Nightlines, the title of John McGahern's first collection of stories, (1970), promises a series of sombre narratives; Getting Through, the title of his second, (1978), connects communication with strategies of survival; High Ground, (1986), his most recent collection, hints at elevations of theme or perspective, but a perusal of the title-story reveals the ironies of eminence. John McGahern's short fictions are studies in disillusionment and its apathetic aftermath, in alienated authenticity and the sad stoicism of the undeceived.

At first glance his fictional terrain may seem familiarly uncomfortable to readers of James Joyce, Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain. Stories set in dreary, Irish provincial towns and villages or in the bars, dingy interiors and wet streets of Dublin. Unheroic white-collar heroes—teachers, police sergeants, civil servants, translators, failed writers, a priest. However, where his predecessors were actually or avowedly concerned with the representation of Irish life, writing chapters of moral history, diagnosing urban paralysis, forging an uncreated racial conscience, revealing Catholic Ireland to itself in an unflattering looking glass, McGahern's focus is on the ostensibly unrepresentative, on characters estranged from their families, professional milieux, social contexts, on solitaries, celibates, farmers’ sons who have disinherited themselves, dropouts, bachelors who have not summoned enough sustained enthusiasm to marry. Neither self-deluded nor capable of overcoming their limitations, they are condemned characters, trapped in a world from which death is the only exit. Yet McGahern's heroes are neither freaks nor grotesques, denizens of stables, caves, dustbins, sandheaps. They lead lives of covert desperation, usually contriving to conform outwardly to social mores or role-expectations to the extent that their alienation or despair escapes public notice.

When I claim that these low-pulsed, phlegmatic, dispirited heroes may be only ostensibly unrepresentative, it is because their nihilism, their insistent consciousness of the pointlessness and purposelessness of their lives, their obsession with death, seem to me to derive less from Heideggerian existentialism than from a belated post-Christian reflectiveness pursued, for the most part, in the context of a casual, untroubled Irish Catholicism. Accustomed to living sub specie aeternitatis they now ‘get through’ each day in the certain knowledge of ultimate extinction. An idealist sensibility and a contemptus mundi have outlived the religious belief that engendered them. (‘Faith, Hope and Charity,’ in the story of this title, are three hard-up musicians who provide cheap entertainment.) McGahern's undeceived heroes are ill-adjusted to the finite; theirs is the peculiar hopelessness of former Catholics recently deprived of a teleological metaphysic. They are disappointed men, discontented with the quotidian, grudging and aggrieved, haunted by a phantom promise. Their dilemma is ‘what to make of a diminished thing’ and they confront it listlessly or with grim humour. Carpe diem has no place in their philosophy. They endure but seldom enjoy. They are usually unsuccessful in love because distrustful of consolation. Woman offers them only a temporary respite from despair. McGahern's bachelors are celibates in retreat from life, or men who, failing to resolve a dichotomy between the real and the ideal, pursue love with intermittent ardour and waver about marrying. The motherlessness of so many of his characters may help to account for the joylessness of their disaffection; they lack a primal emotional bonding. Expecting little happiness in the here and none in the hereafter these disillusioned anti-heroes devote themselves to developing their defences against present or future disappointment, protecting themselves against passion or commitment and ‘the stupidity of human wishes.’ They disengage from prevailing social and cultural pieties through withdrawal rather than conflict or debate. Their resistance is passive: they simply ‘prefer not to.’ One even chooses a Bartleby as role-model.

McGahern engages the reader's sympathy for his morose heroes by mediating his fictions through a central consciousness or first person narrator. This is a peculiarly appropriate technique for representing the alienated consciousness, defining the hero's own sense of his isolation from his world. McGahern's heroes are often anonymous and are rarely portrayed externally but they are always self-aware and self-analytic. The narrative, presented from their point of view, dwells on the discrepancy between their public personae and their private attitudes or on the philosophical divide between their anguished nihilism and the nonchalant Catholicism conventional in the society. A reflectively disaffected central consciousness is the vehicle for much of the jaundiced humour of these stories. McGahern's heroes are sometimes sardonically amused at their own despondent singularity, sometimes derisively contemptuous of cheerful, successful, but deluded acquaintances. Through the intimacy of the point of view technique the reader is encouraged to compassionate with these malcontents’ strategies for ‘getting through’ life. In many instances we are led to respect their dedicated pursuit of alienated authenticity; their unwaveringly honest confrontation with the misery of their existence; they appear nobly ignoble.

