Book Review - In Memoriam by John McGahern

Submitted by Bev Clark

On April 1 of this year the Irish writer John McGahern was buried next to his beloved mother who had died of cancer when he was only nine years old. His last work, Memoir, (American title; All Will Be Well) is an elegiac treatment of his mother and, at the same time, an attempt to come to terms with his difficult and often violent father, a garda sergeant. The major part of the book is devoted to the writer’s childhood, to the upbringing and the landscape which formed him and which is so clearly reflected in his writing. Many of the people and incidents described in the autobiographical work are familiar to readers of McGahern’s fiction. There is the alcoholic principal who has lost control of his school and spends his evenings drinking with former pupils, and the local politician who has on more than one occasion burned down his house in order to collect the insurance money and build a bigger one. Fictional versions of both men can be found in the short story “High Ground.”

Memoir also contains sentiments that are embodied in McGahern’s last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (American title: By the Lake): his belief that “the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.” This novel reflects the author’s middle and late period which followed a difficult upheaval resulting from the banning of his novel The Dark by the Irish Censorship Board, his dismissal from his teaching post, and his leaving Ireland. When McGahern returned to take up a small farm in Leitrim, not far from where he was brought up, he was accompanied by his second wife, Madeline Green, an American photographer. The middle-aged couple, Joe and Kate Rutledge, main characters in That They May Face the Rising Sun, have also left London for Ireland where they can live their lives at a slower pace and with a closer connection to both community and place. The characters in this novel seem to move almost in time to the rhythms of the land and its seasons. There is a circular pattern to the novel whose end echoes its beginning. This is true of much of McGahern’s work, including Memoir in which the narrow lanes which he and his mother once traveled so happily in one another’s company both open and close the work.

For those of us who have read and loved John McGahern’s writing it is difficult to comprehend that he will walk those lanes no more. Nor will he continue to write so beautifully and so honestly about his country and its people. He was not only a great prose stylist but also a social historian, documenting in his fiction a passing world. Thanks to his gift for storytelling the world he knew lives on and can be returned to again and again through his novels—The Barracks, Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun—and his short stories and autobiographical work. They are his legacy to us, his readers.