John McGahern, Memoir. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. 272 pages. GBP 16.99 (hardback). In his long-awaited new Memoir, John McGahern revisits the places that are so familiar to the readers of his novels and short stories. Any reader of McGahern's fiction will have been struck by the constant recurrence of names, places, incidents, images, and even phrases throughout his oeuvre. Some not-so-astute critics have subsequently over the years levelled the charge that McGahern has been repeating himself since the beginning and has made a career out of telling the same story over-and-over-again in six different novels and nearly forty-odd short stories; and that, moreover, this small store of materials has been mined from the author's real life rather than made up as is 'proper' for works of fiction. In comments made in occasional interviews McGahern has always brushed these accusations off lightly. Art, he argues, is about the artist's vision, about the way the materials are shaped and ordered in accordance with this vision rather than about those materials themselves. Writing is nothing more than "getting the words right', and characters become 'as much a way of seeing as a character in [their] own right'. So if commentators limit their discussion of his works to guessing at the origins in McGahern's own life of incidents and characters (is the abusive and tyrannical father in The Dark or Amongst Women in fact a thinly disguised portrait of McGahern's own father?; did adolescents in the 1940s really m********e over risque ads in the Irish Independent?; did McGahern himself work as a labourer on a London building site?), in how far does that then contribute anything worthwhile to the study of his art?--especially if we consider that McGahern himself has over the years already openly discussed some of the same materials he had used in his fiction in interviews and non-fiction writings.
