The calm jounney through the day

John McGahern lopes into the Westbury Hotel, shakes hands enthusiastically, as if he was being interviewed for a job, not a magazine. He makes conversation gently, generically ("Eddie Hobbs is the man of the moment," he laughs, "the politicians don't like him anyway") and answers the initial questions with polite efficiency.

He's been unwell in recent years. How are you, he's asked.

"I'm seventy."

The question is repeated.

"I'm fine thanks."

He looks well. Strong, great brightness in his face. An air of simple confidence, of solidity. Piercing grey-blue eyes.

The release of his Memoir brings with it a hectic schedule of launches, interviews and signings. "Wouldn't it be worse if nobody wanted to buy the books at all," he laughs, gratefully.

Community is the big issue of the moment, An Taoiseach the previous week in Cavan declaring it one of the pillars of the Fianna Fáil agenda, following American guru Robert Putnam's counsel. McGahern has been writing about community since long before Putnam.

At the birth of the state, "the morale of the people could change in four or five miles, so intense were the local communities".

He tells a story a neighbour in Leitrim told when McGahern first moved back there, in the early 1970s. The neighbour describes somebody as being hard-up and "having to go abroad for a woman". McGahern asks, where abroad did he have to go? "And he says, 'to Cloone', and Cloone is seven miles away. So that's a different sense of space than we have now."

"I never thought that there was much serious politics in Ireland... I thought that most politics here was chasing after power for power's sake, rather than trying to do something for the good of the people. It was very closed and conservative, like the Church. The Church had almost total power, the politician was a secondary figure to the priest."

Did he resent that?

"Ah no. I think it was just a fact. You can neither resent it nor like it, you just deal with things as a fact."

His people in Leitrim, "they really hadn't much regard for either Church or State. They all went to mass and voted in elections but they knew if they couldn't make a living from the small piece of land that they had that neither Church nor State would look after them."

"The whole of Ireland has changed probably more in the last 15 years than it had in the previous 100 years."

That They May Face the Rising Sun, his 2001 novel, written through the 1990s but set in the early 1980s, draws an Ireland on the cusp of this change.

"It's almost a society that is given utterance to at its end." At a time when the country was being invaded by mobile phones, McGahern wrote wistfully about an Ireland being defaced by telegraph poles. Will he ever catch up?

"I don't know and I don't care," he says, gently.

"What you write about is in your head for a long time... And sometimes when you write it down, it disappears – there was nothing interesting there in the beginning – and other times it grows into work."

His work method is slow, laborious, organic.

"You're never sure when you write it down if it's going to be a short story or a novel... Eventually, after a long time working, especially in fiction, the work takes on its own life, you know, the characters start talking back to you."

What does he start with?

"Generally it's an image, or a phrase or a scene, and it stays in your head and won't go away... I've often spent two or three months writing and had to discard everything, nothing was interesting in what I was writing down.

"There's thousands of stories around every one of us, but they're inert, they've no life, and the problem for the writer is how to dramatise that inert mass of material. And how you know if it's not dramatising (is) if it's not stirring and talking back to you. And after a while, (as) the writer interferes with the material, the material also takes on a life of its own, especially the characters... As well as being the manipulator of what's happpening, the writer is also the receiver of what's happening. The characters actually go in different directions, that one would never think they'd go in."

The excess isn't always wasted, though. When Adrian Hodges was working on the television script for the BBC dramatisation of Amongst Women, he came to McGahern and said the BBC had complained there wasn't enough violence and sex in his script. So McGahern dug out some scenes he'd previously cut, "that had plenty of violence and sex in them".

He is less interested in the drama of plot than in the effort to dramatise the things around him truly. This culminates in That They May Face the Rising Sun, where his idea was "to take all drama out of it", so "that the ordinary day becomes the drama, in which preferably nothing happens and where everything happens".

The challenge for the artist is to dramatise the private world of his life, in such a way that the reader can take it into his private world, and recognise that it is true. McGahern prefers to think of this role as that of a "tradesman", rather than an artist.

"A book is a dead thing when it comes to life in another's mind. What is a book, but a bundle of words between covers. And then you'll get as many versions of the book as the readers it finds."

Readers write to him, affirming this with their correspondence. "A lot of letters over the new book are coming in now, mostly talking over their own lives, which is a good thing."

Truth was what was at issue for him in The Dark, his second novel which fell foul of the censor and the Church, and saw him fired from his Dublin teaching post.

"We would argue then that if a book was well written, it couldn't be immoral. Because if you get your words right, it can't be against the truth."

This is an intense business.

"You need to feel deeply and think clearly in order to find the right words. And that's why I could only ever write for two hours a day. You wouldn't have enough energy or think clearly enough."

Writing Memoir, his first foray into non-fiction, allowed him to resolve some stories he had previously tried to set down in fiction.

"One of the reasons that life isn't very good for fiction (is) it has to be believable, (and) in order to be believable it has to conform to laws. There is a tension between life as it is and life as it ought to be. But life has no difficulty with that because the god of life is accident, and I suppose the enemy of fiction is accident. A lot of things in life wouldn't be believable except that they do happen."

