[In the following essay, O'Connell explores the relationship between McGahern's protagonists and the lands they call “home.”]

Throughout most of his impressive oeuvre—four novels and two story collections—John McGahern imagines Ireland as dark, dank and dour. Ireland is a prison to which his characters are sentenced, from which they are unable or unwilling to escape. Their lives, turning in a narrow gyre, embody McGahern's vision of the constricted state of the nation.

However, in his writings of the late 1970s McGahern leads some of his characters through a door into the light, into a problematic freedom, out to an open field in which they first run free, but from which they eventually seek release, so some return to familiar confines. In The Pornographer McGahern turns his hero homeward, back to the same rural Ireland his early characters could not wait to leave. Having enacted the myth of Daedalus, flight past the nets, McGahern's late hero enacts the counter-myth of Antaeus. “My elevation, my fall,” says Antaeus in a Heaney poem. So too might say McGahern's bright, young men who come home again. Ireland, no longer a prison, is transformed into a haven.

Most of McGahern's early characters are drawn inward, earthward, though some pull away from home. Those who flee from inland Ireland usually do not get farther than Dublin, where McGahern was born in 1934. Often the escapees in his stories and novels are taken West, as was the young McGahern, son of a police officer stationed at Cootehall, County Roscommon, an isolated area of bogs, meadows, low hills and scattered lakes. Speaking from an Anglo-Irish perspective in Woodbrook, David Thomson registers the area's cultural limitations in the 1930s, the time of McGahern's childhood: “Cootehall is a typically Irish village; it straggles and has no architectural design; and it is dominated by a police barracks and a large grey, ugly Catholic chapel.” For Thomson, “this sad village” became “one of the most romantic places in the world.” For McGahern, a young Irishman yearning for release from provincial village life, Cootehall was one of the least romantic places in the world. This was the perpetual place in which his childhood was rooted. Home was a police barracks set near a bridge over the dark Boyle Water, at the edge of a West-Irish village.

However, the mythic center of McGahern's fictional world is Carrick-on-Shannon, a few miles away, in County Leitrim, where he was educated at Presentation College before he went on to St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra, and University College, Dublin, thus completing a territorial circle which would also enclose most of his characters. His parishioners swim toward city lights, but a psychic and cultural undertow draws them back to what F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a similar context, called “that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Carrick is, though, more river than field, for there the Shannon becomes navigable in its downriver flow toward the Atlantic, or ceases to be navigable on an upriver journey. A point of difficult passage.

An economically and geographically depressed area of small dairy farms while McGahern lived there, Carrick has recently been promoted as a must-stop for those who cruise the Shannon. In Rambles in Ireland Monie Begley urges vacationing Shannon boaters to stop off at Carrick for the Festival of the Shannon (traditional music, “canoe races and other festivities”), advice heeded in The Pornographer by two sets of lovers. McGahern's characters cross between sometimes hang between these worlds. Many cannot choose between, the fetters of a fast-fading, rural, isolated Ireland and the debilitating freedom of an expanding, urban, European Ireland. Reflecting Ireland's conflict of convictions, McGahern seems uncertain at times which way to have them turn, so many turn in circles. The structural design of McGahern's fiction is, as well, circular.

“All a wheel,” thinks a former teacher and ex-Christian Brother in “The Recruiting Officer.” In “Wheels” the narrator returns from Dublin to a West-Ireland farm to try to break “this ritual wheel” of responsibility which rolls between and over the generations. Throughout McGahern's writings, characters are raised by a hard father or driven by an aspiring mother, then they are drawn toward the humming lights of the cities, where they are cursed with the ironic gift of consciousness and brought to the ends of their tethers; finally they return, sadder if not wiser, scarred, back where their journey began, where their long voyages often end. Such is the plot of The Barracks, his first novel, a work which embodies the ur-McGahern myth and aesthetic pattern of circularity: a pointless cycle ending in death. Only in The Pornographer does a citizen of McGahern's fictional world return home willingly; only in this novel does he try to restore the world to which he returns, as does the hero in Joseph Campbell's “monomyth.”

McGahern's Ireland, its regions and its citizens, is divided by a deep-running pattern of faults. Yet his divided Ireland, surprisingly, is not political. For all we know from reading McGahern, the “troubles,” which have ripped Ireland apart for fifteen years, never happened. Only rarely does he note in passing that there are two Irelands, North and South. In The Pornographer the rail lines which once linked these political units are, fittingly enough, torn up. Connections, regional and personal, are problematic. The central character, the pornographer, meets a woman, a writer for a magazine called Waterways, who tells him that there is talk of reopening the canals between the Shannon and Erne rivers, thus joining North and South again in friendship. “A watery embrace,” he says, a jibe which adapts a political-regional image to his own sexual obsessions. In The Pornographer transit lines between the two Irelands are torn up and water links are imaginable only as sexual tropes.

McGahern is more concerned with the latent politics of Irish life: provinciality, family enclosure and Church repression of sexual expression, an Ireland not far from the starved land in Kavanagh's The Great Hunger. To stay within the circle of acceptability is, spiritually and sexually, to starve, but to range outside the province of the predictable in Ireland, particularly for sexual purposes, is to bring about retribution. “Either you toe the line or you get out,” says the hero of The Leavetaking. Repression is the means by which community is sustained. This point is clearly made in a scene from The Pornographer in which we trace the sexual adventures of the hero's chief pornographic characters, Col. Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael. They too travel inland, for a boat trip up the Shannon, where they assault and rape an Irish yokel while he is in a drunken stupor. Mavis assures the Col. the lad will remember nothing when he wakes. “He'll think he was dreaming. Doesn't the whole country look as if it's wet dreaming its life away. He'll want to be no exception. He's a prime example of your true, conforming citizen.” Like Joyce's Citizen in Barney Kiernan's pub, who meets Bloom's plea for love with scorn, McGahern's citizen is held up for satire, an example of the thwarted Irish character.

Throughout McGahern's works other sex-driven, yet repressed citizens appear, though they are treated more sympathetically. The sexual fantasies included in The Pornographer might well be the dreams of his sad Irish men and women, particularly those landlocked in the moist valleys of Roscommon-Leitrim. Pornography is the black mass celebrating Irish repression. McGahern's sexual politics mock Irish containment: physical psychic, regional.

His characters are cornered, burnt-out cases. The most moving of these lost souls is Elizabeth Reegan, heroine of McGahern's first novel, The Barracks. Though she has known some freedom and love in London, where she served as a nurse during WWII, she chooses a life of confinement and indifference when she returns to her Irish village, where she marries a widower, cares for his children and lives out the rest of her days in seething conformity.

Married to a police officer who cannot talk to her except to complain about his barracks supervisor, and caring for children who ignore her, Elizabeth is trapped inside a quotidian, “shackled, a thieving animal held at last in this one field.” Like other McGahern characters, she sees no purpose in her life. “She was existing far within the recesses of the dead walls and gaping out in mute horror.” Her sense of transiency is made more poignant by her realization that she has cancer, a terminal condition which makes her life seem a meaningless cycle:

A girl child growing up on a small farm, the blood of puberty, the shock of her first sexual act, the long years in London, her marriage back into this enclosed place happening as would her death in moments where cigarettes were smoked.

In London she had had an affair with an alcoholic doctor, named Halliday, who initiated her into sex and, after his fatal car accident, introduced her to death. “What the hell is all this living and dying about anyway?” Halliday would yell, posing a frequent question for McGahern characters. Surely this torment must have a purpose, they insist.

For Elizabeth, Halliday provided the gift/curse of consciousness: “it was as if he's put windows there, so that she could see out her own world.” However, as her life closes in, Elizabeth sees bars on those windows and wonders at the worth of a consciousness which sets her apart from others, an awareness which grants her painful attentiveness to her own deteriorating condition and presents her with no rhyme or reason for living.

Finally, as she lay dying, Elizabeth ceases to ask for an Answer; she accepts her own passing, irresolute condition. “Nothing could be decided here. She was just passing through.” It is not so much that she has arrived at meaning, but that she can finally praise life's mystery. “All the apparent futility of her life in the barracks came at last to rest on this sense of mystery.” She chants the rosary at her death, as much for its music as for its matter.

If McGahern's mothers transmit mystery, his fathers pass along their own miseries, often with the back of their hands. The Dark opens with Mahoney whipping his son for swearing. Yet Mahoney is even more eager to inflict psychic than physical shock, for he brings his strap down on the chair arm, not on the boy. The effect is even worse, for the boy “couldn't get any grip on what had happened to him, he'd never known such a pit of horror as he'd touched, nothing seemed to matter any more.” Since Mahoney is a widower, no woman mitigates his brutality, so he is an extreme version of The Barracks's stern father, Reegan. As Reegan had made his children dig turf, Mahoney makes his children pick potatoes in the lashing rain. McGahern's fathers curse their children with corporal punishment and hard labor. They initiate their children into the stern ways of the world. Mothers hold out a sense of escape into life's mysteries, but fathers know better.

