SOURCE: “Hamlet at the Abbey,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4981, September 18, 1998, p. 27.

In the following review, Foster offers a negative assessment of Two Moons, criticizing the inaccuracies in Johnston's description of modern Ireland.

A new work [Two Moons] by Jennifer Johnston is always an event. The literary generation to which she belongs has produced some of Ireland's most ground-breaking fiction. Unspoken rules and invisible lines laid down by history, religion or family ties have supplied plenty of material for those writers raised within the peculiar straitjacket of de Valera's newly independent nation. And their acute awareness of convention, whether to stay silent or speak out, is their only common theme.

Born in 1930 as a southern Irish Protestant, Johnston has written fiction which has caught much of that strangeness and inhibition. But whereas her contemporaries, such as John McGahern, Edna O'Brien and Brian Moore, set their characters against conventional...