ESSAYSLESS THAN THREE years after his death, the reputation of John McGahern continues to follow a sharply rising curve, a process accelerated by the praise lavished on his posthumously published 2006 collection, Creatures of the Earth.
In 2007, an international seminar was established in his honour in Leitrim, the second gathering of which, on July 24th-26th last, began with a magisterial lecture by Prof Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh to a large, appreciative audience in the Bush Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon. Afterwards, the first volume of The John McGahern Yearbook was launched, a fine commemorative gesture that reaches out from what Ó Tuathaigh referred to as the writer's "base community" to the expanding constituency of his devoted readers.
In his foreword, the director of the seminar and summer school, John Kenny, explains that the Yearbook's aim is "to combine accessibility with scholarship, specialist knowledge with community knowledge". To this end, it features four kinds of contributions: revised versions of papers delivered at the inaugural 2007 seminar; reminiscences by people who knew the novelist in a private or professional capacity; a series of short responses by writers to 10 McGahern stories; and a specially commissioned short story by Mike McCormack. The interspersed arrangement of these contributions captures the reader's attention easily and fully, and the eye is further engrossed by several starkly atmospheric black-and-white photographs of the writer in his last years, together with reproductions of manuscript pages from the McGahern archive at NUI Galway. All of this, coupled with the Yearbook's elegant design and production, means there is visual as well as intellectual pleasure to be had in the reading of this volume.
In addition to explaining the book's purpose and scope, Kenny uses his foreword to offer an encapsulation of the quintessence of McGahern's oeuvre. The term he settles on, "lapidary" - the word refers to an engraver of precious stones and to that which is worthy of inscription upon stone - is entirely appropriate for a writer of such scrupulous artistry as McGahern. Its aptness is implicitly endorsed by other contributors, many of whom extol the crystalline definition of his prose. Yet too close an association of McGahern with dolmen-like immutability can blind us to his exploratory and revisionary vigour: the formal experimentalism that informs the changing architecture of the novels, his readiness, even in the last months of his life, to rework the short stories.
Herein lies one of the central challenges of writing about McGahern. Although the core dynamic of his aesthetic is towards sophisticated simplicity, the work itself is irreducible to singular definition or thematic generalisation. If he insists on laying bare the intimacies of thought and deed that our vanities and vulnerabilities conceal, it is in the full knowledge that what Belinda McKeon calls "the truth behind the habitual" is not susceptible to definitive naming. And while, as Seamus Heaney observes in his affecting tribute, McGahern's art has "always been true to the dailiness and the dark" of a life, he never flinches from the discomfiting intuition that there is no resolution to the existential riddle of our being here.
It is this quality of what Declan Kiberd terms "heroic honesty" that preoccupies many of the essayists in the volume. There is a recurring appreciation of McGahern's eschewal of moral preachiness, sentimentality and nostalgia; his refusal, too, to dodge what McCormack calls "the difficult, elusive truths of the human condition" or cloak them in the consolations of conventional piety. This aspect is succinctly noted by Vincent Woods in his essay on Gold Watch: "Time does not heal, people do not change their stripes, the new does not always outlast the old. We can wait forever in silence and still no truth will shine from act or symbol." Such unabashed fidelity to merciless realities is itself oddly consoling; that is one of the paradoxes of McGahern's appeal.
Unsurprisingly, the enormous importance of place to McGahern is everywhere acknowledged here. There is a marked consensus that his treatment of the local is imbued with global resonances, and more than one contributor identifies the interpenetration of the human and the natural worlds as one of the key constituents of his vision. Other essayists sharpen our understanding of the complex interplay of memory, experience and imagination in McGahern's writings. Commenting on his insistent recapitulation of his troubled upbringing, Kiberd observes that McGahern "seems never to have felt that the experience was fully contained, that he was truly freed of it". Aengus Woods amplifies this point in his deft analysis of The Wine Breath, arguing that McGahern's continual quarrying of his childhood landscapes was driven by "the very unrecoverability, the absolute loss of these grounds".
Such perceptive insights punctuate the suite of essays focused on individual short stories, which had their genesis in a Leitrim readership project entitled "McGahern 10 X 10". Each constitutes a subjective, sympathetic response to McGahern's literary method: his complex constructions of character and incident, his skilled orchestration of imagery and tone, his devastatingly spare prose style, once brilliantly compared to "the sting and clarity of an early morning in October" by Michael McLaverty. The intimate, informal tone of these brief meditations invites us to stop and stare at the stories anew. They also suggest the ways in which the master's influence and legacy are being mediated by younger Irish writers, a theme directly addressed by James Ryan (himself a novelist of McGahernesque gravitas) in his analysis of Claire Keegan's recent short story, Surrender.
• Liam Harte is the 2008 Armstrong Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Toronto. His book, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan