John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (review)

Under the general editorship of Eugene O' Brien, Contemporary Irish Writers and Film Makers is a new series from Liffey Press that provides substantial critical introductions to the work of notable contemporary Irish writers. Each volume in the series thus far serves as a perfect introduction to the work of the given author, including a chronological examination of the artist's development, and a detailed critical apparatus. Eamon Maher's discussion of McGahern's work is no exception: it is an impeccably researched, appreciative, and well-written. It is a critical study that in its attitude merges the best aspects of traditional literary scholarship with Reader-Response Theory: the result is a passionate and fluent explication of McGahern's work. In addition to Maher's critical narrative,the volume includes a chronological tracing of McGahern's career and an interview with his subject.

Although his first novel, The Barracks, was published in 1963 to critical acclaim, McGahern's early work has been overwhelmed by the success of his recent novels, Amongst Women (1990) and That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) published in the United States as By the Lake, and his first commercial success here. Since 1990, McGahern has been awarded important literary prizes, been the recipient of honorary degrees from Irish and French universities, and been appointed a member of the Arts Council. Maher notes that "there comes a stage in a writer's career where he or she is acknowledged as being capable of producing 'great literature'-this is now the case with McGahern. Only William Trevor among contemporary Irish writers enjoys a similar stature." His reputation is undeniable among fiction writers and carries with it, albeit quietly, the visionary and moral force of an artist who has always favored the resonant over the fashionable.

Throughout his career, the locations of his novels and short-stories have remained constant to those parts of the West encompassed by counties Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo, and Dublin on occasion, though the capital is usually where a protagonist lives while his eyes are still cast westward to the family home. At the same time, McGahern's rural Ireland is purposely not well delineated for the reader. It is not always easy to know where one is exactly in his fiction, for the simple reason that the characters in his work know exactly where they are and have no need to describe their place to each other. In Amongst Women, for example, one does not really know if the departing Morans leave from the train station at Boyle, or Carrick-on-Shannon, or elsewhere; what is important is that they know where they are and that we as readers are allowed to enter into their world and lives. The center of Dublin, on the other hand, is a neutral territory and well-known to everyone.

There is a similar constancy to be found in the characters that populate McGahern's fiction: his farmers, guards, forlorn lovers, stepmothers, and children appear and reappear throughout his work, sharing names, gestures, beliefs and profound measures of complexity. The world McGahern describes can be cruel, claustrophobic, and quite terrifying; however, it rings true to Irish experience, particularly in the West, in the decades of postcolonial confusion that lasted from the 1920s until the 1970s or so. Declan Kiberd has compared McGahern "to one of those painters of the Renaissance who tried to do one painting over and over until they got it near to perfection." As both Kiberd and Maher point out, McGahern gives voice to an Ireland that is fading from view, writing both its tangled narrative and its joyful requiem. Until the appearance of That They May Face the Rising Son, his novels are dominated by disappointed and disillusioned fathers who—because they cannot control the movement of the world outside the home—rule the home by means of fury and silence. In many of his novels, the farms or houses...