McGahern's short fictions modulate from realism into lyricism. The realist mode enables him to focus on the humdrum drabness and routine banality of his characters’ lives and contexts. It is also secular and finite, firmly excluding transcendental comfort. Realism laced with lyricism is the mode best adapted to the portrayal of disenchantment. McGahern's narrators are at their most lyrical in evoking lost Edens and, more particularly, lost Eves. Failure in love is a recurrent theme; childhood disillusionment is treated only in Nightlines These are timebound stories and their central preoccupation is with representations of human life in time: clockwatching, pastimes, repetition and predictability, recollection or oblivion, the fugitiveness of the present, apprehension as to the future, beginnings and, especially, endings, the mind's capacity to disregard time and place, and chronological time's measured indifference to the human story.

Where postmodernist fiction amazes the reader with its labyrinthine structures of forking paths and teases him out of escapist identification with a dizzying array of narrative choices McGahern employs realism to portray his characters’ indifference to alternatives or to close off their options. Any change of course is pointless or illusory since life is a story in which all plots are unhappy and all narratives conduct towards ultimate closure. In Nightlines the narrator of ‘Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass’ attempts to ‘annul all the votes’ in himself through the choice of a brutalizing life on a London building site. A blackly comic story within a story in ‘Wheels,’ which tells of a Sergeant who in attempting to hang himself almost drowned by mistake and roared for help, is regarded by the narrator as an analogue to his own life, a story about having neither the will to live nor the courage to die unpredictably. This narrator's sense of the absurdity of his life's ‘journey to nowhere’ is syntactically conflated with his indifference towards the continuation or cessation of his autobiographical narrative: ‘the repetition of a life in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as stop.’ The theme of indecisive passivity, inertia in the face of alternatives, is resumed in the concluding story of Nightlines. A teacher's tale of his exit from the Christian Brothers, which closely approximates to ‘the shape of his own life, is, like the sergeant's failed suicide, an instance of McGahern's technique of deploying anecdote as image. Lacking ‘the resolution to stay or the courage to leave’ he lay in bed until his religious superiors finally made his decision for him. He is afflicted with what he diagnoses as ‘a total paralysis of the will, and a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worth doing as any other.’ In the narrative present he manages to survive by escaping from his role into alcoholic anaesthesia every evening. His pupils who appear to choose a clerical career as Christian Brothers are really pressganged into God's service as the story's title, ‘The Recruiting Officer’ implies, their reward, an education they couldn't otherwise afford. To the one who got away these would-be ‘fishers of men’ are really fish who have risen to the bait.

Like Nightlines, Getting Through also concludes with a story which questions voluntary change, ‘Sierra Leone.’ Here the narrator, gazing at the corpse of his apparently unhappily married stepmother, ironically prevaricates on the subject of her now closed alternatives:

Would she have been happier with another? Who knows the person another will find their happiness or unhappiness with? Enough to say that weighed in this scale it makes little difference or all difference.

His ex-girlfriend's departure to Sierra Leone to seek a happy future with her older married lover prompts this underwhelmed reflection on wish-fulfilment:

All things begin in dreams and it must be wonderful to have your mind full of a whole country like Sierra Leone before you go there and risk discovering that it might be your life.

Such a guarded and qualified hypothesis might appear a rhetorical technique for rendering the psychic timidity that inhibits adventure. However, the narrator's dubiety as to the heroine's future happiness in ‘Sierra Leone’ is endorsed through the narrative device of having it conclude a collection which began with a story about a woman who travelled hopefully to fulfil her dream and ended up disillusioned and destroyed.

In this opening story, reflexively entitled ‘The Beginning of an Idea,’ a successful theatre producer abandons her familiar world to pursue a career as a novelist in Spain. Having failed as a writer and been doubly raped she returns feeling like a corpse, icy and coffined. Within the imagery of the story she is also an oyster who has slid out of her protective shell and been devoured. Inspired by Chekhov's story, ‘Oysters,’ and by two sentences she herself had composed on the dead Chekhov's last journey to Moscow in an oyster wagon, she had embarked on a fictional recreation of his life. Through the somewhat irritating device of reiterating her two sentences McGahern traces her course from obsession to writer's block. The fictional ending that had seemed to her a beginning was really only an ending, after all. Her imaginative obsession with Chekhov's final journey culminates ironically in her inarticulate reenactment of it in her own person. Is a heroine who has committed the existentialist crime of attempting to spend her life imagining another's life being punished by final absorption into her own text? Or is McGahern demonstrating that there is no better alternative, that changing one's career or circumstances is pointless? Why bother to live somewhere else ‘when you can be just as badly off at home’?

