In “Oldfashioned,” perhaps the most highly-charged and accomplished of the stories in his new collection, [High Ground,] John McGahern allows himself a loaded observation about the works of an Irish documentary filmmaker:

they won him a sort of fame: some thought they were serious, well-made, and compulsive viewing, bringing things to light that were in bad need of light; but others maintained that they were humourless, morbid, and restricted to a narrow view that was more revealing of private obsessions than any truths about life or Irish life in general.

Change the medium, and you have a summary of McGahern's own experience, especially with regard to his novel The Dark (1965), against which a lot of affronted voices were raised. Some of these voices were choleric and Catholic; others belonged to people who resented being disheartened by McGahern's joyless view. The Dark—a very seedy evocation of adolescent suffering and anxiety—does seem to have been written out of a profound malaise; it's good to note a raising of spirits in subsequent fiction by this author. Not that he is ever exactly ebullient; his strengths instead would seem to lie in a steady approach, an encompassing sense of time passing, and a feeling for things like the everyday ecstasies which typically occur in a room in Rathmines, or near Stephen's Green.

High Ground, in fact, opens with a broken relationship and ends with a flourishing one, a positive note thereby being struck. In between are some instances of dignified behaviour, and some tests of loyalty—the latter concerning country schoolmasters, young and old, and the choices that confront them. In the title story, to take that example, a boy with a new degree is invited to oust the old master whom drink has impaired. He himself was once the master's star pupil. The prospect of sudden advancement is held out to him by an upstart. Out of these few facts, McGahern makes a poised and resonant tale. As for the need to conduct yourself with decorum—it may be especially pressing if you are an unassertive girl, a maidservant, seduced and let down by the local ladykiller. Eddie Mac, in the story of that title, spectacularly abandons, along with his herdsman's post, the woman he has impregnated. This story, like its sequel (“The Conversion of William Kirkwood”) opposes two qualities, Irish wildness and Anglo-Irish mildness. Or, if you like, Irish unease and Anglo-Irish self-possession.

McGahern isn't after anything so crass as local colour, but locality is important, whether it's a Dublin dance-hall he's envisaging or a Georgian country parsonage complete with walled orchard, lawn and garden. In the first of the Dublin stories, a man is left by his girlfriend and goes adrift for a while in the company of some drunkards. There is another story in which we are asked to accept the peculiarity of an intending nun, in her last days of freedom, accompanying a man to a hotel room (to compound the pattern, he's an ex-seminarist). In fact, McGahern doesn't seem to have a wide range of female characters at his disposal; and this one, typically a nurse, is also typical in being clear-headed, guileless, nerveless and unironic.

A common masculine figure in McGahern's work is the warped Irish father: one or two of these get into High Ground, blusterers, grudge-bearers, graceless and glum. They don't loom especially large, however; that's a hell confined to childhood. More agreeable in disposition is the type of old man who ruefully compares himself to Oisin in the wake of the Fenians, the ethnic simile persisting in the face of modern innovations, church bingo, colour television and the like. McGahern, charting social change, notes the disappearance from Irish country roads of bicycles, horses, carts, traps and sidecars. He notes the modernization of the Mass and the advent of the minibus. The newer Irish ways are offered without comment, unless a comment is implicit in McGahern's faintly elegiac tone. He writes, as always, with authority and gravity, and with an instinct for the most appropriate detail.