Peace under the Iron Mountain

When he was little, John McGahern’s mother took him with her to the school where she taught, through the lanes with flowering hedges linking the small reedy lakes of Co Leitrim, in the lee of the Iron Mountains. This physical and emotional geography is in his bones, and the source of ‘an extraordinary sense of security, of deep peace’. Over and over, in this memoir as in childhood, he goes

up the cinder path to the little iron gate, past Brady’s house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the dark, deep quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon’s shop.

A similar litany-like repetition was a disconcerting feature of his novel For They Shall Face the Rising Sun. It is his way of conveying unquestioned continuity.

‘People did not live in Ireland then. They lived in small, intense communities.’ Neighbours’ eyes glazed over at any news which was not local. It was only when people died that the ‘illusion of endless continuity’ was threatened, and the loss of his mother is the core of McGahern’s book.

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The father of the family, a police sergeant, lours over the narrative. Understanding nothing, McGahern writes, is one of ‘the great miseries of childhood’; he still does not understand his father, and does not judge him, though versions of him recur ominously in the novels and stories. There is a contemplative quality about this book, and a willingness to yoke farce to tragedy, which separates it from recent ‘terrible Irish childhood’ memoirs of which Angela’s Ashes is a prime example.

The father lived in police barracks 20 miles away, visiting the family at intervals, begetting seven children of which John, born in 1934, was the eldest.