McGahern's father is such a thing. Drawn simply, in Memoir, he is scarcely believable, extraordinarily brutish, opaquely unsympathetic.

"It'd be very difficult to get someone to believe that my father didn't visit my mother in the last six weeks (as she was dying of cancer), and that he cleared the house of all the furniture except the room she was dying in." He tried to write about this in short stories, but never got it right – he couldn't make it credible in fiction.

But the need to put down what had happened persisted. "It was in my mind for a long time that it should be written about." Then his sisters brought him a collection of their father's letters that their stepmother had found in the attic, and asked him to write their story. They approved the manuscript of Memoir.

"What pleased me most of all was they said I went far too easy on my father."

Why should this please him?

"I think (my) long training in fiction was useful in that you never judge people, (you) let people exist in their own place and time and leave the judgment to the reader. I think the fiction writer has to learn that an ounce of sympathy is worth a tonne of judgments. In fiction, the most powerful tool that the writer has is suggestion."

It seems as if McGahern has been writing about his father for much of his career, perhaps in some attempt to understand a man he admits at the end of Memoir he never understood.

"I don't think so. I just wanted to get the thing right."

And in the novels – the sergeant in The Barracks, Mahoney in The Dark, Moran in Amongst Women? None of them are his father, he says, but composite characters.

"If you did draw on one person in fiction, it'd be a kind of thin character... Often five or six people, and different strands from diffferent people, and a lot of invention, goes into the creation of any character.

"The sad thing about finishing a novel is that you know the people so well, because they've actually been created gradually in your mind, and only five per cent of what you know about them goes into the novel... You could put them in any situation and you'd know exactly what they would do because to a certain extent you have created them."

The other presence dominating Memoir is his mother, who died of cancer when he was nine. Memoir reads as something of an elegy to her. Should they meet again, he writes, "I would want no shadow to fall on her joy and deep trust in God".

"She gave us a very different sense of life then my father gave us. In the years of my father, I don't think we would have come through that as undamaged as we did, without that other life that she gave us."

McGahern promised his dying mother he would become a priest. But his faith, strong in childhood, slowly faded.

"Through reading and those things I found that it had no meaning for me after a while and it almost ceased to have meaning for me without me knowing it... Gradually I saw the story of Christianity as another sacred story amongst many other stories that sought to make palatable and intelligible what is inexplicable.

"I think that life itself is all that we have and I don't believe that there is an afterlife, and that's all that there is to it... And that (loss of faith) happened gradually and without any drama."

Yet his notion of contentment, of happiness, seems informed by the aesthetics of contemplative Christianity.

"I think that the best of life is life lived quietly where nothing happens and the precious life is everything in the calm journey through the day."

He quotes a French writer, Monthelant: "happiness writes white".

"Happiness being its own completion – you can't write about it. If you're happy, only a fool would try to write about it, because you'd just be instead of doing anything. In a way you only realise you're happy when you've lost it. As you get older, there are certain times in life that this intimation – that this must be happiness – comes to us, but it's almost unlucky to articulate it."

But where is the room in this for passion?

"The quiet feelings can be far more powerful than the more dramatic feelings.

"There are two types of violence. The violence of sentimentality, where people break out into false, unearned tears, I see that as an abuse of feeling, as actual violence is an abuse of feeling as well, on the other side. Where I see sentimentality and violence very closely connected is that they're exaggerations of something that is true. Because truly-felt tears is true feeling, but sentimentality is the abuse.

"Isn't there two things – the self, which is almost a mysterious thing, or the soul, of a person; and the life he leads, and the life that he leads is to a certain extent made of the other people that he has experienced." The public life, lived amongst people, can be busy and fruitful, he says, but "if you didn't have a very strong private life, which I would essentially see as a spiritual life... you could not have much life, no matter how successful".

In That They May Face the Rising Sun, they watch Cilla Black's Blind Date programme on television. One of the characters, Mary, dismisses the programme's voyeuristic preoccupation with sex with the line: "Soon they'll be watching it on television instead of doing it themselves." McGahern laughs hearing it quoted back, as if the line was someone else's. Has Mary's prohecy, with Big Brother, come true?

"In a way television has taken over from what used to be called gossip, has taken over people's lives..." But then he demurs. "I really can't make judgments on anything. In fact, I find as I get older I fail to make any judgments." He chuckles. "I find people that judge rather unattractive people. My father was very judgemental."

"I would like to think that good manners, rather than the formula, is in using the imagination on behalf of others. You actually imagine if you were that person how you'd feel, and such a thing, and you adapt your manners to correspond to that. And I think that the natural process of living is so difficult that judgement is too easy for it."

The publicist has returned, watching so that McGahern gets a break before the book launch later that evening in Dublin. McGahern hunches forward, inquiring, asking was he clear, did he ramble. He shakes hands, and compliments, smiling, self-effacing. "It's difficult to answer good questions." He shakes hands again. He'd get the job, any job. He lopes off, tweed jacket, battered old leather briefcase, on his calm journey through the day.p