McGahern's heroes in Getting Through are more cynical about their options than his heroines. A teacher recognizes that winning the girl or the silver cup are among the ‘sorts of impossible things’ and the spurned narrator of ‘Doorways,’ footloose and fancy free on a Sligo morning, knows that his apparent choices are merely ‘all sorts of wonderful impossibilities.’ In ‘Swallows’ where ‘getting through’ is lugubriously translated as ‘killing time,’ a Sergeant and his housekeeper both while away their time unprofitably, he fishing and giving away his catch, she knitting socks mechanically for a few pence. The alternative proposed by the narrative of a visitor is cruelly inapposite, a story about how Paganini overcame his humble circumstances and lived life creatively to the last. For the sergeant, who could once manage a few Irish dance tunes on the fiddle, Paganini's career falls into the category of ‘wonderful impossibilities’ and the visitor's story only serves to arouse his latent discontent with the limitations of small town life. His housekeeper is better off, deaf to alternatives and contentedly absorbed in her limited progress from the heel to the toe of a sock. As one character remarks on the subject of greyhounds:

They say there's only two kinds to have—a proper dud or a champion—the in-between are the very worst.

The tragedy of McGahern's heroes is that they are neither duds, nor champions, but in-between people, intelligent and sensitive enough to savour the full bitterness of their disappointed lives.

McGahern exploits the narrative strategy of the flashforward to convey not choice, but predictability. The Sergeant of ‘Swallows’ can script the evening's conversation in advance. The courting narrator of the comic romance, ‘My Love, My Umbrella,’ foresuffers wet Sunday outings as a married man down to the excruciating detail of the condensation on the windshield as he stares out to sea from his car and quells ‘the quarrels and cries of the bored children in the back seat.’ In ‘Parachutes’ the narrator foresees a young couple's inevitable future on a suburban housing estate:

the child in the feeding chair could be seen already, the next child, and the next, the postman, the milkman, the van with fresh eggs and vegetables from the country, the tired clasp over the back of the hand to show tenderness as real as the lump in the throat, the lawnmowers in summer, the thickening waists. It hardly seemed necessary to live it.

Irish garrulity in McGahern's short fictions is a pragmatic evasion of existential reflection. Marooned together in ‘Strandhill, The Sea’ his holiday-makers swap ‘informations’ all day, every day, ironically escaping from any confrontation with reality through ‘the despotism of fact’:

Conversations always the same: height of the Enfield rifle, summer of the long dresses, miles to the gallon—from morning to the last glows of the cigarettes on the benches at night, always informations, informations about everythings, having come out of darkness now blinking with informations at all the things about them, before the soon when they'll have to leave.

Comic realist summary modulates into discursive moral censure almost imperceptibly here as daytime becomes synchronous with lifetime and departure with death. A recent story, ‘Oldfashioned,’ deploys a similar comic technique of mimetic summary to illustrate the Irish country person's insatiable appetite for ‘news,’ any news, however trivial, from local gossip to minor wonders farther afield.

McGahern's undeceived heroes tend to be more taciturn or reticent than their voluble neighbours. They have perfected a rhetoric of covert disengagement. Cliched politeness, the ‘guaranteed responses’ that impede any genuine conversational exchange, these are their most common forms of self-insulation against empathy or involvement. The narrator of ‘Wheels’ prefers music to ‘talk’ in the office but when compelled to converse colludes in ‘the lies that give us room’ and parries his father's emotional appeals with a hollow semblance of common sense and consolation. He is practised in the art of self-effacing and non-provocative obsequiousness:

As I grow older I use hardly anything other than these formal nothings, a conciliatory waiter bowing backwards out of the room.

The hero of ‘Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass’ who is endeavouring to reduce himself from a state of pour-soi to en-soi, learns the minimal language of his fellow—workers on a London building-site. Like the prostitutes who inhabit the condemned houses on the site they trade their times and their bodies for money and the password to acceptance in their society is ‘fukken’:

the repetitious use of fukken with every simple phrase came harsh at first and now a habit, its omission here would cause as much unease as its use where ‘Very kind. Thank you, Mr. Jones’ was demanded.

