The beauty is in the truth - Rated 
John McGahern's Memoir (like his life) is dominated by the figure of his father - a tyrant, unpredictably violent and charming by turn. I longed for the boy to grow up and and achieve his independence, but this too is threatened and harassed by the pull of his father. One aspect which disturbs him greatly is that he can find no explanation:
"I knew him better by then than I knew any living person, and yet I had never felt I understood him, so changeable was he, so violent, so self-absorbed, so many-faced. If it is impossible to know oneself, since we cannot see ourselves as we are seen, then it may be almost as difficult to understand those close to us, whether that closeness be of enmity or love or their fluctuating tides. We may have an enormous store of experience and knowledge, psychological and otherwise, but we cannot see fully because we are too close, still too involved."
The father is also a representation for the authoritarian, over-bearing parental Irish state, whose political and religious authorities, the forces of law and order and the educational establishment all form part of the same controlling force - one the Stazi would have been proud of!
"Much has been written about the collusion of Church and State to bring about an Irish society that was childish, repressive and sectarian, and this narrative hardly suggest otherwise. People, especially young people, will find ways around a foolish system, and difficulty can often serve to sharpen desire, but many who could not were damaged or were driven into damaged lives."
Perhaps most damaging and damning is the fact that no one would even say a word against the father, even in private, never mind take a stand to prevent him abusing his children. (Ireland has changed greatly in recent years and this book will leave you in no doubt that change was needed!)
"There was also something dark or foreboding in his personality that made people reluctant to speak about him, and he himself never offered an explanation for anything he ever did."
McGahern's attachment to his mother brings further tragedy with her early death. Her character - loving and loved, constant, amenable, patience and forgiving, was in total contrast to his father's.
Escape came from fishing and reading, sometimes together, on a boat on the river. The author was not blind to the beauties of the gentle countryside and the gentle way of life, one to which he returned in later life. And the simple childhood walk to school (and church) is much repeated until it becomes a lyric:
"...past Brady's pool and Brady's house and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the deep, dark quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon's shop to school."
Growing up the books he most appreciated gave a "mirror on life" and that is what we are given here. It is astonishing that a story so personal and harrowing could be told so frankly without any obvious cover-up, dramatics or bitterness. Thankfully, there is little attempt at analysis and barely a trace of self-pity - no mention of being a victim.
The whole is a lot less morbid than this summary might suggest. The beauty is in the truth.
Wonderful writing - Rated
Ireland has been blessed with many brilliant writers over the years and John McGahern is up there with the very best. Beautifully written, I found the pages that dealt with the death of his mother some of the most moving that I have read and the passage often comes back to me. Also interesting to see that so many of the themes he uses in his other books have their roots in his own upbringing.
A wise and compelling book - Rated
I read this beautiful, lyrical and tear-inducing autobiography in just two sittings. With no chapters or natural breaks, I just could not tear my eyes away from McGahern's seamless narrative.
Concentrating mainly on his childhood and adolescence growing up in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s, it is very much a love letter to his adored mother, an accomplished school teacher, who died of breast cancer when he was eight years old.
It is also a heartfelt exploration of the ambiguous and complicated relationship with his father, a police sergeant, who ruled the family -- McGahern, the eldest child, had six younger siblings -- with a vicious tongue, temperamental mood swings and powerful fists.
At times the grief resonates off the page -- the account of his mother's illness, in which the family was moved out, furniture and all, to the police barracks in a different village while she lay upstairs in her sickbed seemed unbelievably cruel. During the several weeks in which she lay in her sickbed dying, her husband -- McGahern's father -- did not once visit her to offer comfort or companionship. This is something that stays with McGahern for the rest of his life: his inability to understand his father's lack of care or consideration for others close to him.
Despite this, Memoir is not a soppy book. And by no means is it anywhere near as cloying as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (which, by the way, I loved when I read it several years ago). The difference here is that McGahern is not seeking sympathy, but recounting honestly and truthfully what it was like to grow up with a widower father, who could not relate to those he supposedly loved and found it easier to lash out than bite his tongue. In many ways the book is about McGahern coming to terms with the fact that he will never understand his father.
What I found most interesting is how McGahern mined the events of his life for his fiction. I can't tell you how many times I felt the penny dropping as I read specific incidences: just the mere fact that his beloved mother had died of breast cancer explained much about the clear-eyed realistic portrayal of a woman grappling with illness in his debut novel The Barracks.
There are other bits -- the unspecified sexual abuse as he shares his father's bed, the desire to enter the priesthood and the rescue of his sister from a boss who molests her -- that appear in his second novel, The Dark. Similarly, his father's remarriage to a younger woman, the strength of his love for his sisters and the continual running away of his youngest brother, feature in his Booker shortlisted book Amongst Women.
I also found it interesting to read about McGahern's life as a writer: how he first discovered literature (a local priest had a wonderful library he was allowed to riffle); when he first realised he wanted to be a writer and not a priest or a farmer, two options that had been open to him; and how he dealt with the ups and downs of his career (lauded by the literary elite, banned by the Irish censors).
All in all, fans of McGahern's fiction will find much to admire in this wise and compelling book, but even if you have not read any of his novels or short stories this is a must read memoir that will have you rushing to read everything he has ever written.
A living masterpiece - Rated
A great book. It's rich in detail about that part of Ireland (Co. Leitrim) in the 40s and 50s and McGahern's prose transports the reader to the characters, fields, noises and streets of those days. His love for his mother is told with poetic feeling and is unbearably moving in parts not least when they revisit the vacant house after her funeral. He's just as effective in capturing the shift in power in the relationship he has with his brutish father. The other characters of family and friends are clearly drawn as is the role of the Catholic church in McGahern's life. Perhaps he is too fleeting in last quarter about his adult life but there may have not been enough time. Wonderful.
A life-changing book - Rated
Love's lifelong branding of itself into the psyche of some human beings can seem almost cruel in the way it forces them to expose themselves to us. From the heart-shredding fictional obsessions of Jack and Ennis in Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain to the resurrectional purity of John McGahern's love for his mother - dead before his 10th birthday - in Memoir, we sometimes get to see life with savage, christening clarity.
Memoir is the centrepiece of the jigsaw McGahern has had us put together throughout his life as a novelist. If his mother had been cast as his father's wife in any piece of fiction readers would have tossed it aside as being incredible. How could a woman of such piety, empathy, intelligence and love have married a man whose hatred of the world spouted like pus on to his family and those he deemed below him in the social pecking order?
McGahern senior, police sergeant and ex IRA man, deceives himself that others, including his wife and children, will judge him for how he chooses to portray himself at any time. a real-life ham actor who is immersed in the characters he becomes as his moods dictate them. Such is John McGahern's skill and his tendency towards objectivity that some might weep for the desperate childishness of his father who, we never doubt, is beyond redemption.
But what redeems everything is McGahern's love for his mother. Mothers and children everywhere share deep love but McGahern, without mawkishness or sentimetality, makes me believe that his longing for the presence beside him of his mother was what formed his life from birth to his recent death. I can never imagine feeling again such a mixture of emotions when I heard he had died of cancer in Dublin (his mother died of breast cancer). Terrible sorrow at the loss of such a brilliant writer. Huge joy at the thought he breathed his last with the thought that his mother would be waiting for him. The final paragraph of Memoir touches with all the more poignancy in the knowledge that, now, John can make it come true.
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