Safe in her shadow

John McGahern's powerful memoir is grounded in the natural world and based on the understanding of life's purpose. Review by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Memoir or All will be well: a memoir. By John McGahern. Alfred A Knopf. €18.50

Imagine a flock of birds somewhere in the west of Ireland, suddenly rising from a hayfield and settling in a line on a telephone wire. That's something like the effect of reading John McGahern's powerful memoir, in which the fragments of the life that lies scattered across his remarkable novels and stories seem to disentangle themselves from their embodying fictions and come home to roost.

If you've read McGahern before, you'll already know his territory – the fields and rivers, the villages and bogs. And you'll know both the subtlety and the plainness of the people who live here, on the border of County Leitrim and County Roscommon. If you haven't read McGahern before, this is a good place to start, at the heart of a lyric grief and an embittering passion.

The grief is for his mother, a teacher who died of cancer when McGahern, the oldest child in his oddly sorted family, was still a boy. They lived in a small bungalow outside the village of Ballinamore in County Leitrim. McGahern's father – a police sergeant and an occasional visitor in a blue Ford – lived 20 miles away in the barracks at Cootehall. Theirs was an unequal contest for the child's affections, made all the more unequal by his father's violent and unstable character. McGahern's young life was shaped by this imbalance: knowing one parent too briefly and the other (as far as he could be known at all) far too well.

"People did not live in Ireland then," McGahern writes. "They lived in small, intense communities which often varied greatly in spirit and character over the course of even a few miles." In his fiction, McGahern is one of Ireland's supreme topographers, mapping the nuances of minute shifts in neighbourhood and class. The singular accomplishment of Memoir is to show us, with almost blinding emotional clarity, the small, intense community of a particular young boy growing up in a certain set of fields and lanes by the side of his dying mother, a boy tortured, at irregular intervals, by the attentions, desirable and undesirable, of his parsimonious yet emotionally wasteful father. McGahern has hinted at all of this before – in his stories, in novels like The Barracks and The Dark. But here he takes up his own life in his own hands.

I don't know another writer who grounds his fiction as inevitably in the natural world. Neither foreground nor background, it has no emotional fallacies to perpetrate on McGahern's behalf. It is simply the stuff of perception itself. In Memoir, McGahern reminds us of the way our appreciation of nature is grounded in repetition. The lanes near Ballinamore are overgrown with hedges, "and in the full leaf of summer", he tells us, "it is like walking through a green tunnel pierced by vivid pinpoints of light". What makes those lanes even more vivid is McGahern's memory of walking along them with his mother.

Woman and boy beat a long path through their short life together, and it is the familiarity of that path – its persistent emotional echo – that McGahern wants us to understand. "With her each morning," he writes of her walks with her young family, "we went up the cinder footpath to the little iron gate, past Brady's house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the deep, dark quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill by Mahon's shop to the school, and returned the same way in the evening."

That simple route recurs like a litany in Memoir. Walking by his mother's side – after she returns from an inexplicable absence and in the dim foreknowledge of her death – he is "safe in her shadow." The doubleness of that phrase – the fact that as a grown man he is still safe, even in the shadow of her death – haunts the book and also McGahern's understanding of life's purpose: "I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything."

From the reassuring mystery of his mother's love, the boy was suddenly plunged at her death into the impenetrable mystery of his father's overbearing presence. "Which of us knows who we are?" the neighbours said evasively when McGahern, later in life, asked them about his father. "He had a physical attractiveness that practically glowed," McGahern explains, "but seldom was he able to sustain it: he demanded that the whole outside world should reflect it perfectly back. Once this mirror dimmed or failed, his mood would turn."

The cardinal elements of this man's being were vanity and self-pity, which is all the more striking since McGahern's dying mother seems never to have grieved for herself. That the core of such a brutal man, so ready to beat his children, should turn out to be cowardice and weakness hardly seems surprising. Until the boy comes of age and stands up to his father, the children's only defense is their wicked mockery of a grown man – and a police sergeant at that – bemoaning his fate.

The course of Memoir takes us through the writer's life, almost down to the present. And yet what makes this memoir so moving is its insistence – shared with many of McGahern's stories and novels – on the power of the single day that passes before us. For McGahern, daily routine is the root of our being, the arena of our noticing. It has an ontological glow, as if life were best understood in the episodic rhythms of daylight and darkness.

It is also a rhythm of expectation and disappointment. That is the world McGahern describes in his short story Sierra Leone: "The rich uses we dreamed last night when it was threatened that we would put it to if spared were now forgotten, when again it lay all about us in such tedious abundance." But the day can also be one of epiphany, as in The Wine Breath: "This, then, was the actual day, the only day that mattered, the day from which our salvation had to be won or lost: it stood solidly and impenetrably there, denying the weak life of the person, with nothing of the eternal other than it would dully endure."

There must, of course, come a day when the dying are removed into a separateness all their own. As a boy, McGahern clung to his mother, to the paths they walked. But as a man he comes to understand the true nature of her vanishing. "Those who are dying," he writes, "are marked not only by themselves but by the world they are losing. They have become the other people who die and threaten the illusion of endless continuity. Life goes on, but not for the dying, and this must be hidden or obscured or denied... All the pious platitudes are like a covering of dust or chaff."

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