‘Yes,’ that most positive of responses, with which Joyce had concluded Ulysses, becomes a bored mimicry of assent for McGahern's schoolteacher during the routine annual seaside holiday with his mother:

and I walk by her side on the sand saying, ‘Yes and yes and yes’ …

McGahern's realist art strains towards the condition of vision, seeking out a single image that will define the narrative's central preoccupation and reinforce or transcend the principal character's cheerless brooding. Its central image is often foregrounded in the story's title. The title-image of ‘Wheels,’ the first story in Nightlines, rotates throughout this opening narrative and on into the concluding story, suggesting life's predictable circularities, the pointlessness of its onward motion. The narrator of ‘Wheels,’ whose story begins and ends with a train journey, is obsessed with life's aimlessness, the body's ‘journey to nowhere,’ the cycle of the generations from nurturing to dependency, the equal tedium of progress or regress along life's groove. He is the first of McGahern's cheated characters, embittered by memories of his own youthful optimism, when the wheel seemed to be revolving towards a welcome future. The closure of his narrative is appropriately anticlimactic:

all the vivid sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn, impatient for the rich whole that never came but that all the preparations promised.

McGahern's ‘wheel’ represents what Hardy allegorized as ‘Time's mindless rote.’ In Nightlines life's meaningless monotony is sometimes suggested through rhyme, rhythm and repetition. Irish school children in their ‘infant prison house’ learn by rote, reciting the nonsense rhyme: Eena, meena, mina moo, capall, asal agus bo. The ‘rise and fall’ of their voices are echoed in the repetitive routines and work shanties of the adult Irish on the London building site of ‘Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass’: the rhythmic drive and throw of the shovels, the filling and rise of the hopper and Murphy's chant, ‘shovel or shite; shite or burst.’ The narration of these actions and phrases is itself repeated within the narrative, a simultaneous mimesis and metaphorizing of monotonous recurrence. Mimesis is almost indistinguishable from metaphor in ‘My Love, My Umbrella,’ a comic romance in which love-making is humorously inseparable from the phallic erection of a black umbrella. In ‘Peaches’ a dead shark is deployed as an objective correlative of the effect of writer's block, an intolerable stench of ‘decomposition’ which pollutes his environs. Narrative imagery is deployed excitingly throughout ‘Peaches’ but the story is uncomfortably Hemingwayesque.

In Getting Through, where McGahern is obsessed with death, from the image of Chekhov's coffin in the opening lines to the narrator's stepmother's death in the final story, there is often more disjunction between mimesis and metaphor than in Nightlines. The image of death as a stoat relentlessly stalking his prey is well realized but its integration into the story, ‘A Stoat,’ is too obviously contrived. A bald teacher's continual wearing of a hat to signify timor mortis in ‘All Sorts of Impossible Things’ is naively allegorical. Perhaps the bleakest and most realistically unaccommodating of all McGahern's narrative images in Getting Through occurs in ‘Doorways,’ where the slight realist tale of a failed love-affair proves too insubstantial a context for the powerful title-symbol. The occupants of the doorways, two almost interchangeable figures with two similar-sounding names, Barnaby and Bartleby, pass their days silently in close proximity but apart, each in his separate frame. Doorways, which function as images of entrance, exit and the threshold between, are visual analogues of the volume's title, Getting Through. At one point they are compared to ‘coffins stood on end,’ a terminally punning reminder that life is lived in a context of death. The two isolated Beckettian figures, who scavenge for their food, occupy a minimal amount of space and shelter and live by an unvarying routine, represent human life at its most basic, ‘getting through’ as survival. Barnaby and Bartleby are solipsists who ignore each other and are indifferent to the attentions of passersby. They never communicate in words. Yet to the disappointed narrator of this story they are exemplary human images: in their strict observance of a disciplined aimlessness, their rigid adherence to absurd routines, their isolation and complete disengagement from their context, their passivity, they embody strategies for survival.

A sardonic perspective on human finiteness, on evasion of or confrontation with existential despair, is frequently expressed in narrative terms through ironies of closure. Time is often alluded to in McGahern's finales. ‘The Recruiting Officer’ concludes with its teacher looking forward to an evening's alcoholic anaesthesia before ‘the morning's dislocation.’ ‘A Slip-Up’ finishes with the would-be farmer's public(house) procrastination, a postponement of routine:

trying to put off the time, when he'd have to go up to the counter for their next round.

