29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Death of an Irish giant., March 30, 2006
This review is from: All Will Be Well: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Though McGahern is not well known in the United States, his books were very influential in Irish literature. His early work, "The Dark", a family saga including an abusive father and a seductive priest, was banned in Ireland in the 1950's. He was forced to find work in London and the United States before returning to Ireland.
This memoir, particularly focusing on his childhood years is strangely flat in places, but where it illuminates is in his relationship to his mother, and, in the true Irish fashion; his relationship to her MEMORY. She takes on a quietly iconic status, so that, even though she died when he was 8 years old, her influence is all over his writing.
He reminds one of another great Irish writer of an earlier era, Patrick Kavanaugh. Both deal with rural Ireland of bygone times. Both are past-haunted. There is none of the squalid, almost humourous tone of Frank McCourt. McGahern has more dignity. The manipulative nature of his relationship with his father is also a dominant theme. His father was an "old" Irish male, a rigid police sergeant who lived in the Gardai barracks most of his married life. The clash of wills and ideals is palpable between the two men. McGahern was transformed by his writing into something which transcended his tortured youth.
I heard of his death today. Perhaps he will receive his worldwide recognition postumously. He certainly deserves it.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Silence, exile, cunning return, along with endurance, July 10, 2006
This review is from: All Will Be Well: A Memoir (Hardcover)
I have read all of McGahern's work, and sadly this is the last such exactingly prepared book that I presume will appear under his name. Any reader of The Dark, The Leavetaking, or By the Lake (aka That They May Face the Rising Sun) will find much here to document how McG hacked out from his own servitude much of the raw material for his justly praised prose constructions. Most deeply rooted in the straitened years of the 40s and 50s excavated here are seeds of what blossomed into his first novel The Barracks and his later success Amongst Women. The tone, shared with his fiction, often is shadowed more than sunny. This does make for a challenging read in parts, notably as the book goes on and McG battles with his father after the death (halfway through the book, when the author was nine) of his beloved mother.
The grimness of great stretches of this memoir makes it sobering for any naive reader expecting a rural idyll romanticized. I would have edited more of the micro-detail that McG presents, as not all of it is germane to his larger arc, although he labors long in providing the meticulous array of details and spare dialogue to pace his vignettes. McG is known for his concerted rewritings and revisions of his work before publication. Perhaps his early death, soon after this memoir appeared, may account for the hastier (only by comparison with his other works, spaced out often over decades rather than years) appearance of "All Will be Well." Intriguing to find that the British version that appeared first is titled only "Memoir;" terse contrast with the more poetic and much more fitting "That They May Face the Rising Sun" title abroad of his final novel that for Americans was redubbed the less evocative if also enigmatic "By the Lake."
The lack of breaks in the autobiography deepens the feeling of unrelenting struggle engaged in by the narrator. You feel more trapped in the telling of his difficult coming of age. Beauty and sorrow tumble one after the other. You never know which will appear next as you read--he recreates the surprises and terrors of anyone's life, no matter, as he says, how softly led. "I am sure it is from these days that I take the belief that the best of life is lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything." (87)
But the book is lopsided. Presumably intentionally, for perhaps McGahern anticipated a sequel? However, as half the book takes place only up to his ninth year, the remaining couple of decades rush by with alarming brevity. The author does not have intimations of being such until he's late in his teens, and this occurs first on p. 217 of a 290 pp. account.
Necessarily and deliberately, McG's young adulthood and the start of his career is compressed into much less space. I would have preferred much more attention to his maturation as a writer than the extreme emphasis paid his early formation. I understand the polarity of his parental positions and how they marked irreperably McG's own soul, but if more follow-through had been given to how he wrested himself free of the restraints of his family and his nation would have made for a more memorable, and also less suddenly fast-forwarded, depiction of himself. (This portrait of the artist as a young man conveys shades of Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait; like Stephen, McG too returns, however, to Ireland after overseas self-exile has not fully freed the artistic imagination from its first inspiration.) Yet, McGahern knows that he cannot stand apart smugly from his inherited legacy, in its joys and its sorrows, and he comes to accept this if not find comfort in it later in his telling.
Despite its uneven pace, this story will endure as an self-penned and as always in such books, a prematurely engraved epitaph. McGahern's courage in standing up for himself against the powers of Church, School, and State makes for engrossing if often reticently told autobiography. Refusing the comforts of faith as he grows, he nonetheless is fair-minded and balanced in crediting the good that the Church instilled in him during very dark years. Never concealing the sins, but noticing too the comforts, he looks at himself with as much detachment as he does others, no easy feat, considering what we now know would have been his last couple of years (dying at seventy of cancer)as he wrote this memoir.
He hides as much as he exposes, the privilege of any teller of one's own tale. This is recommended for those already familiar with his fiction, as his early publications find only bare mention here, but a grounding in his harsh and bracing, and later more nuanced and forgiving, tales is necessary if you wish to savor all the textures here evident, poignantly, in the last two pages. He spent a decade on By the Lake, and his craft is never hurried or unmeditated. As with his last novel, the conclusion to "All Will Be Well" ends this intense narrative elegantly and powerfully.
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