'Only what happens': mulling over McGahern.(John McGahern)

What I'd like to do here is just offer, by way of appreciation, a few brief responses to some of what draws me into McGahern's work, elements that represent for me its enduring value.

Voice

Whenever I launch myself into a story or novel by McGahern, the first thing I'm aware of is the power of the telling voice. Whether first- or second- or third-person narrative (in The Dark he uses all three), the voice of the story-teller is an immediately palpable presence. I'm right away in the grip of someone who is not only going to tell me something interesting, but whose way of telling it is part of the point and part of the power. Voice is McGahern's means of knowing, of experiencing, the world.

There are, I think, three distinct levels or kinds of voice in McGahern. The first of these allows him to register actions and facts with beautifully lucid objectivity. Here's a segment of the opening paragraph of The Barracks:

 
   The bright golds and scarlets of the religious pictures on the walls 
   had faded, their glass glittered now in the sudden flashes of 
   firelight, and as it deepened the dusk turned reddish from the 
   Sacred Heart lamp that burned before the small wickerwork crib 
   of Bethlehem on the mantelpiece. Only the cups and saucers laid 
   ready on the table for their father's tea were white and brilliant. 

This is the 'voice' of a Dutch interior, carrying the shades and textures of an oil painting, life stilled to the still life of its ambient objects. It is a voice McGahern never loses. In each novel and story he puts it to different use. But its meaning and effect are always the same: to anchor the unsteady universe of consciousness and moral complexity in the simple, concrete data of ordinary life. It is a voice that seems to exist independent of any human agency, the expression of some innate life in the things of the world. Often these 'things' are landscape and weather, the largest of the steadying forces in McGahern's universe. In Amongst Women one of the characters experiences such local elements as 'dear presences'. In his most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, such evocations become a primary element in the book's architecture; the novel paces itself by a constant return to the seasonally changing landscape of the lake around which it is set. Such passages are the means of locating the characters and their various actions in a recognizable single unfolding life:

 
   The plum trees blossomed, then the apple came and the white 
   brilliance of the pear tree ... The rich green of the grass in the 
   shelter of the hedges travelled out over the whole field ... All the 
   hives were working. The spaces between the branches of the trees 
   along the shore filled with leaves and were now a great broken 
   wall of green. In the clear spaces through which the water showed 
   it looked like sky, until the eye travelled to the farther shore.