‘Where do we go from here?,’ asks the newly widowed father as ‘Sierra Leone’ draws to its close. ‘Not anyhow to Sierra Leone,’ is his son's mental response, though aloud he contrives a soothing form of noncommittal procrastination:

I suppose we might as well try and stay put for a time … that is, until things settle a bit, and we can find our feet, and think.

When the dying priest in ‘The Wine Breath’ conjures up an alternative narrative to his own concluding autobiography he imagines a young man who feels himself ‘immersed in time without end,’ thereby permitting McGahern the terminal irony of ending his story with the phrase ‘without end.’ ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ closes with the opening bars of a tune and the start of a discourse, enabling the author to end on the word ‘began.’ The topic that launches the final disgruntled discourse is young people's early sexual initiation:

Earlier and earlier they seem to start at it these days …

‘Gold Watch’ from High Ground, a narrative meditation on human life in time, is in many respects the quintessential McGahern story. It is the most ambitious and among the most achieved of his short fictions, a story whose mimetic and metaphoric concerns are intricately interrelated. Here he returns to one of his most obsessive themes, the failed father/son relationship, first announced in ‘Wheels,’ the opening story of Nightlines. The concomitant theme of disinheritance is also reintroduced through the titular gold watch, a family heirloom which for the narrator son symbolizes a compensatory alternative to the family farm he has rejected. This wary, defensive narrator is one of McGahern's few successful heroes: he has a rewarding career, marries the golden girl, acquires the coveted gold watch and seems assured of a gilded future. Refusing public acknowledgement of the familial and patriarchal symbolism of the gold watch and always self-righteous in his dealings with his father, he buys a literal replacement for the family heirloom, a modern watch, expensive, ugly and, of course, ‘duty-free.’ This the father sets about destroying to signify the severance of their relationship, when all else fails steeping it in a barrel of crop spray. Since the son's rejection of the family farm is the origin of their poisonous quarrel the corrosion of the substitute watch with form chemicals is symbolically appropriate. The conclusion of the narrative universalizes the watch image, making it symbolize chronological time. All the temporal tropes on which the story draws—seasonal cycles, the progression from childhood to parenthood, the procession of the generations—and its final religious or Romantic expectation of revelation, ‘some word or truth,’ are undermined by the realist recognition that chronological time is merely successive. An anti-epiphanic epiphany! ‘Gold Watch’ is the work of a meticulous, old-fashioned craftsman, every cog precisely positioned in relation to its balance wheel and mainspring. McGahern is here consciously telling the time. The narrative ends by separating the gold watch as artifact from the concept of chronological time. It concludes with the phrase ‘time that did not have to run to any conclusion.’ Time is mindless, purposeless and interminable; narrators and narratives both seek a meaningful progression and terminate.

For my part I shall conclude by discussing my favourite story from High Ground, ‘Parachutes.’ Like so many of McGahern's stories this is an anti-romance, but one that does not strain to achieve universality. McGahern's narrative strategy in ‘Parachutes’ is to begin with an unhappy ending and to end with a happy beginning. Such reversal of chronology in a love story enables him to achieve an anticlimactic structure. This is the story of a fall from ‘a pure dream of Paradise’ to unendurable ‘hell’ in the real world, hell being a city much like Dublin. The objective correlatives of empirical reality are for the first person narrator a dishevelled lilac bush, blue railings, three milk bottles with silver caps, granite steps, the phenomena that surround him in the clear, disillusioned perspective of the morning after his fall. The dramatis personae of this real world are the Mulveys, a shiftless, bickering, Bohemian couple and their friend, Eamonn Kelly, impoverished acquaintances whom he plies with drink, purchasing their company to stave off the tortures of solitude. The Mulveys are impatiently awaiting a payment cheque from an editor, Halloran, and the externalized narrative of their expectancy and suspense ironically counterpoints the internalized narrative which encompasses it, a story of aftermath punctuated with, and ultimately overwhelmed by, retrospection. Irritated by Halloran's delay in paying them the Mulveys break open the suitcase he had left with them as surety and disclose his secret sexual perversity but they fail to probe the narrator's secret sexual suffering. A ‘move in the right direction’ in the realist dimension of the story, a cash advance from Halloran, serves as the prelude to a contrary narrative movement from realism into dream, imagery and rhythmic lyricism.

