'Open to the World': A Reading of John Mcgahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (Critical Essay‪)‬

John Banville remarked in his review of Amongst Women, 'We have the feeling that we have not so much been reading as living', and Thomas Kilroy expressed a similar view of the novel's impact: 'It conveys a sense of a force above and beyond the individual person, an ongoing cumulative process'. (1) Such remarks are even more appropriate in the case of That They May Face the Rising Sun. The absence of plotting or chapter divisions, the lack of dramatic build-up, the transparency of narrative point of view, the emphasis on description and dialogue with minimal analysis, the presentation of character without interior monologue or development during the novel's timespan: in so many ways, McGahern's poetic narrative appears to discard many conventions of novelistic tradition and to simply present in an impersonal way a year in the life of a closed, rural community. Yet its experimental means create an image of a particular kind of world and a particular kind of experience of life's passage. In the end, its technique affirms a vision of life's essential movements that is not to be understood by human intelligence or to be explained in terms of socio-historical formations. This vision rests on a sense of the human embedded in the natural, and readers of the novel have generally assented to Seamus Deane's view that McGahern's sixth novel has 'an amplitude and serenity rarely achieved in fiction'. (2) Much of this can be deduced from the first episode, which begins as follows: