Analysis
John McGahern’s writing career was plagued by controversy due to his challenging many of Ireland’s past religious, social, and sexual values. Although such abstract social issues are not at the center of his stories, there are no sentimental images of Ireland in them either; many are darkly pessimistic. Nor is there a garrulous, Irish storyteller voice, for his stories are concise, controlled, and clipped—much more characteristic of Chekhovian writing than a folklorish oral style. It is not the speaking voice of Frank O’Connor that dominates these stories but the stylized tone of so-called modern minimalism.
Because of the self-conscious control of McGahern’s narrative technique, his short stories have received as much critical analysis as those of Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien. These writers are both realistic and lyrical at once, as is typical of the modern Joycean tradition, pushing mere description of the material world to unobtrusive symbolic significance. McGahern was also typical of that tradition; although his stories have a recognizable social context, he was not interested in confronting his characters with the abstractions of social limitations. More often in his short stories, his characters face the universal challenges of responsibility, guilt, commitment, and death.
“Korea”
“Korea” is a deceptively simple story with a seemingly misleading title. Although the story is quite brief, it contains within it another story, which a father tell, about being captured just after the revolution in 1919, when the British were shooting prisoners. The father describes a young man of sixteen or seventeen who, after being shot, plucked at the tunic over his heart as if to tear out the bullets, his buttons flying into the air. The father says that years later, while he was on his honeymoon, he saw bursting furze pods, which reminded him of the young man’s buttons.
After the father urges his son to go to America, the boy overhears him excitedly telling a man that American soldiers’ lives are insured for $10,000 and that, for the duration of a soldier’s service, his parents receive $250 a month. Later when the boy tells his father he has decided he will not go to America, the father says it will be his own funeral if he refuses this chance and comes to nothing in “this fool of a country.” Although this seems to be a story about a calculating father willing to sacrifice his own son for money, the boy does not see it that way, feeling closer to the father than ever before.
“Peaches”
Both in terms of the clipped, repetitive syntax and the basic situation of a couple living in Spain, “Peaches” is McGahern’s most Hemingwayesque story. It begins with a prevailing metaphor, also reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, of a dead shark that lies stinking on the beach beneath a couple’s house. The couple, referred to simply as “the man” and “the woman,” have come to Spain, where they can live cheaply and where he can write and she can paint; however, the two do little more than quarrel, have sex, and talk about why they are unhappy, much as Hemingway’s couples do.
The title metaphor of peaches brings the couple’s lethargic and unproductive lifestyle to a head when the magistrate of the area invites them to his house to try his peaches, making it clear that it is the woman in whom he is interested by stuffing peaches into the breast pockets of her dress. When he urges them to come again so they can swim naked in his pool, the couple feel both shocked and bewildered. The story ends with the woman feeling somewhat responsible for...
(This entire section contains 1449 words.)
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what has happened, although she blames the man for not doing anything when the magistrate stuffed the peaches in her pockets. At the end, she says that the incident is no more than what she deserved.
“The Country Funeral”
Described by several reviewers as McGahern’s short-fiction masterpiece, this story has been compared to Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914). The surface similarities are clear enough; the story approaches novella length, and it focuses on a social ritual, albeit a funeral instead of a dinner party, that ultimately leads to a kind of communal affirmation. The story centers on three brothers, who go to the funeral of an uncle they never really liked. The focus is both on the discrepancy between their view of the uncle and others’ views of him and on the relationship of the past to the present.
As in “The Dead,” nothing much happens in this story except a routine, ritual meeting, common to Irish wakes, in which friends and relatives tell stories about the dead person. One of the brothers, Philly, who has come back home from the oil fields, is the most affected by the death, impressed by the respect everyone shows to his uncle’s memory; Fonsie, who is confined to a wheelchair, is the most acerbic and sarcastic, sneering that everyone is respected for a short time after he or she dies because he or she does not have to be lived with anymore. Philly, who says he cannot work in the oil fields forever, wants to buy his uncle’s farm, where his mother was raised, and the story ends as undramatically as it has proceeded throughout.
“The Beginning of an Idea”
As the title suggests, this story actually begins with the idea that dominates it: the first sentences of Eva Lindberg’s notebook, which describe how on a hot day the corpse of Anton Chekhov was carried home to Moscow on an ice wagon with the word “Oysters” chalked on the side of it. McGahern’s story then describes, almost word for word, a brief Chekhov story, entitled “Oysters,” about a young boy and his father who, begging on the street, are given oysters to eat by prosperous diners, who laugh when the boy also tries to eat the shells.
Eva Lindberg gives up her work as a theater director and her affair with a married man to go to Spain to write an imaginary biography of Chekhov beginning with the oyster story and ending with the story of the oyster wagon. The lines in her journal haunt her and are repeated several times throughout the story. However, when she arrives at the isolated house where she will be staying, she cannot write, taking on routine translation jobs instead. The only person she sees is a local police officer named Manolo, who visits her daily. When she agrees to get him some contraceptives, which are illegal in Spain, Manolo and the police chief tell her she will go to jail unless she has sex with them. Repeating the Chekhov sentences in her mind like a mantra, she gives in and afterward packs up and leaves, feeling rage about her own foolishness. On the train she has the bitter taste of oysters in her mouth, and when a wagon passes she has a sudden desire to see if the word “Oysters” is chalked on it.
“All Sorts of Impossible Things”
The central metaphor of this story is a brown hat, which has been worn by a teacher, James Sharkey, for the past twenty years. The central event is his friend Tom Lennon’s facing exams to determine whether he is eligible to become a permanent instructor; Lennon’s anxiety about the exams is complicated by the fact that he is frail and has a weak heart.
As is frequently the case in McGahern’s short fiction, the story has a story within it: Twenty years previously, when Sharkey’s hair began to fall out, he felt his life slipping away and was desperate to moor it to a woman; however, from the day the woman rejected him, he has never taken off his brown hat. When he is warned that he must take off his hat in church, he tells the priest that his encroaching baldness has the effect on him of timor mortis, the fear of death, so he has decided to cover it up.
However, the more serious sign of mortality in the story is Lennon’s weak heart, for when he goes to take his exams, he falls dead. Sharkey feels a certain amazement that it is Lennon lying there and not he. He keeps Lennon’s dog and after the funeral feels the same rush of feelings that occurred when his hair started to fall out. Now, however, he has a wild longing to throw away his hat, find a woman, and enter the dog in a race to win the silver cup. The story ends with his mind racing with a desire for “all sorts of impossible things.”
