Connected to these, perhaps standing a little at an angle from them all, is what I’d hear as the inimitable McGahern narrative tone. This is the true sound of the story-teller, composing sentences that can appear at times somewhat awkward but in their awkwardness revealing the very quality of what it is they are recounting. I hear it as the teller’s own rapt involvement in his tale, so that the style itself is willing to lose “stylishness”, forego clean edges, in its eagerness to match (as distinct from describe) the matter with the language.

[Quotes from “Strandhill, the Sea”: ‘Fear of the sky since morning had kept them on the benches away from the strand a mile downhill they’d come to enjoy, fear of the long trudge past the golf links and Kincorn and Central in rain; but they’d still the air here, sea air, it was some consolation’.]

Whenever I come across such sentences, and they are a McGahern habit, I wonder why this slight awkwardness. It’s as if the sentence bulges in a slightly ungainly way with its contents. But since it also works, since it deftly enhances the mood of the narrative in which it appears, I conclude that McGahern intends it (probably unconsciously) as a demonstration of the organic, muscular, bodily nature of style itself. I catch from such examples the sense that for McGahern style is an organic representation of much that cannot be, in substantive ways, said. That style itself, the story-teller’s nuanced use of language, is in an almost subliminal way telling us something about the slightly fraught nature of the reality he’s creating for us. Listen, for example, to the “dead of heart” narrator of The Pornographer musing: “It must surely be possible to be out of our life for the whole of our life if we could tell what our life is other than this painful becoming of ourselves”. In the actual prose here there is a kind of wilful awkwardness, as if the nature of the observation were frayed, had unfinished aspects, loose threads. The tone that such style creates is peculiarly intimate, obliging us to be very attentive listeners to a teller who has great confidence in his own telling mode, whatever the uncertainties and disquiets of the matter (or the character) he’s setting before us.

Each of these voices, all of them employed in the business of narrative, composes a separate layer of the texture of being in addition to letting us feel the very presence of the story-teller’s tone of voice. By moving between them as he does, McGahern manages to create his [16] own literary equivalent of Being itself. This, for me as a reader, is probably the primary satisfaction of these constituent voices, he can give us - by means of a kind of stylistic existentialism - what Henry James calls “the felt sense of life”. (p.16.) [Speaks of ‘solidity with a rim of radiance [...] that give voice to, and that is everywhere around us’.]

[...]

This last point leads me to something I particularly love about McGahern. For “the world” is not - as the same priest knows very well, and as I have suggested - confined to “the solid world”. In truth, and it is a truth McGahern comes back to again and again, the world, solid as it seems, has also a mysterious, mysteriously impalpable nature. It becomes at moments a network of signs, a sacramental space. To put it more accurately, the novels and stories seem often an attempt, against some of the evidence, to assert the sacramental side of things. [...]’ (p.16.)

What I so often relish about McGahern’s work is the way he is able to question the assumptions inherent in this religious culture, quarrel with its often malevolent consequences, and at the same time keep faith with something in it that was of real value, the vision that allowed the solid world to be seen as a space in which grace could happen, goodness could be revealed. That even worldly experience can be understood in the idiom of redemption (an idiom seems to be implicit in the endings he composes for his novels and some of his stories). My sense of “post-Catholic”, then, is not of something that has superseded the Catholicism of an earlier hear, but a literary manner (it can be found in the other arts as well) that expresses the loss of a spiritual energy in the culture, but can use its vocabulary, its symbolic “stock”, as a way of asserting imaginafively a secular spiritual value as a counterweight to that original loss. It is the razor’s edge on which the tricky notion of art’s “spiritual” value can, at least in the Irish context, dance. / I imagine that one of the consequences of this sacramental vision [..] is the fact that so many of McGahern’s stories have a soldily realistic superstructure on a scaffolding composed of what can only be described as moral fable. His work, that is, always takes place at that intersection where philosophy, theology, and common life meet, a crossroads where notional ehtics and ordinary human behaviour run into each other, a confluence of forces that can only be grasped in moral terms. (p.18.)

The sacramental might also be seen, I guess, as the ground of the “redemptive” element in McGahern. [...] In their implicit (post-Catholic) religious accommodations, their narratives provide no paradise, but they do allow a purgatorial state that is illuminated by hope, satisfaction, and a kind of spiritual equilibrium. All of which shouldn’t take us away from the absolutely convincing ordinariness of the quotidian universe which McGahern creates in these stories. (p.19.)