'All Toppers': Children in the Fiction of John Mcgahern (Critical Essay‪)‬

John McGahern's first two books were considered at the time of their publication to belong to a literature of protest, to be concerned most fundamentally with exposing the cruelties and privations of Irish rural life at mid-century. Despite their 'un-novelistic' narrowness of focus, The Barracks and The Dark were interpreted as outcries against social conditions in the Irish Republic in general, and against the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church in particular. The controversy that erupted in early 1966 following the revelation of the author's dismissal from his position as a primary schoolteacher in Clontarf the previous year buttressed the view of him as a rebel artist, though McGahern himself was persistent in his repudiation of any intention beyond the purely aesthetic in his writing. It must be acknowledged that the pitilessly clear-eyed apprehension of the inadequacies and hypocrisies of Catholic Ireland in both works--particularly The Dark, with its vivid scenes of family violence and its suggestion of a clerical disposition towards sexual abuse (in chapter twelve)--gave a degree of plausibility to the belief that McGahern was motivated in his early fiction to challenge the pieties and perhaps even the power of the near totalitarian church-state system in which he himself, in his capacity as a teacher in a Catholic primary school, was unhappily implicated. Moreover, the references to Reegan's past as an IRA fighter in The Barracks seemed to adumbrate a glancing critique of the failed promise of the southern Irish state. As four further novels and three volumes of shorter fiction have succeeded The Barracks and The Dark, however, it has become clear that McGahern has never been in more than a very secondary sense a political writer and that such social commentaries as his work provides are marginal to his main purpose. His primary thematic interest is metaphysical. '[A]ll human life is essentially in the same fix', he observes in his autobiographical essay, 'The Solitary Reader', (1) and his novels and stories are concerned with the general conditions of being, with how life is lived and has to be lived. (In saying this it is only fair to point out that in interviews the author is notably reluctant to make concessions towards any thematic generalizations about his work, preferring to draw attention to his aesthetic and procedural priorities). (2) The historical, geographical, and cultural contingencies of McGahern's writing--its Irish details--function as intimately known, paradigmatic instances of those conditions. McGahern emerges from the full range of his fiction as a writer powerfully engaged with process, with the cyclical rhythms of birth, growth, copulation, and death, and with the sometimes fierce clashes of will that serve the instincts for sex and survival. The essentials of his fictional vision are highlighted alike by the title and narrative of 'Wheels', the opening story in his first collection, Nightlines, which focuses on the turn brought about by time in the power battle between a son and his ageing father. Indeed the wheel would become the central motif of the subsequent fiction, developed in the imagery of many of the stories as well as in the variously cyclical, seasonal narrative structures of the novels.