The subtle art of suggestion

Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already perfect. He also added two stories, one of which, ‘The Country Funeral’, strikes me not merely as the best that he ever wrote but also as the one that most accurately epitomises the sort of subject that he chose and his unsparing way of dealing with it.

Three brothers, though long since transplanted to metropolitan settings, are still emotionally connected to the seaside hamlet in which, as fatherless children, an uncle invited them, as an act of grudging charity, to spend their summer holidays on his estate. Now, the uncle having died, they reluctantly set off for his funeral, leaving their mother, too old to travel, behind. The first brother is a once brilliant schoolmaster who seemed destined to go far but then succumbed to an inexplicable inertia.