[Pryce-Jones is an Austrian-born English novelist, biographer, and critic. In the following review, he discusses the bleak vision presented in the short fiction of Nightlines.]

The Ireland of John McGahern's stories is not the country other Irish writers describe. Here, to be sure, are the Shannon and Oakport and the hill of Howth—but only as accidents of geography, as parts of a setting into which people have blundered and where they no longer belong, if they ever did. Mr. McGahern is free from the emerald sentiments that have been invested in his native land. He is his own master, and his stories owe nothing to anybody.

If this is an Ireland virtually without a past, it is without a future too. The opening story in Nightlines has a young man returning from London to come to terms with his old father, who has remarried. All he can do is to go away again from this country of the aged and the sad.

In their unwisdom and smallness, those who are left behind in Mr. McGahern's Ireland cannot be awakened from themselves, since there is nothing to awaken them to. Their very occupations (like farming and fishing) are coming to an end. Some who persist, such as a country policeman, lose their reason. A carpenter like Lavin, in a poignant story of that title, goes crazy with unfulfilled sexuality before he is taken off to the poorhouse. For his characters, the author uses a narrow range of names. One of them is Moran—repeated, one feels, because it sounds so close to moron.

The present, then, is existing in the middle of nothing and its standstill very much interests Mr. McGahern. One of the finest stories in this collection is "Korea," in which a boy is about to leave home, to break the immobilization of his life. For the last time, he is helping his father to fish the nightlines that give this book its title—on the stretch of river from which the family makes a precarious living. The father wants him to emigrate to America, in the knowledge that the boy will be drafted into the Army there. If his son is then killed on active service, the father will receive from the Army more life insurance money than fishing can ever produce. The boy has his would-be murder under consideration as he baits the hooks for his father—and the image of a hook pulling its unknown catch to disturb some dark, still water is a suitable one to apply to Mr. McGahern's work.

In "Korea" the relation of father and son is framed by the box of worms they use as bait. On another occasion, a dead marriage is similarly framed by the smell of a shark rotting on a nearby beach. It is the author's technique, his whole style, to take something from the external world—the wheels of a train, an umbrella, the sea, rain—and to merge into it the components of his story.

Success depends upon picking external symbols apt enough to bear the weight put upon them. In "Christmas," for instance, an orphan is given a present of an unwanted toy airplane: he destroys it, and we are made aware that he cannot fly away from where he is. Such moments of banality are more than compensated by the way Mr. McGahern usually brings together the contrasting elements of his stories. In an irregular but calculated prose he achieves a mood all his own, which is shabby and hurtful and lyrical—"refining our ignorance" in the phrase he puts into the mouth of one of his characters.

Two stories make a particular impact. In "Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass," laborers on a building site are waiting for one of their number, Jocko, to turn up to be paid for work he has not done. Jocko is a methylated-spirits drinker; his co-workers have been out to get him and their chance has come. Eight or nine years ago a good many English writers were trying to see the violence of primitive men as something akin to ritual, which was a halfway effort to beautify it. That fashion has passed, but its cruelty is recorded here, as part of what is elsewhere called "the stupidity of human wishes."

"Peaches," the story in which the above-mentioned shark is featured, is the length of a novella. A writer, discontented in his rented house in Spain, works too little and drinks too much and has a protracted, neurotic quarrel with his wife. They leave for England the moment a local magistrate (who is also the local fruit-grower and the archetypal Fascist) makes a pass at the wife—but movement will resolve nothing. "Peaches" might have been any writer's summer vacation story. Mr. McGahern, using a foreign setting for the first time, shows how well he can extend anywhere he pleases the themes of desolation he has already found at home.