Criticism: Eamon Maher's new study of the fiction of John McGahern has an immediate edge over its only Irish precursor, Denis Sampson's memorable Outstaring Nature's Eye (1993), in that it takes account of the work published after Amongst Women (1990): the Collected Stories, which appeared in 1992 with two new stories, and the 2001 novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, writes Belinda McKeon.
Maher also has the benefit of several new essays by, and interviews with, the author, who has in recent years become a much more public figure than the reticent, intensely private artist of the 1970s and 1980s.
In contrast to the broad brush-strokes of Sampson's exploration, Maher's is a more unified thesis, dedicated to an idea about which McGahern has written and spoken often: that "all good writing is local", that the depiction of village life, rendered into art, attains a universal truth. However, Maher's pursuit of this idea seems not to register its second part, as set out by McGahern: that, if all good writing is local, then "nearly all bad writing is national". This statement isolates the artist and his task from the commentator, the historian, and the journalist; the artistic image stands clear of nation, of concepts of identity, of such props of the actual world. But Maher regards "local" as synonymous with the novelist's actual rural roots in Leitrim and Roscommon; for him, McGahern is "chronicler" and anthropologist, and his real achievement is to capture "the closing chapters of rural Ireland", to "reveal to us from whence we have come". This "we" is taken for granted throughout Maher's study as an unambiguously Irish readership which can "commune" with McGahern's rural characters.
So deep is the resonance, for many, of McGahern's fictional worlds that this much may be forgiven. But more worrying is the analysis of scenes and characters in terms of their relevance to real life; the behaviour of two men at Elisabeth Reegan's funeral in The Barracks, for example, is "typical of how many people feel when they are attending funerals". Of Leddy, a character in a short story, it is asked, "how many men like him can be found scattered across the country even today?" In the most recent novel, a boy hired out from an orphanage as a farm hand serves as "a reminder of the great injustice . . . (of) places like the Magdalene Laundries". But none of this is the artist's concern, unless he is driven by an agenda, which cannot be said of McGahern.
That said, several promising theories jut out from Maher's narrative. He suggests, interestingly, that McGahern's own critique of the endeavour of The Leavetaking, which drove him to revise the work in 1984, could equally have applied to The Dark. His argument that the second part of The Leavetaking is flawed finds an echo in the interview which forms the appendix to the work, where McGahern criticises Camus's L'Étranger on the same grounds - a concurrence which, unfortunately, remains unexplored. So, too, does his insight that the description of Monaghan Day, in Amongst Women, bears a close relationship to Padraig Pearse's description of the 1916 rising; that the interjection of authorial comment, at only one point in that novel, deserves deep analysis. And there is valuable observation of elements of That They May Face the Rising Sun - the paganhood of the lakeside community, the absence of the old McGahern theme of family, the ungrounded, almost unworldly, sense of time.
But Maher neglects to develop these ideas, and substitutes generalisation and an increasingly irksome parochialism - in emphasis and in expression - for scholarly analysis. He often writes in a style so colloquial as to seem almost an affectation, as if in the hope that imitation of the simplicity of the speech with which McGahern endows his characters would bring also its profundity. Tellingly, he is ill at ease with the more abstract, "experimental" passages in the early novels, particularly The Dark and The Pornographer, describing them as "unusually awkward". His discomfort at the atheistic universe of much of the fiction pushes him to seek for signs of religion where none exist, and there are signs of an associated discomfort as he cloaks commentary on the sexual landscape of the works in jokes and euphemism.
Maher's feeling for the work is evident, and, when he brackets preconception, it can move him towards real insight. But he lacks confidence, smothering his own thoughts with lengthy quotations from other critics making the same point more eloquently, and in most chapters, the last word is not even his. When he allows himself to stay with the fiction, intuiting its depths, he can, in McGahern's phrase, "get the words right". But that takes more time than this book seems willing to give.
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic
John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. By Eamon Maher, The Liffey Press (Contemporary Irish Writers and Filmmakers series), 208pp.
€16.50