The Almería coast is the Spanish setting of a brief but consequential period in John McGahern’s life: after moving there with Annikki Laaksi, he was away from Ireland when The Dark was published and banned, and could watch the controversy from a distance. The account identifies the place through its borrowed house and its position in the couple’s passage from Finland to London and Spain, rather than through a description of the landscape.

Setting and Circumstances

After winning a prize that required its recipient to travel abroad for a year, McGahern took leave without pay from his school. He went to Helsinki and married Annikki Laaksi later that year. Finland, he wrote, was not a country where he felt he could live; after Christmas, the couple moved first to London and then to Spain, where they had been lent a house on the Almería coast.

A Stay During the Banning of The Dark

The couple were staying on the coast when The Dark was published in London in May 1965 and seized by Customs and banned in Ireland. McGahern was glad to be in Spain and outside the storm. From there, he regarded the controversy as childish and unpleasant, and felt some shame that Ireland was making a fool of itself. He wondered privately whether a slower, more careful writing process might have kept the novel from attracting notice, but refused to join a protest, believing that participation would give the affair too much honour.

Place in the Narrative

The Almería coast marks a temporary remove from both Ireland and the school that had been McGahern’s livelihood. That distance did not end his connection to the dispute: from London, after the Spanish stay, he wrote to the school that he intended to return when his year’s leave ended. The coast’s significance in the account lies in this contrast: it offered refuge from the immediate public uproar, but not an escape from the professional consequences that followed.