As difficult as paternal discipline is for children, paternal love is worse. Occasionally Mahoney tries to express affection for his children, but he can never wholly give, nor can they ever quite receive. When Mahoney takes his children fishing, the day ends in complaint, his and theirs. However, the real perversion of love is also more psychic than physical. Sometimes at night the lonely Mahoney climbs into bed with his son, hugs him, smothers him in “the dirty rags of intimacy.” In a bed of childhood horrors, fleas feed on father and son, mixing their blood in a bond which sickens the boy. He asks: “Why had things to happen as they did, why could there not be some happiness, it'd all be as easy.” He includes no question mark, so he expects no answer.

The boy in The Dark seeks relief through masturbation and other modes of self-referential dreams. His stark options: either find release from his perverse family thrall or face death, like Elizabeth Reegan. The literary lad determines “It's the same stake as Macbeth's except for the banality of the whole situation. It's fight a way out or go down.” However, he finds in Ireland only great hatred, little room. Though he escapes from home, he finds no satisfying alternative place for himself. His vocation for the priesthood and his aspiration to become an educated man are both destroyed by disappointing role-models. Finally the boy's hopes overcast, like an Irish sky.

He is not only disappointed, he is assaulted. When he visits Father Gerald, Mahoney's brother, he is met by death imagery—a burial ground looms outside Father Gerald's residence—and sexual harassment. Father Gerald gets into bed with him to hug and joke about sex. To underline his point, McGahern doubles examples of sexual assault. The boy discovers that his sister, Joan—for whom Father Gerald had found work in a draper's shop—had been fondled by the draper. Thus the whole male, adult population of The Dark is composed of child-molesters. The boy, who misses Father Gerald's faint traces of pathos, rages at all adults: “how your hands hungered for their throats.” We see the world from his perspective (“your hands” and “their throats”), a world of adult oppression of the young.

Yet the boy battles on. He will not live his father's life on the farm or his uncle's life as a priest; his is Jude Fawley's dream: self-transformation through higher education. There he would learn and love. Yet this dream also quickly diminishes, for he is too shy to approach women and he quickly decides that university life is a sham. A lecturer throws the boy out of class because he smiled, a gesture the lecturer calls “hooliganism.”

McGahern's patterns of adult monstrosity make The Dark a stark parable. All elders are killers of the dreams of youth. Ireland's good country people—its priests, its teachers, its fathers—are caricatured. It is small wonder, then, that the Irish Censorship Board banned the novel in 1965, for it seems designed to shock Irish sensibilities through its sexual explicitness and its sustained scorn for Irish culture.

The Dark is a cautionary tale, dramatizing the modern defeat of young Irelanders. In the end the boy does not quite know what he wants out of life. Like Paul Morel or Stephen Dedalus, he dreams of release through art, yet decides to settle for an unadventurous clerkship in Dublin. Neither exile nor native, artist or artisan, the boy is paralyzed in the civil service, an Irish purgatory.

In McGahern's third novel, The Leavetaking, a young man is again defeated by narrow-minded Ireland, though he faces defeat with more resiliency than the sad hero of The Dark. The Leavetaking portrays a fictionalized version of pivotal events in McGahern's own life, his own difficult passage. McGahern, like Patrick, the novel's central character, was punished for a gesture of independence. After he married a non-Catholic, Patrick, like McGahern, was dismissed from his teaching post at a Catholic boys’ school. Patrick married an American, while McGahern married a Finn. However, Patrick had not written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board, so his reason for dismissal was at least clear. It is less certain whether McGahern was let go for his marital or literary affront. In any case, in The Leavetaking Patrick follows his author into exile, that wider world elsewhere for so many Irish writers. Like Macbeth, the young man in The Dark was unable to fight his way out of his castle keep, Ireland. In The Leavetaking he leaps the moat.

