[In the following review, Sampson traces the development of McGahern's short fiction.]

Nightlines. Getting Through. High Ground. In retrospect, the titles of John McGahern's three volumes of stories seem to light up the stages of his development as an artist—images which evoke the atmosphere of each book and at the same time suggest the energy and movement of a talent discovering itself and then growing towards maturity. These three volumes are reprinted with little change in The Collected Stories, and to them is added a brief, late story, "The Creamery Manager," and a novella, "The Country Funeral"—34 stories in all. This novella is a tour de force written in the afterglow of Amongst Women and occupies a place in this world of the stories much like that occupied by "The Dead" in the collection which was McGahern's first inspiration.

In Nightlines (1970), early stories like "Coming into his Kingdom" or "Korea" or "Lavin" are disturbing revelations of male disillusionment and violence. Stories of boyhood in the country with an abusive father, of frustrated lovers away from home, of teachers, laborers and farmers in their paralyzing routines are fragments of a world which is unrelentingly dark.

As the images associated with the title suggest, these fictions represent a grim sense of cruelty and of the absurd; this is a world in which pleasure and joy have been blasted by violence, and the rules of personal and social life are strictly survival of the fittest. Technically, these stories owe much to Dubliners, not simply in the taut atmosphere, the formal conciseness or the style of "scrupulous meanness," but in the use of epiphany: revelation is at once shocking and exhilarating.

The subtlety and brevity of these early fictions signals McGahern's distance from the acknowledged Irish masters of the time, O'Connor and O'Faolain. As in The Dark, the representation of Irish country life is stripped of all traces of romantic realism and western pastoral. While the drama of character and scene remain, these fictions are close to Beckett in the intensity of their understatement. The controlled impersonality of style reflects a repression of nostalgia and of pain but it is also a way of exploring repression, silence, and the inadequacy of traditional forms of story telling for capturing the truth of this world.

The opening and closing stories, "Wheels" and "The Recruiting Officer," are masterpieces which extend the technical accomplishment of earlier work: the style is now more complex and varied in capturing layers of comic and satiric ironies with broad social reference to authoritarian personalities and systems, especially the Catholic Church and the schools. The psychological war which the ex-Christian Brother/teacher in "The Recruiting Officer" has been fighting for his own survival has left him going around in circles in "a total paralysis of the will. . .a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worthwhile doing as any other."

The claustrophobic world of the victimized self, imaged first in childhood and adolescence, is given adult dimensions, and it becomes evident that McGahern is not simply writing traditional stories of growing up or loneliness but is conducting a philosophical investigation of paralysis through stylistic experiment. The reader is called on to respond to a type of fiction which is increasingly experimental and conscious of its own patterns as fiction. These stories anticipate the experimental styles of The Leavetaking and The Pornographer.

But as McGahern became increasingly his own master in technique, it became evident in Getting Through (1978) and then High Ground (1985) that his vision was constantly changing. He calls on the reader to recognize that change by introducing each collection with a striking story on the nature of art and the character of the artist: "The Beginning of an Idea" and "Parachutes." These stories are urbane and satirical explorations of failure in love and failure in writing, and, implicitly, they instruct the reader on how to read the symbolic parables which follow.

The countryside and the family situation in the fiction of the 1960s remain recognizable as the reference point for all of McGahern's later work. The atmosphere of abuse and despair changes, however, so that already in the 1970s the handful of stories which present a cast of country characters adds up to a more comic view of that world, and in High Ground McGahern achieves a kind of anthropological perspective on the life of groups and communities. This sense of a social and historical overview of the circumstances of Irish country life gradually deepens, and stories like "Oldfashioned" and "The Conversion of William Kirkwood" prepare the way for Amongst Women.

At the same time, McGahern explores city life in a series of stories of lovers, teachers and artists. The depiction of Dublin which began in "My Love, My Umbrella" is extended throughout the next two collections. The city is seen with Joycean attention, a place of pubs and frustration and tentative love affairs. It is a world which is an enlargement in some ways of the country world, a place where young men can go for freedom and adventure. There is room here for experiment, for happy accidents, for the growth of love. Characters travel. A European dimension is introduced, also, in continental settings and, especially, in literary and symbolic motifs. A lighter touch allows for the inclusion of various tones, romantic, comic, satirical, and this variety evokes a sympathy and compassion for the bewildering complexity of ordinary experience.