Narrative focus shifts from the pub interior outdoors, to reveal a vision of fragile beauty hovering briefly by the portals of the disenchanted, ordinary world:

The state was so close to dreaming that I stared in disbelief when I saw the first thistledown, its thin, pale parachute drifting so slowly across the open doorway that it seemed to move more in water than in air. A second came soon after the first had crossed out of sight, moving in the same unhurried way. A third. A fourth. There were three of the delicate parachutes moving together at the same dreamlike pace across the doorway.

The Mulveys speculate on the squalid origins of this transitory, gossamer beauty, an ironic counterpointing of sordid realism and metaphoric imagining which serves the narrative function of providing a solid, empirical basis for, while also deferring, the story's final flight into symbolic lyricism. Ultimately, the wafting thistledowns are associated through imaginative choreography with the dance that started the narrator on his love-affair, the take-off from realism into dream:

‘Do you like waltzes?’ were the first words she spoke as we began to dance.

She did not speak again. As we kept turning to the music, we moved through the circle where the glass dome was still letting in daylight, and kept on after we'd passed the last of the pillars hung with the wire baskets of flowers, out beyond the draped curtains, until we seemed to be turning in nothing but air beneath the sky, a sky that was neither agate nor blue, just the anonymous sky of any and every day above our lives as we set out.

In this, the concluding paragraph of his story, the narrator twirls his partner rhythmically, phrase by phrase, into an aerial dance, floating them into their future together. A story which opens with the parting of the ways, with the woman's entreaty to stay behind and not leave with her, concludes with the start of their shared journey, an apparently open ending structurally blocked by the narrative technique of beginning with closure.

The title-image, overtly assigned a metaphoric role only in the final section, is a pervasive symbolic presence throughout the story. It is the imagistic correlative of its anticlimactic structure, a visual analogue to the narrative of a fall from heaven. Notions of risky adventure, of brief, unsustainable flight, of the inevitability of a return to earth, are implicit in McGahern's choice of the parachute metaphor. The title-image also serves as a visual comment on the narrative's intersecting plots since the reader is made aware that the narrator was exploited by the woman as a saving support in her depressed descent from the dizzy heights of her previous love-affair just as he, in turn, clings to the frail support of the Mulvey's company in his own emotional downward dive. Other allusions within the text subtly recall the title-image. The narrator wishes for a radar screen on which to plot the movements of his departed lover; Claire Mulvey says that her frequent rows with her husband help to ‘clear the air.’

McGahern's brief meditation, ‘The Image,’ (The Honest Ulsterman, December 1968) reveals the poetics underlying his aesthetic achievement in ‘Parachutes.’ For him, ‘the image’ is inseparable from ‘the rhythm and the vision’:

The vision, that still and private universe which each of us possess but which others cannot see, is brought to life in rhythm, and by rhythm I think of the dynamic quality of the vision, its instinctive, its individual movements …

Characteristically, he associates art and ‘the image’ with transitoriness and failure, and, in particular, with the failure of love, again anticipating ‘Parachutes.’ The image is a ‘grave … of dead passions and their days’ and ‘the need of permanence’ creates ‘the need for shape or form.’ ‘Parachutes,’ a fiction in which suspense is subordinate to suspension and realism is subverted by the precarious magic of a doomed lyricism, seems to me the finest justification of McGahern's disenchanted art.

High ground, for this anti-romantic writer, is less a place to aspire towards than to descend or fall from. Despite its title, however, there are some signs in this last volume that he is contemplating the move to a different fictional terrain, a middle ground between the nadir of despair and the unattainable or unsustainable altitudes of ecstasy. In the concluding story, ‘Bank Holiday,’ he is in a rare holiday mood. Even Dublin's climate has improved: ‘the rain, the constant weather of this city,’ gives way to ‘unusual weather, hot for weeks.’ The hero, who in late middle age is given a third time lucky chance of finding happiness, recognizes the importance of celebrating life's ordinary, everyday drama rather than judging by criteria of aspiration and failed achievement. Patrick Kavanagh, for all his personal rebarbativeness, is this hero's exemplary poet. ‘To realize sympathetically the natural process of living’ would now seem to be the older, mellower McGahern's fictional aim. High Ground appears to conclude with the traditional romantic promise of happiness ever after, but disenchantment dies hard. McGahern cannot succumb entirely to fairy tale convention, so love and good fortune are still somewhat qualified by inertia and hypothesis:

They were so tired and happy that it was as if they were already in possession of endless quantities of time and money.