It has been argued that McGahern is too much a child of his generation, locked into the problems which faced young men in the 1950s, his decade of coming-of-age. Anthony Cronin, Irish man of letters, has suggested that McGahern, like Edna O'Brien, persists in misrepresenting Ireland—which Cronin sees as urban, open and secular—by portraying characters who are dominated by rural values, taboos and religious repressions. Yet the circumstances of McGahern's life suggest that his Ireland is not fanciful, though the terms in which he portrays Ireland may at times be extreme. After all, McGahern's book was banned in Ireland and he was dismissed from his teaching post. While the rest of the English speaking peoples were discovering sex—“Between the end of the Chatterly ban / And the Beatles’ first LP,” as Philip Larkin put it—Ireland was still preserving its innocence with repression. In No Country for Young Men, Julia O'Faolian explains that

the tide of permissiveness which lapped the shores of Ireland, like an oil slick riding the warm Gulf Stream, was safely navigable only as long as you kept off its coastal rocks. Laws here had not changed, nor people's attitudes underneath.

The hero of The Leavetaking certainly seems stuck. He left, but has returned. On his final day as schoolmaster he paces the playground, watching gulls’ shadows float on the concrete, his own thought floating in similar hazy circles. Roger Garfitt has described this circularity as McGahern's Buddhist cast, his characters turning on a Wheel of Karma. Certainly Patrick erects a metaphysic out of his immediate circumstances. For him all life turns and returns. He journeyed from rural Ireland to Dublin, where he won his teaching job; to London, where he won his wife; then back to Dublin, where he lost his job.

If I believed in anything, and it was without conviction, it was that once upon a time we had crawled out of the sea and were making a circular journey back towards the original darkness.

Had the novel ended at that point we would be granted the same No Exit vision we find in The Dark, where the boy sinks into a routine job, stuck for life. However, The Leavetaking and Patrick (finally a hero worthy of a name) go on to another stage of development.

In a near magical gift of grace—suggesting McGahern's determination to plot in a possibility of relief for his hero—love, in the person of Isobel, an American, walks into the London bar where he works. They match. He has a mother problem: when she died, Patrick's life became meaningless, a mere cycle of regret-nostalgia. She has a father problem: he is managerial, overbearing, another child molester. Patrick and Isobel set out to rescue each other, to build their own separate world. Finally private happiness is possible in a McGahern parable.

Still, the problem of the public life remained to be solved. Patrick returns to Ireland with Isobel—they live on Howth, where Molly said yes to Bloom—and resumes his teaching duties. Here Patrick faces a revealing choice. He knows he cannot hope to retain his position if it becomes public that he married a Protestant, so either he has to lie—say he was married in a Catholic Church in England—or pretend he is not married. He chooses the latter, but Dublin remains a small town, gossip travels fast and soon it is widely known that he is living with a woman on Howth. Then he is dismissed, leaving him where we find him on the opening page of the novel, walking the gull-shadowed concrete of the schoolyard, reverberating in reverie. He did not toe the line, so he is dismissed. The proposition seems confirmed.

Yet Patrick helped to contrive his own dismissal, for he set up a situation which challenged the Irish-Catholic establishment to act and then blamed the power structure when it did exactly what he knew they would. His stage-managed dismissal is his final act of exorcising Ireland. He sets up a situation in which he is forced to choose between his country and his love and, of course, chooses his love at the willing price of exile. Father Curry, an alcoholic who continues to drink despite his ulcer—another Irishman suffering from self-inflicted wounds—meets with Patrick to announce his dismissal and asks why he flew in the face of God. However, Patrick is well-insulated against such taunts; he sees Father Curry as fat, old and bigoted, a horrific version of the priest his mother wished him to be. In engineering his own banishment, Patrick makes his separate peace with all the men he might have become had he stayed. He will not be a policeman, like his father; a teacher, like his mother; or a priest, a role both he and his mother had desired for him. What he will become is uncertain. Like the boy in The Dark, he seems to have inchoate aesthetic longings, but as yet has no form in which to translate his impulses. All that seems to matter is that he, unlike earlier McGahern lads, has found his love, a love which constitutes both a profession and a world. The novel ends with a rhetorical flourish which echoes Arnold's “Dover Beach,” another land's-end haven where love alone is certain good:

Ah love, let us be true to one another! When we

tire we hear the rain on the slates and in the

distance the muffled breathing of the sea.

“How perilous it is to choose / not to love the life we're shown,” asks Seamus Heaney in “The Badgers.” Often McGahern's bright young men and fading women hate the lives they are shown. Through death, self-annihilation in meaningless work, or exile, they fight their ways out. Elizabeth dies; the young man in The Dark makes it to Dublin; Patrick, in The Leavetaking, will make it again to London, with his wife. Though their lives ease, these novels and stories of McGahern's early career show characters who find Ireland a world well lost.

