The John McGahern Companion: A refuge and resource

The John McGahern Companion

Author: Eds. Eamon Maher, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Derek Hand and Barry Houlihan

ISBN-13: 9781805843627

Publisher: Peter Lang

Guideline Price: £45; 394pp

In a world governed by vast stupidity, there is rare pleasure in exploring the collective thoughts of scholars about the writers and books they love.

Academic writing can be shorthand for the death of language. But even the most technical arguments have something of the individual’s flair tangled in the undergrowth. Imaginative empathy is after all what connects us to literature, even if the critic sometimes plays the role of the book’s uninvited guest. Which is to say that a good collection of critical essays is now, more than ever, a refuge and a resource. The John McGahern Companion is one such.

Edited by four leading scholars of McGahern, the book surveys a wide range of topics, McGahern’s landscapes, influences and interests mapped from diverse perspectives. There is room for the rising generations too, and Yen-Chi Wu’s study of McGahern’s literary afterlives is full of surprises.

McGahern is best known today for two things. The first is his clash with the religious and social establishment after he published The Dark, with its intimations of abuse. As Rachel Kelly’s excellent essay explains, McGahern was then a teacher. His school manager, a cleric who hadn’t read the book, said he didn’t mind a bit of vulgarity, but surely McGahern knew he couldn’t write about that.

The second is as a prose stylist, or as that most indescribable of things, a writer’s writer. This quality is generally opaque, beyond the requirement to sell a few books with a quality press. McGahern certainly qualified for this until his later work reached a wider audience, thanks in part to the film adaptations that the companion explores so vividly and well.

Still, this division of McGahern between the rebel and the stylist doesn’t quite capture McGahern’s individuality, or his aesthetic, as the companion shows. His shared ground with Colm Tóibín is revealing, as is his often painful awareness of the impositions of masculinity. McGahern was also a committed small farmer, and Eamonn Wall’s study of his accidental environmentalism signals an emerging way to think about the literature after this summer of climate chaos. The whole companion is full of such points of interest, illustrated by the photographs of Paul Butler, which catch the magic light of a middle Ireland that unveils itself but slowly, as McGahern knew, lit from darkness.

• Nicholas Allen is a writer and academic