'Robins Feeding with the Sparrows': The Protestant 'Big House' in the Fiction of John Mcgahern (Critical Essay‪)‬

Just as certain motifs and observations recur in his novels and short stories, gaining strength and consolidation with each utterance, so too do the public pronouncements of John McGahern, such as they are, take form around the repetition of certain fundamental personal truths. Of these, McGahern's assertion that the Catholic Church was his 'first book' and his 'most important book' is arguably the most familiar, and the one which still retains the capacity to surprise. (1) It comes, after all, from a non-believer whose work explores an Ireland darker and more complex than that which the established church attempted to mould into being, and who suffered himself at the hands of that church following the publication of his second novel The Dark in 1965. (2) This statement is often accompanied by others which reinforce the sense that McGahern views his early encounter with Catholicism as having been close, in its form, to the act of reading; he admires the role played by the architecture and iconography of the church as the 'bibles of the poor', adding that, for these worshippers, Catholicism's aesthetic splendour 'wasn't ornament [but] was a function'. (3) Of his own youth, he has said that Catholic ceremonies provided 'the only notion of poetry', as well as a 'sense of mystery, of luxury, of beauty'. (4) Having, then, provided him with his first experience of the word, the impact of Catholicism on McGahern's fiction is a powerful one, and certainly, as he writes in a 1991 essay on the genesis of his creative process, it was through an act of reading that he 'came to write'. (5) Ironically, however, this first step towards writing was simultaneously a step away from Catholicism, away from that 'first book'; or rather, away from the metaphorical incarnation of that first book towards one more literal.