The Irish literary world suffered a terrible loss in late March when celebrated novelist and short story writer John McGahern - easily one of the 20th Century's greatest Irish writers - died of cancer at the age of 71.
In a twist not unlike those which dotted his fictional explorations of rural Irish life, McGahern's own life story "All Will Be Well" was published here in the U.S. just weeks before McGahern died.
"All Will Be Well" reveals the often tortured inspirations behind McGahern's powerful, beautiful fiction.
McGahern was the oldest of seven children from Leitrim. We read that McGahern's father, a police sergeant, has a violent streak which, invariably, is directed towards his almost saintly mother.
Sadly, McGahern's mother, a teacher, died of breast cancer when John was just nine.
Indeed, there are several familiar themes of Irish fiction in McGahern's life story: for example, a beloved mother and domineering father.
In another echo of many Irish narratives, McGahern initially set his sights on the priesthood, partially because it clearly would impress his mother.
However, the McGahern children do not buckle following their tragedy. According to McGahern, his mother's love, her legacy of independence, was so strong that it helped the children survive the hard years they lived under their father's rule.
McGahern, whose writing career was bound up in lush, clear-eyed descriptions of the Irish countryside, describes his own home as such: "There was no running water then, other than in streams or rivers, no electricity, no TV, very few radios, and when newspapers were bought they were shared between houses. Each locality lived within its own small world."
Rather than the priesthood, of course, it was writing that would call McGahern, and not only intellectually.
As with Joyce (to whom McGahern is often compared), McGahern drifted away from rural Ireland. He travels to Dublin and London, then the continent - Paris, Spain, and even the United States.
But for all that travel, it was in McGahern's homeland - specifically rural Ireland, its beauty and also its provincial nature - which was his muse, in his early novels (such as "The Dark" and "Amongst Women") through the later short stories which have earned their place among Ireland's finest.
As McGahern writes: "The people and the language and landscape...were like my breathing." It is to every reader of Irish literature's benefit that McGahern was able to complete this book before he died.
($25/304 pages Knopf)
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