In the fiction of McGahern's middle forties—Getting Through and The Pornographer—his characters take new turns: some farther out, some deeper in. Though it never comes easy, some find new ways to live with Ireland. These works constitute a mid-career summing-up, a rounding out of a series of major and minor fictions which embody parables on the state of Ireland, its men and women. What had been bleak and constricting (The Dark, Nightlines) takes on a faintly optimistic cast (Getting Through). These works clarify McGahern's revised vision of Irish culture, character and place.

Unlike some of the stories in his early collection, Nightlines, which stress separation, the stories in Getting Through stress reconciliation. “A Slip-Up,” for example, describes an elderly couple who left Ireland for London—as though we were picking up the Patrick-Isobel story years later—and their memories of home. Increasingly the husband recollects their days on an Irish farm. Lost, wandering the alien streets of London, in his imagination he walks “safe in the shelter of those dead days, drawing closer to the farm between the lakes they had lost.” In “Faith, Hope and Charity” an Irish laborer is killed in a ditch cave-in in London. Perhaps, then, London has its own dangers which make Ireland seem more a haven than a trap.

However, themes in Getting Through run in several directions. Some stories still feature characters who struggle against obstructions which keep them isolated in Irish backwaters. A teacher dreams of “all sorts of impossible things” he might do outside his village, but fears change more. A policeman regrets that he has only a broken fiddle to play to a crone in an isolated village, while others play their fine violins to beautiful women in Galway. Other stories focus not on regions and freedom, but on the perverse contrivances of the imagination to supply counter-realities. McGahern implies that not just rural Ireland is smothering, but that any actuality, any life shown, is enough to set off the imagination in flight for some better place or state of being. “Doorways” is about a young man who would rather think than act, so life and love slip away while he stands imagining “all sorts of wonderful impossibilities” in life's doorways; he stands still, though “the day was fast falling into its own night.” The imagination soars like Daedalus, but crashes like Icarus. Thus Getting Through leaves McGahern's representative men and women in conflicting states of being and ambiguous relation with Ireland. However, his next novel steadies his vision of Ireland.

In The Pornographer McGahern brings his characters full circle, back to the moist valleys of Roscommon, the rivers which soak the countryside of Carrick-on-Shannon. McGahern's wheel turns and turns again, yet there is, too, a sense of progression, of moving on past obstructions to a new resolution. At the end of The Barracks a woman dies of cancer and her family is land-locked in West Ireland, a bleak fate; at the end of The Pornographer another woman dies of cancer and another family is fated to remain in West Ireland, yet optimism buoys the novel. Elizabeth Reegan had little choice, found no exit, but the unnamed narrator, the pornographer, chooses his fate, removes himself from the doorway of indecision and unrealized imaginative possibilities.

The pornographer lives in contemporary Dublin—as much plate glass and disco as it is Georgian and pubs—where he practices his artificial art. He has, it seems, left old Ireland behind. Recovering from a lost love, the pornographer insulates himself from pain by making his appointed rounds: to the hospital to visit his dying aunt; to his room where he contrives more consequenceless sexual acrobatics for Col. Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael; to pubs where he discusses sexual and literary aesthetics with his publisher, Maloney. The pornographer's doorway is revolving. Between “the womb and the grave,” all is an empty cycle, a dutiful dance.

“Dance” is not only a metaphor, but also a site, for at a dancehall on O'Connell St. the pornographer meets a 38-year-old woman, a semi-virgin who jolts him out of his numb cycle. Josephine comes to represent something deeply, darkly Irish to her 30-year-old lover. John Updike was right to note “the hero's deadly coldness, and Josephine's credible, vital humanity,” but he misses some of her threat to the pornographer; after creating the illusion of permissiveness, she comes to stand for Irish conformity.

First she is fertile Ireland. Josephine brings him on a boat trip up the Shannon, where they leave behind the world of contemporary artifice in Dublin and enter a mythic realm: “there was a feeling of a dream, souls crossing to some other world. But the grey stone of the bridge of Carrick came solidly towards us out of the mist around eight.” This metaphoric and actual passage ends in Josephine's womb. In a bay above Carrick he enters her, fertilizes her. Finally the McGahern hero unifies geography and psyche, body and mind; he possesses and is possessed by Ireland-as-woman.

But the pornographer will not be so easily netted. Pregnant, Josephine quickly sheds her easy ways: they must marry, settle down; he must give up writing pornography and find a proper job. When he refuses, she moves to London to have her baby, yet still seeks to have him face his responsibilities.

