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COPYRIGHT 2005 Irish University Review
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.
Again, this voice has the rich descriptive expressiveness of a painting--in this case less Dutch than French, something by Corot. In this novel, McGahern employs this richly descriptive voice not only to establish a distinct rhythmic pattern, but also to signal a deep moral awareness, bearing witness as it does to the fundamentally positive existence of the world. It seems to me that the whole world of this novel is striving for this condition of simple witness to the way things are. It may be some such moral intent that makes its central character, through whose seemingly neutral gaze much of the action is conveyed to us, a kind of window of plain, not--as with so many other main characters--stained glass, his consciousness matching the clear transparent surface of the lake itself. (1)
On the solid ground of this impersonal but deeply engaged voice McGahern erects a world of various, variously kinetic, human voices. Through these varied voices he creates the inner texture of individual consciousness as well as the outer exchange of impeccably caught and exactly registered (to often devastatingly painful or comic effect) dialogue. The voice of consciousness (heard when we enter, for example, into the life of Elizabeth Reegan or that of the priest in 'The Wine Breath', or when we attend to the first-person narrator of The Pornographer or 'The Gold Watch') stands between the other two, mediating between the given world of phenomena and the world of human action. The solidity of the first voice is matched by the puzzled sometimes philosophically generalized quiet of the second, inner-meditative voice. And this in turn is counterpointed by the edgy, perpetually shifting, character-revealing intonations of the third voice--that of individualized speakers expressing themselves in all their local, unmatchable idiosyncracy. McGahern's ear for the actualities of local speech--rural or urban, educated or not--is unparalleled. The stories are full of talkers: talk is the life-blood and pulse-beat of his characters. Through their talk he dramatizes and animates their lives against the backdrop of their often desperate conditions. The 'voice' of talk, of speech, of dialogue is the noise of the world as it surrounds the silent inner voice of consciousness and is in turn surrounded by the speechless voice of the natural environment and the enduring quiet of inanimate objects.
Connected to these, perhaps standing a little at an angle from them all, is what I'd hear as the inimitable McGahern narrative tone. This is the true sound of the story-teller, composing sentences that can appear at times somewhat awkward but in their awkwardness revealing the very quality of what it is they are recounting. I hear it as the teller's own rapt involvement in his tale, so that the style itself is willing to lose 'stylishness', forego clean edges, in its eagerness to match (as distinct from describe) the matter with the language. Here's a sentence from 'Strandhill, the Sea': 'Fear of the sky since morning had kept them on the benches away from the strand a mile downhill they'd come to enjoy, fear of the long trudge past the golf links and Kincora and Central in...
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