Fallen nobility: the world of John McGahern.(Critical Essay)

There is a temptation to interpret the writings of John McGahern as one last, loving exercise in the old Gaelic mode of caoineadh ar cheim sios na nuasal, a lament for fallen nobility: but the writer is also shrewdly aware that the announcement of the death of a code is often the signal for a major attempt to revive it.

Although many of the characters in That They May Face the Rising Sun are poor in a material sense, and some are either gruff or completely silent, they bear themselves like mined aristocrats, for whom the exchange of money is a vulgar embarrassment and custom far more significant than any law. 'No misters in this part of the world', says one of them early on in a beloved local mantra, 'nothing but broken-down gentlemen'. (1) In one sense, that line evokes the great elegists from a toppled Gaelic aristocracy, from Daibhi O Bruadair to Aogan O Rathaille, and seems to suggest that it may not be possible to write a conventional bourgeois novel about such people. Yet, at a deeper level still, the remark recalls the rural villages of Jane Austen in the England of 1800, that mellow, fading world in which a few families shared scraps of news and gossip in the slowest of slow motion.

McGahern himself has observed that the decline of rural Ireland began as far back as the Act of Union in 1800; and that, in three hundred years' time, historians may have come to see the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 less as a qualified triumph for nationalism over unionism than as the moment when a native elite took over from foreign rulers the responsibility for 'managing' the crisis of rural Ireland. The image of fretful children peering up from the floors before being removed to England is what Patrick Ruttledge recalls of visits by himself and his partner Kate to view 'For Sale' houses near Shruhaun, put up by families whose dreams were now 'in tatters' (p.16). The x-mark scored through every day of the month on a calender left hanging in the house which the couple finally bought stopped on October 23, the day its owner died. This seems to be a community whose members are bound only for death or the emigrant ship. The return of the Ruttledges is almost perverse, an act which goes against the prevailing trend of people leaving the place. Their childless state suggests that only couples untrammelled by parental responsibilities--which is to say, only those without a personal stake in a communal future--can afford to stay. The few who achieved some wealth, such as Ruttledge's uncle (called the Shah), have done so by smartly avoiding the heavy demands of family life with many children. That celibacy practised by priests, far from being repressive, is viewed as the ideal social state and emulated by the Shah, who says ruefully of a girlfriend who tired of waiting for him and married another man: 'if she'd waited another few years, she'd have been safe' (p.39). The logical outcome of these attitudes is narrated by Patrick Ryan, another singleton, who says that whereas once the countryside was walking with people, 'after us there'll be nothing but the water-hen and the swan' (p.45).

Dirges like this have been sung in every generation and yet something of the old world always stubbornly remains. Telephone poles, television aerials, and meat factories may change the look of the landscape, but its traditions manage to live on, even in the very lament for their passing. What is celebrated here is nothing like wild, untamed nature, but an altogether more Augustan notion of a countryside filled with civilizing human presences, such as the practice of bee-keeping. (2) Against such a neo-classical backdrop, the naked expressions of rudimentary passion by characters like John Quinn or Johnny, seem like gross self-indulgence, bound to bring suffering and trouble, as when Quinn rapes his new wife or when Johnny quits a good life in that secure world to pursue an unrequiting lover to England. The sexual reticence of the Ruttledges, in a community which prizes the quiet life, begins to seem enviable rather than wan. The cultural alternatives to it are stark--the brutal violation of almost total strangers enacted by John Quinn, or the licensed version of his activity which passes for entertainment on the TV show, 'Blind Date'. Soon, says a trusted neighbour named Mary, 'they'll be watching it on television rather than doing it themselves' (p.189). It is as if the same fate awaits sex which has already overtaken darts.

The overall focus ...