He, however, has other plans, centering upon a 23-year-old nurse who attended his dying aunt. Dancing with her, he feels he is “holding glory,” not responsibility. While Josephine represents something grasping in the Irish character, the nurse suggests youthful vitality. Like other McGahern women, Josephine and the nurse, even the hero's failed first love, are factors in an argumentative design:

It seems we must be beaten twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it's all that we'll ever know.

The nurse, then, this “agreeable plant” drawn from native ground, will nurture his growth. He even has the one dear perpetual place in mind to plant his new life. His business with Josephine finally settled in London, his aunt buried, the pornographer vows to make a new start with the nurse at his side, deep in the Irish countryside, at a rural farm. The McGahern hero willingly goes home again. “There comes a time when you either run amok completely or try to make a go of it. I'm going to try to make a go of it,” he tells Maloney.

Even more than Josephine, Maloney provides impediments to the pornographer's development. (In The Leavetaking a character named Maloney, a headmaster, caned boys. In The Dark the similarly named Mahoney brutalizes his son. McGahern, who often has no name for his heroes, has found a name for his villains.) In The Pornographer Maloney, a publisher of smut, seems at first the least constricting of men. Failed reporter, failed lover, cynic, dandy, aesthete, Maloney's mutability embodies modern Ireland's openness. Yet, McGahern shows, a fierce moral righteousness runs just underneath the skins of Irish men and women, still. Maloney argues the hero is stupid for getting the woman pregnant, so he should be punished with marriage. Josephine argues responsibility; Maloney argues retribution.

Maloney explains that the pornographer must pay because life, unlike art, has consequence. Col. Grimshaw could not get Mavis pregnant, for such things do not occur in pornography. “Art is not life because it is not nature.” This Wildean theorizing inspires Maloney with the plan to have the pornographer recreate in pornographic terms, for the Col. and Mavis, the Shannon trip on which Josephine became pregnant. Thus Maloney's “art” is a parody of life. “Life for art,” he argues, “is about as healthy as fresh air is for a deep-sea diver.” The pornographer carries out his publisher's instructions as though hypnotized. At this point he is caught between high-minded self-sacrifice urged by Josephine and Maloney, who both urge him to marry, and life-defeating artifice, his tawdry “art.” At the end of the novel, with the help of the nurse, he rejects both. The hero defines his life in his own terms, rejecting pressures to conform to Irish expectations. McGahern would have us see that life is not all dire consequence, and art is not without such consequence. Further, both art and life should hold glory.

Yeats thought “one's verses should hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one's own climate and scenery in their right proportion.” McGahern too seeks such proportion, such balance. The bold clash and colors of his early works has given way to patterns of complexities; revulsion against most things Irish has modulated into a tense truce or a qualified acceptance of the national landscape.

It is an extraordinary turnabout which brings the pornographer to take up his new life and his new wife in the Irish countryside, the trench from which McGahern had previously sent so many of his fictional characters over the top. Of course Ireland has greatly changed since the days of The Barracks and The Dark—images of solitary confinement, apt for Ireland of the 1950s.

Though still a tight, little island, contemporary Ireland is a place where a freer life is possible. The pornographer can avoid being trapped into marriage, choose his love and still stay on in Ireland. Perhaps McGahern will go on to demonstrate in later fiction the workings out of such an idyll as the pornographer hopes for himself and the dancing nurse in the Shannon valley. (Why would she wish for such a life after living in liberated Dublin? Isn't she following the downward spiral of Elizabeth Reegan, another nurse who gave up urban freedom for rural marriage and the family? Or has Irish country life changed sufficiently to make her rustic retreat another form of renewal? Since McGahern does not represent the young nurse's point-of-view, such questions linger.) The glory that the pornographer holds in the nurse's body is the promise of renewal through love and sex, set in an Irish remote field, but the novel ends before we see whether such a new life can be more than a rhetorical assertion.

For all that, McGahern, having made the easy case against Irish parochialism, now brings his considerable talents to focus on the mixed blessings of Irish provincialism, a more exacting challenge. The wall against which the McGahern hero pushes so long and hard has yielded to counter-pressures from Common Market commonality. In the face of such change, McGahern writes parables which suggest, as Edith Wharton once said about another ancient regime in decline, “there was good in the old ways.” McGahern's revised version of the Irish pastoral is edged in irony, weighted by expectation and sustained by compelling fictional energies.