Criticism: In welcoming this critical celebration of the work of John McGahern, one wonders why it has taken Ireland's leading literary journal so long to get round to marking his achievement.
Doubtless the answer lies in the popular and critical success of That They May Face the Rising Sun and the imminent publication of his memoirs, though it is notable that editors and publishers elsewhere have needed no such spur. In fact the detailed bibliography included in this issue reveals some significant discrepancies between the critical reception of McGahern's work at home and abroad. No less than six French periodicals have devoted special editions to him in the past decade or so, and his work has been the subject of books by German, French and Italian scholars. Time, then, to clear arrears.
The volume opens with a revised version of McGahern's celebration of Tomás Ó Croimhthain's An tOileánach, which stands as an oblique manifesto of the novelist's own aesthetic theory and practice. Sifting the textures of Ó Croimhthain's prose for the secret of its "simple, heroic poetry", McGahern finds it in his elemental style, his "persistent way of thinking and feeling" that "seems always to find its right expression". It is this sure instinct, he insists, that purges the narrative of its local characteristics: "So free is the action of everything that is not essential that it could as easily have taken place on the shores of Brittany or Greece as on the Dingle Peninsula."
The relevance of such comments to McGahern's own work is not hard to fathom. The mythic patterning of mundane experience, the revelation of the emblematic through the particular, the intense evocation of "the innate sacredness of each single life" in the shadow of death - these have been the constants of his fiction across five decades. What's more, he has repeatedly stressed the importance of imagistic precision in the search for formal truth: "The quality of the seeing is more important than the quality of the message. If the writing truly sees, then it is liberating." Little wonder, then, that the qualities McGahern most admires in Ó Croimhthain's writing - his sense of timelessness, his minimalism, his vivid Homeric utterance, his fidelity to "all near and concrete realities" - are those which also distinguish his own.
The essays contain many perceptive insights into the myriad ways in which these qualities cohere to create a body of fiction which is "powerfully engaged with process, with the cyclical rhythms of birth, growth, copulation, and death", as Patrick Crotty puts it in his critically judicious survey of McGahern's child protagonists. Each turning of the cycle, moreover, deepens his characters' yearning for meaning, so that the insistent cry of Michael Halliday in The Barracks - "What is all this living and dying about anyway?" - becomes the defining query of McGahern's entire oeuvre.
The sub-headings of Eamon Grennan's essay - voice, vision, mode, details - encapsulate the recurring preoccupations of the 11 essayists, all of whom (to a greater or lesser extent) endorse his view of McGahern as "the best cartographer of the physical and metaphysical landscape our generation, and Ireland as whole, has moved across over the past sixty years". Grennan's sense of McGahern as a post-Catholic novelist, bereft of belief but with an essentially religious imagination, is amplified in the essays by Eamon Maher and Denis Sampson, who offers a sensitive reading of the way in which a timeless, transcendent aura encircles the natural and human worlds in That They May Face the Rising Sun.
Other contributors are more concerned with matters of literary influence and affinity. Robert Garratt traces the imprint of Joycean stylistics in Amongst Women; Stanley van der Ziel persuasively argues that Beckett rather than Proust is the spiritual father of The Dark; Declan Kiberd detects echoes of Jane Austen, Synge and early Irish nature poetry in That They May Face the Rising Sun, while Eamonn Hughes details some intriguing correspondences between that novel and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard.
There are hints, too, of what future volumes of this kind might contain. Eamon Grennan offers a series of intriguing suggestions for essays, as well as the outline of a comparative piece on the narrative methods of McGahern and William Trevor, while several other contributors allude to the recurrent theme of barrenness in McGahern's fiction - fertile ground, surely, for a postgraduate thesis or two.
Liam Harte is lecturer in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester
Irish University Review Special Issue: John McGahern Edited by John Brannigan Publisher, 243 pp. €12