The Mangan Inheritance by Brian Moore (1979)

The Mangan Inheritance
by Brian Moore
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright: 1979
Book Club Edition

Thirty-six-year-old Jamie Mangan, a failed poet and sometime journalist, has suddenly and tragically been set free from his seven-year, childless marriage to a beautiful and successful actress of stage and screen. Among his wife's friends in New York's theatrical world he had been looked upon as a somewhat pathetic appendage to her. Back home in Montreal, he discovers through his father and from documents that he may be descended from James Clarence Mangan, the drink- and drug-taking bohemian Irish poet of a century and a half ago, perhaps Europe's first poete maudit, whose Romantic verses are still read by Ireland's schoolchildren. Among the family papers is a daguerreotype of the accursed poet that could well be a photograph of Jamie himself, so close is the resemblance.

Intrigued by this Doppelganger, Jamie sets out for picturesque and primitive southern Ireland. Although James Clarence Mangan was said never to have married, and died relatively young, Jamie finds evidence suggesting that he may have had direct descendants. And indeed there are Mangans in Drishane, the town Jamie settles into to discover his ancestry -- and perhaps gain a clue as to who he himself might really be. Among these Mangans are Dinny, who works as a laborer on a road gang though the job is obviously beneath him; his mother, Eileen, driven mad, it seems, by an event no one wants to talk about; and Conor, a dwarfish, drunken, and dishonest man who lives in a trailer with Kathleen, his eighteen-year-old sister, an untrammeled and unwashed red-haired beauty for whom Jamie conceives an irresistible and reciprocated lust. From them, and from a variety of colorful local characters, Jamie bit by bit pieces together the puzzle of his family's history, culminating in a horrifying account of sexual crimes told him by the criminal himself, yet another of the family's group of accursed poets.

The Mangan Inheritance is at once a mystery, a tale of passion and ambition, a search for roots, and a splendid evocation of the mist-drenched Irish landscape and its denizens. Ever since his first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore has ranked among the best writers of our language. In his newest novel, he puts his abundant literary gifts at the service of a story that is compellingly readable and uninterruptedly spellbinding.

Condition: Used. Hardcover. Dust cover shows shelf wear, rubbing and light discoloration. Pages are tanning from age. Previous owner's "Library Of" stamp on the front endpaper.

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