[In the following review, O'Rourke compares McGahern's The Collected Stories to the writings of D. H. Lawrence.]

On the heels of William Trevor's Collected Stories Ireland sends us another, John McGahern's [The Collected Stories]. That has something to do with the age of both writers (Trevor was born in 1928, McGahern in 1934), but it is also due to the Irish affinity for the modern short story. The daddy of them all, James Joyce's brief 1914 collection, Dubliners, has spawned generation upon generation of short stories, in Ireland and in this country as well.

There are a number of crucial differences between the stories of McGahern and those of the more lionized Trevor. The subjects of Trevor's stories (especially those with Irish locales) are largely genteel, steeped in nostalgic disaffection and somewhat cosmopolitan, whereas McGahern writes about an Irish society so limited, so confining and claustrophobic, that the idea one could be nostalgic about it is a pipe dream. Indeed, Anthony Burgess once praised McGahern's work by claiming that no one else had so well caught “the peculiar hopelessness of contemporary Ireland.”

In the states, McGahern's stories are less well-known than his novels, especially Amongst Women (1990) and The Pornographer (1979). As the latter title may indicate, McGahern has had his run-ins with his mother country; his second novel, The Dark (1965), was banned in Ireland, and as a result he was fired from a teaching post at a Catholic school. That did not deter the author or empty his work of its sexual and religious subject matter. Reading the 34 stories here collected makes one understand why the tide of emigration from Ireland doesn't ebb.

McGahern's best stories are his longest—“Doorways,” “Oldfashioned,” “The Country Funeral,” “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—and together they make up about a fourth of the volume. Amassing a lot of close detail of Irish life, family connections and village-life interactions, they find him working more in the blunt sociological vein of D. H. Lawrence than in the well-honed lyrical mode of James Joyce.

A good many of McGahern's earlier, shorter stories are about men alone and men about to be alone. Read singly they are effective; read together their repetitions become too apparent. Yet because this male experience of solitude and disconnectedness is so prevalent in McGahern's world, he has developed quite a sharp sensitivity to it. This passage is from “Along the Edges”:

Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked toward her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. … Yet it could not go on for ever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without knowing. He had already lost her while longing to draw closer.

Father/son and mother/son relationships in McGahern's stories are daunting. In “Sierra Leone” a father wishes to sign over his farm to his son, in order to disinherit the woman he married after the death of his first wife:

‘Are you saying to me for the last time that you won't take it?’ And when I wouldn't answer he said with great bitterness, ‘I should have known. You don't even have respect for your own blood,’ and muttering, walked away towards the cattle gathered between the stone wall and the first of the walnut trees. Once or twice he moved as if he might turn back, but he did not. We did not speak any common language.

Most of McGahern's stories render the same verdict. And just as sons have no common language to speak with fathers and have given up all attempts to get on with them, they never are able to detach from their mothers, or the memory of them.

In “The Wine Breath,” a priest contemplates his own death now that his mother has died: “But when he looked at the room about him he could hardly believe it was so empty and dead and dry, the empty chair where she should be sewing, the oaken table with the scattered books, the clock on the mantel. … It was as good a day as any, if there ever was a good day to go.”

McGahern's tales are utterly convincing, poignant and moving, and the writing is unflinching and spare, but I would not recommend reading more than a handful at one sitting. They are bitter pills, and you do not want to swallow too many at once, filled as they are with the potentially toxic knowledge, expressed in “The Country Funeral,” of “the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast.”

The protagonist of Colm Toibin's second novel, The Heather Blazing, shares an emotional makeup with many of McGahern's male figures. Cold and reserved, Eamon Redmond is detached from his two children and remote to his wife. A judge on Ireland's High Court, he is committed to the law but barely cognizant of its human applications and devoid of most of the tools of self-examination.

Redmond recalls one afternoon with his wife, Carmel—a memory that comes to him after her death—when he tried to explain his detachment to her:

‘You know [she says], when either of your parents are mentioned you become strange. … I feel there's a sort of pain in you, I feel it even now that I've mentioned your father and mother.’

‘My mother died when I was a baby.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

He was silent, sipped his wine, then he looked out of the window and back to Carmel who was still watching him.

‘She is just someone who wasn't there.’

‘And your father?’

‘We managed together, I suppose. It must have been hard for him.’

‘And for you?’

‘It's hard to talk about it. It made me very self-sufficient. I can look after myself.’

Again, he was silent, and stood up to remove the dishes from the table. When he came back he sat down on the sofa beside her.

‘I never learned to need anything from anybody. I suppose that's true. … I have never asked anyone for anything. I think I feel that if I did I would be turned down.’

Toibin is a younger writer (he was born in 1955 and his first novel, The South, appeared in 1991), and he eschews the seemingly more autobiographical material employed by McGahern and his generation. Toibin has a plain style, and the simplicity is reinforced by the novel's repeating structure—the last day of a year's session of High Court is the starting point for every leap forward in time (three years’ worth), whereas the rest of the story is recounted through flashbacks. Brief scenes from the judge's entire life are relived, and through them we view bits and pieces of post-World War II Irish history, seen from the perspective of solid supporters of Prime Minister Eamon de Valera.

Unlike McGahern, Toibin deals almost exclusively with well-educated people, but they too have immense difficulty finding a “common language” and largely have given up attempts to get on with anyone near them. The novel's title comes from a revolutionary song—“A rebel hand set the heather blazing / And brought the neighbours from far and near.” Reading this very undemonstrative and elliptical novel of character, one can assume there is irony at work in that choice of title. In The Heather Blazing one finds not the blaze but the barely smoking ashes produced by the Republic of Ireland's current smoldering history.