These changes in distance and perspective mirror a vision which is simultaneously freed from the static and dark world of the early fictions and also aware that what appears to be linear development is, in another perspective, circular. While the contrast between the provincial and the metropolitan modes of life is marked, in many stories the two are interwoven. It becomes evident in the stories, as in the novels, that a drama of opposites—an unending drama of yearning and loss, desire and defeat, beginnings and endings, departures and returns—is central to McGahern's work. The ritualized movement from city to country, first introduced in "Wheels" and reintroduced in "Sierra Leone" and "Gold Watch," reappears in many forms—of home holidays, of emigrants returning, of going back in memory, of going back to die—and these processes are central also to the The Leavetaking, The Pornographer, and Amongst Women.

The work of the early 1980s, collected in High Ground, brings all of the familiar situations and themes to a new point of clarity. Stories of the country and of the city, of lovers and farmers and teachers, of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, map a world which is now accepted in its mysterious processes of change. Time and place become the dominant characters in this world. Individual lives, marked by pain or love, despair or hope, are woven into a tapestry with other lives, all mirroring each other, meeting and parting in a kind of dance. "Parachutes," which opens with the parting of lovers ends with a memory of a waltz, the moment when they met, "we kept turning to the music . . . until we seemed to be turning in nothing but air beneath the sky . . . the anonymous sky of any and every day above our lives as we set out."

McGahern writes of this heartbreaking immediacy, the overwhelming significance of the moment in the natural—and unnatural—process of change: the life-or-death choices of youth as in stories like "Crossing the Line" or "High Ground" or the flash of sudden recognition of the wrong word said, the fatal turning point in a love affair. Actions become rituals; symbols and myth resonate behind a surface texture which remains close to the coarse grain of everyday circumstances. The tones of the visceral and the hilarious, the anguished and the detached, the compassionate and the satirical, mingle from sentence to sentence so that Ardcarne and Cootehall and the streets of Dublin become the site of a sense of life which finally yields nothing to formula or dogma: "I stood in the moonlit silence as if waiting for some word or truth, but none came, none ever came; and I grew amused at that part of myself that still expected something, standing like a fool out there in all the moonlit silence, when only what was increased or diminished as it changed, became only what is, becoming again what was even faster than the small second hand endlessly circling in the poison." This is from "Gold Watch," and while the disillusioned residues of Irish Catholicism may inform this sensibility, McGahern's accomplishment is to infuse each object and each moment of a life with a luminous sense of anxious and frail significance. The precision of style is suffused with immense compassion and openness to hard-won joy.

Such consistency and concentration are the signs of an intimately known world, the artist's growth a matter of going not out but in deep, and McGahern's world (in which person, place and memory are miraculously fused) is recalled to us in story after story. While McGahern has touches of the provincial realist, his sense of character, nature and story separate him from the writers of the 1930s; the speaking voice here is not a translated seanachai although McGahern is just as close to the voices and textures of his world as any Irish storyteller. Nor is there any masquerade of charm or wonders although the local place is rich in the distinctive traces of individual lives and reveals its own amazing and fragmentary narratives. Internal references to places, characters and events in other stories remind the reader that all the stories are interweaving; as the narrator in "Wheels" put it, "repetition of a life in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as stop." Lives take on shapes; the shapes change; time passes; the present and the past assume mysterious circling patterns; an individual life is absorbed by the flow.

As we read forward in this volume, we realize that it is not simply McGahern's material which is observed or presented in this way: we are participating in the evolving consciousness of McGahern as artist. His organic development is shared with the reader through the double retrospective impulses of experiences re-imagined and the self-conscious patterns of repetition and variation. Nowhere is this more strikingly evident than in the new novella which rounds out the collection, "The Country Funeral."

The "rich whole" of life, which in "Wheels" seems to be an innocent vision inevitably destroyed by an incremental disillusioned adolescence and adulthood, now seems to be apprehended by three brothers who travel to the west of Ireland for the funeral of an uncle. The suffering and the absurdities of adult life are not denied, and the decision of one brother to return from working in the Middle East to live on the small farm next to Gloria bog is muted; but there is an implicit sense of eternal lightness in the accommodation to death which the story enacts through the funeral rites and through the symbolic position of the cemetery in the landscape. This novella recapitulates many situations, themes and motifs in earlier stories, but most strikingly of all it mirrors and reverses the vision and meaning of the opening story. It is as if the artist himself has traveled in a great circle of experience and perception. This collection is made to be the "rich whole" of the artist, all the fragments finally put into a satisfying order.