`A Book Only Lives if It Finds Lovers'

Here is the first paragraph of a first novel published in 1963:

“Mrs Reegan darned an old woollen sock as the February night came on, her head bent, catching the threads on the needle by the light of the fire, the daylight gone without her noticing. A boy of twelve and two dark-haired girls were close about her at the fire. They’d grown uneasy, in the way children can indoors in the failing light. The bright golds and scarlets of the religious pictures on the walls had faded, their glass glittered now in the sudden flashes of firelight, and as it deepened the dusk turned reddish from the Sacred Heart lamp that burned before the small wickerwork crib of Bethlehem on the mantelpiece. Only the cups and saucers laid ready on the table for their father’s tea were white and brilliant. The wind and rain rattling at the window-panes seemed to grow part of the spell of silence and increasing darkness, the spell of the long darning-needle flashing in the woman’s hand, and it was with a visible strain that the boy managed at last to break their fear of the coming night.”

When we open a novel, we are impatient to begin. A practiced reader slowly but firmly presses the accelerator, eager to reach the speed when the cruise-control can be switched on. But wait. This vehicle is dual-op. Like a driving-school instructor, the author has his own brake and accelerator. Almost invisibly, our man eases down on the brake pedal. What he gives us is the literary equivalent of a Dutch interior from the 17th century, a Vermeer in shadows. We don’t run through a gallery. Nothing is hurried and details grow in importance. We notice four colors in five sentences – and the white of father’s cups and saucers is shockingly white. The darning needles, too, seem ominous, like weapons.

The sentences are straightforward but our narrator knows how to manipulate syntax and pacing. The three commas in the first sentence, the insertion of “her head bent,” are a storyteller’s trick, rooted in oral narrative, to slow progress and prolong anticipation. This is appropriate, for rain is falling and we are seated by the fireside on a windy winter evening, waiting for the story to begin. We’ve encountered such deftness before. Another Irishman – where else could we be but Ireland? – begins one of his stories like this:

“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.”

Our man is good with texture. His fourth sentence is seeded with alliterative pairs – “glass glittered,” “flashes of firelight,” “deepened the dusk.” He knows the worth of repetition – “spell” twice in the final sentence, and three abstract nouns tolling like a mournful bell – “silence,” “darkness,” “fear.” This is realistic fiction in a darkly lyrical key, without melodrama, dissonance or attention-seeking pyrotechnics. We don’t need to see the artistry to fall under its spell.

The writer is John McGahern and the book is his first, The Barracks, as grim and beautiful a novel as I know. The principal failing of contemporary fiction is a failure of narrative tone, its stance toward the reader, whether jokey, ironic, self-congratulatingly sensitive or faux-naïve. Beginning, often, with their titles, we don’t take today’s novels and stories seriously. McGahern’s tone, to my inner ear, is grownup and confiding. He seduces us with seriousness, which is not the same as earnestness or humorlessness. His fiction respects readers, treats them as valued colleagues. In a 2002 interview with Eamon Maher, McGahern said:

“I think that the whole of literature would collapse without the solitary reader. No matter how people try to legislate for literature with university courses, with prizes, with reviews, it still all comes down to the solitary reader being king and queen. You never know what the reader is going to come up with. And if somebody likes a book, it may be because of a fresh insight that the author never dreamed of. A book only lives if it finds lovers. Lovers talk.”