The circular path of a Leitrim life

John McGahern has attained literary icon status in recent decades. He captures elements of local Irish rural life in a way that gives them a universal resonance and it is this quality, in addition to his carefully crafted style, that explains his popularity all over the world. It took a while for the Irish public to warm to him, however. Starkly raw representations of rural provincial Ireland in The Barracks and The Dark, his first two novels, may have cut too close to the bone for many.

The infamous banning of The Dark in 1965 brought the author the type of publicity he has always abhorred and resulted in his losing his position as a primary school teacher. The Leavetaking and The Pornographer marked the experimental phase of his literary output, which was to reach its apogée in 1990, with the publication of Amongst Women, a truly brilliant book that was voted third best Irish novel of all time behind Joyce's Ulysses and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a competition organised by The Irish Times and the James Joyce Centre in 2003. His most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, published in 2002, confirmed McGahern's status as a writer of substance.

A wry smile must occasionally crease his expressive and weather-beaten face when he considers the path that has led him to the point where he is now generally considered Ireland's foremost writer of prose in English – only William Trevor would enjoy anything like the same esteem. Like Trevor, he is equally adept in the short story form as in the novel.

So the excitement surrounding the publication of Memoir should not come as a surprise. Nor will the book disappoint. As with all of McGahern's writings, the language is elegant, yet unpretentious, economic or lyrical as the occasion demands. The opening lines describe the Leitrim landscape: "The fields between the lakes are small, separated by thick hedges of whitethorn, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green oak, sycamore [...] The hedges are the glory of these small fields, especially when the hawthorn foams into streams of blossom each May and June." Memoir is superb in the way in which it captures the sights, sounds and smells of McGahern's native Leitrim, a place that is especially dear to him because of its association with walking to school along its lanes with his mother, Susan. More than half of the book deals with the first ten years of the writer's life up to the death of this woman who successfully combined the roles of mother, wife and primary school teacher. Deeply religious, she lived in hope that her first born, John, with whom she had a special relationship, would one day become a priest. Cancer invaded her system at a young age and her leaving was the most poignant event in the life of her eldest child. A mastectomy made it dangerous for her to conceive again but her husband, although aware of the dangers associated with having sex, did not curb his appetites and the birth of the "cancer child" was followed soon afterwards by the death of the mother.

McGahern's anger at his father's failure to visit his dying wife in the last weeks of her illness is palpable. The decision to send a truck to collect the children and the furniture from the cottage in which she lay dying was insensitive at best. The strong autobiographical elements in The Leavetaking are borne out by some descriptions that are identical in the fictional and memoir accounts. For example, there is the hammering apart of the joints of a bed near where Susan was dying, which is especially harrowing. Then there is the final goodbye between mother and son. He had to drag himself away from her bedside for fear that, if he didn't leave then, he would never summon the strength to go. Afterwards he regrets the lost moments: "I would never lay eyes again on her face. The time I had spent in the flower garden by the lorry instead of going to her in the room came back to torture me."

The relationship he enjoyed with his mother was in stark contrast to the tension that characterised his dealings with his father who was vain, self-centred, prone to unprovoked bouts of violence and who seemed hell-bent on belittling his children. Life in the barracks in Cootehall, where he was the Garda sergeant, was excruciating for them. What made things worse was the fact that a number of people knew of their misery and did nothing: "It speaks of how bad it became that a number of times over the years the three guards came to him in a deputation to say that if the cries and beatings didn't stop they'd be forced to report him or take some action." But although the violence resumed a short time after the warnings, the sergeant was never reported. This type of situation was replicated in many places throughout Ireland during the 1940s and 50s: "Authority's writ ran from God the Father down and could not be questioned. Violence reigned as often as not in the homes as well. One of the compounds at its base was sexual sickness and frustration, as sex was seen, officially, as unclean and sinful, allowable only when it too was licensed."

But it would be wrong to give the impression that this book is suffused with anger and resentment. There is also humour, as is evident from the advice a local character, Patsy Conboy, gave to a man who came to him looking for work, armed with a letter from a priest stating he had a large family and needed to earn money. Patsy told the man he should "dump the priest and put a cap on that oil well of yours!"

It is moving to read passages where he describes how, when walking on the lanes at certain times, he comes into "an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live for ever." Such Proustian moments are interspersed across McGahern's writing. Different sights and sounds act as triggers for involuntary memory to kick in and this opens out into an experience of timelessness.

Memoir is an atmospheric and beautifully sculpted work. It is a book that it difficult to put down and one that you hate finishing. It sets a new standard in memoir writing, a genre that has been employed adeptly by many Irish writers in recent times. It pulls no punches as to the violence that characterised Irish society a few decades ago and is particularly good at exposing a certain warped attitude in relation to sexuality. But gentleness and compassion are the two qualities that dominate. McGahern's main message is that life followed a strangely circular path for him: "This is the story of my upbringing, the people who brought me up, my parents and those around them, in their time and landscape. My own separate life, in so far as any life is separate, I detailed only to show how the journey out of that landscape became the return to those lanes and small fields and hedges and lakes under the Iron Mountains." With this, his first attempt at non-fiction, McGahern has produced a classic.p

Eamon Maher is the author of John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (The Liffey Press). He is currently completing a second book entitled: The Life and Works of John McGahern. This is funded by a recently awarded IRCHSS small project grant to help him