The subtle art of suggestion

Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already perfect. He also added two stories, one of which, ‘The Country Funeral’, strikes me not merely as the best that he ever wrote but also as the one that most accurately epitomises the sort of subject that he chose and his unsparing way of dealing with it.

Three brothers, though long since transplanted to metropolitan settings, are still emotionally connected to the seaside hamlet in which, as fatherless children, an uncle invited them, as an act of grudging charity, to spend their summer holidays on his estate. Now, the uncle having died, they reluctantly set off for his funeral, leaving their mother, too old to travel, behind. The first brother is a once brilliant schoolmaster who seemed destined to go far but then succumbed to an inexplicable inertia. The second has returned from a well-paid job in Bahrain. The third is a petulant, demanding cripple in a wheelchair. The last two bicker and taunt each other; the first retains a weary, courteous indifference. Between them there is little love; between the dead man and his neighbours there has been much. The cripple watches the rustic burial from an otherwise empty car. ‘They were like a crowd of apes,’ he later tells their mother derisively. In some 40 pages we have learned as much about this family as we would from many a novel.

Another of McGahern’s favourite themes is the sudden flare-up of a love that then gutters and dies. In ‘Sierra Leone’ the young mistress of a middle-aged, powerful politician has clandestine trysts in bars and hotel rooms with an insignificant man of her own age.