Seizing the moment

Lesley Glaister

THE COLLECTED STORIES by John McGahern Faber, £14.99, pp. 408 .It's not hard to give the wrong signals in this world,' says a female character in one of John McGahern's collected stories. And in tale after tale this sentiment is dramatised: fathers misunderstand their sons, sons their fathers, and love affairs founder for lack of understanding.

It is a feature of a collection of short stories that a writer's preoccuptions become obvious through repetition, and in most of these stories McGahern anatomises failure to connect in a variety of different relationships. The inability of fathers to express love for and need of their sons is a recurring theme, as are fractured love affairs. In several stories the main character is disappointed in love — a woman briefly held is lost through an unwitting, barely understood mistake or failure. In the tenderly erotic 'My Love, My Umbrella,' the slipping away of love is pre- cipitated by an exchange of anecdotes which irritate both partners; in 'Parachutes' the man is insufficiently impressed by his girlfriend's sister's house and is subse- quently rejected. In 'Along the Edges' love fails simply through bad timing: 'There had been that moment too that might have 1- en grasped, and had not, and love had

ed.'

It is the moment that is crucial in McGahern's stories. Repeatedly experi- ence, sensation and possibility are crystallised in moments of sudden clarity, some of which have the quality almost of epiphany. An adolescent overhears his father discussing his future with an uncle:

In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night lines for the eels, I knew my youth had ended.

In 'The Wine Breath' the flash of sunlight on white wood shavings causes an old man to embrace the reality of his own mortality.

The central consciousness of almost all the stories is male. The tender and percep- tive quality of the narrative as it catalogues many aspects of male experience adds up to a rare affirmation of masculinity. There are descriptions of the naive and some- times brutal awakening of sexuality; the experience of being a son, a lover, a hus- band, a worker, an old man. It is the stories where the main character fails somehow to make a desired connection and where there is thus a sense of yearning — some- times reverberating through imagery, sometimes explicitly stated — that are the most powerful and fully realised.

'Bank Holiday' is exceptional in that a happy end is signalled for the love affair, and somehow this is less convincing, lacks that yearning dimension and limps to a curious and uncharacteristically flat, unrhythmic final sentence:

They were so tired and happy that it was as if they were already in possession of endless quantities of time and money.

McGahern wastes no words. His spare, terse and sometimes elliptical prose seduces with its lyricism, shocks with its electric dialogue, jolts sometimes with unexpected humour. His evocation of the simplest and most homely things brim with poetry and love:

She put the plate before him, fried eggs and bacon, a yellow well of butter in the middle of the creamed potato.

Unexpected perspectives add a dimension of dignity and wisdom to the humblest of subjects: here, a flash of consciousness during a fight between two navvies on a building site:

He took the shovel that leaned against the mixer, and drove at Jocko, the dull thud of the blade on cloth and flesh or bone, buttocks that someone must have bathed once, carried in her arms.

Moments of tenderness and connection are rare for McGahern but precious. The best of the stories express yearning for the simplest and most hard-to-come-by commodities: love and acceptance. As one character remarks:

The most difficult things always seem to lie closest to us, to lie around our feet.