant. Michael does not want to be the sort who would abandon her, but he is also unwilling to be a family. There are many revelatory conversations between Michael and Josephine, as well as with other characters who are invited to weigh in, while ideas of what to do are explored. The conversations reveal more than only the complexities of Dublin life in the 1970s, but the complexities of relationships in general.

Throughout the book Michael continues to care for his aunt and his uncle and write pornography; he meets a new woman who is quite independent and wonderful; he discusses life and death with his employer; he gets help and advice from his doctor friend and her wife. The diversity of beliefs in each character is well examined and fantastic to explore.

The story explores sexual behaviors and beliefs, which I expected from a novel called The Pornographer, and does so brilliantly, which I'd hoped for. The differences between the way sex is written in Michael's pornography (yes, we get to read some) is drastically different from the way sex is thought about and experienced in Michael's life. But each, of course, influences the other.

This is a great book, written by an author who is wickedly insightful.

With, perhaps, the greatest ending scene I've ever read in any book.

If you love to explore perspectives, as I do, I recommend The Pornographer.

"By not attending, by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anyone who would agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion and evil as had I actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly." ~Michael, pg 251 of my copy

Author Credentials:

Tsara Shelton, author of Spinning in Circles and Learning From Myself, is a contributing editor to SexualDiversity.org

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