Spain became a temporary refuge for John McGahern and Annikki Laaksi after their move from Finland: in a borrowed house on the Almería coast, McGahern was physically away from Ireland as The Dark was published and banned there, and the resulting controversy gathered force.

Arrival on the Almería Coast

McGahern’s route to Spain began with the Macauley Award, which stipulated a year abroad. After writing The Dark in Dublin during the winter of 1963–64, he met Finnish theatre director Annikki Laaksi in Paris that summer. In October, his school granted him a year’s leave without pay; he went to Helsinki and later married Laaksi. Finland did not seem to him a country where he could live, so after Christmas the couple moved first to London and then to Spain, where they had been lent a house on the Almería coast.

A Refuge from the Controversy

While the couple were in Spain, The Dark appeared in London in May 1965. Irish Customs seized it, and it was banned in Ireland, provoking what McGahern described as violent controversy. He was glad to be in Spain and outside the storm. The distance did not make the affair seem trivial: he found the censorship childish and unpleasant, and felt ashamed that Ireland was making a fool of itself. He also privately wondered whether writing the novel less quickly and with greater care might have kept it from attracting the authorities’ attention.

Distance and Refusal

Spain was not presented as a permanent home or as the answer to the censorship dispute. McGahern declined to join a protest, believing that participation would give the affair more honour than it deserved. Yet he also refused to let the controversy quietly end his teaching career: while in London, he wrote to the school that he intended to return when his leave expired. Spain’s significance in this episode lies in that interval of removal—a borrowed place from which McGahern could watch the Irish dispute unfold without surrendering either his judgment of it or his intention to return to his work.