I would like to have been in Ireland yesterday for John McGahern’s funeral. But I’d already been over in Monday for another one and it would have been logistically impossible. Besides, it would have been impertinent, for I knew McGahern only through his writing. But he and I had a good friend in common, and my friend went to Leitrim for the funeral. This is how he described the day.

It was a traditional Irish funeral in a country church. There was no music, and there were no speeches by the graveside.

His first cousin said the mass and gave the homily, which had been worked out between the two of them for several days and contained McGahern’s own directions as to what should be in — lines from John Donne, from Proust, from Yeats, and then a version of himself, why he ended up back in the church, though he was an unbeliever. For all his differences with the church, it was where he first discovered his first book, his first magic, his first aesthetic, his first sense of beauty, and he could no more turn his back on it than he could turn his back on a part of himself.

[Seamus] Heaney and [Brian] Friel and all the boys — they all travelled. The Minister for Culture was there …. All the playwrights were there, and the short-story writers — Eugene McCabe, Colm Toibin, Tom Murphy — they all turned up and stood in the rain outside the door. The two Lessons were read by neighbours from the area in which That They May Face the Rising Sun is set.

He was buried behind the church, in the same grave as his mother, under that same headstone that he had laughed so much about — his father showing off what a big man he was by getting the biggest headstone in Ballinamore. And there it was: “Susan McGahern N.T.” [National Teacher] He was buried with her, and his instructions were that the four local men from around his area were to fill it in the grave fully. There was to be no token spadeful and then waiting for everyone to go. It was to be filled in fully, and while that was going on the rosary was to be said by the graveside so that people could hear clay returning to clay.

It was a wild Leitrim day — clouds scudding across the sky, but bright. An Irish spring day. Not cold. Just as the coffin was being lowered into the grave there was a peal of thunder and a shower of rain. Then it cleared as quickly as it had come. The four sisters were there, and Madeline, his second wife.

The locals turned out for him. He was brought from Dublin this morning, and at every village in Leitrim the route was lined by locals. Apart from anything else, there was a sense of silent gratitude to him for his redemption of other people’s shame — because the Ireland that hammered him is now coming out in the tribunals looking into corruption, child abuse and the rest. And people who did nothing then were just so grateful that there was a wholesomeness about him that they hadn’t realised at the time. There was sense of gratitude to him for having stayed rather than having gone. It would have been awful if he had died in exile in Italy or somewhere. But to have stayed on and then to have seen through the change was what everyone was grateful to him for.

He had extraordinary integrity. But also an extraordinary concern with his place in history and the rest of it. He choreographed the last few years of his life once he got the cancer — in the televison programmes he made for example: there wasn’t a single aspect of his version of himself that he wanted to leave to chance. It’s going to be a hard job for a biographer to crack into an alternative version. He has left such a definitive — and it would seem irrefutable — set of answers to questions.

He left instructions that everyone that was at the funeral was to be invited to a proper wake, with drinks laid on in the hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon. It was like a wedding reception rather than a funeral. The hotel staff were welcoming people with drinks. Then the bell went and everyone was summoned in to “Mr McGahern’s Meal”.

The best piece about him was by Colm Toibin in the Irish Times. It ends like this:

One night in Co Leitrim, when he had recovered from his first bout of illness, Catriona Crowe and myself sat up late with him. We drank and talked. He’d found the hospital and its community of doctors and nurses interesting and funny but also difficult. He was half amused and half annoyed at being offered professional counselling in the face of death, he said. He sighed at the very thought of it. Then he lifted his glass, drank his whiskey and having left a few seconds of silence he spoke again. “We bloom only once and you’d want to be very foolish not to know that”. He looked at us and laughed calmly and resumed the earlier discussion about some recent books he had loved. In the morning, he and Madelaine took us for a walk around the lane by the lake — the world of his last novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun. I remember him explaining the strange brutality of the way swans send their young away from them and into the world. He was, as always, fascinated by things in their variety. He was also laughing and talking, managing his manners and responses — the same gift for poise and grace his readers find in his sentences. In ‘Memoir’, his last book, he was to find that gift useful one more time. It seems immensely sad despite his own calm acceptance of our fate in the world, that his great gift for words and for friendship had bloomed only once, and will not come again.

One of the (shamefully few) novels I read last year was Ian McEwen’s Saturday. It’s about a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a successful, London-based neurosurgeon whose life is briefly threatened by a brush with the violent underworld of his chosen city.

I read it on holiday, in more or less a single sitting (one night when I had trouble sleeping), and thought it excellent. I had bought it on the recommendation of a philosopher friend, who has good taste in fiction. In an email exchange about the book, he wrote:

In class, I happened to be discussing Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, when I read the McEwan book. Epicurus’ ethics is basically very simple:

1. the most important thing that keeps us from living a good life is fear;
2. the best antidote against fear is knowledge.

So to live a good life, the first thing we have to do is to learn about the world. For example, we are afraid of the thunder, but when we know what a thunderstorm is (Epicurus suggests an explanation – he was one of the atomists) we lose that fear; we are afraid of death, but when we understand what death is…, etc.

I think McEwan’s Saturday basically articulates a modern version of Epicurean ethics. The science is not Epicurus’ atomistic physics, but neuroscience. The fear is provoked not by thunder, but by an airplane in trouble at night, by an intruder (with a neurological disorder), the neurologist knows what the disorder is, etc.

Which seems to me to be spot on. In the first encounter with the violent thug Baxter, for example, Perowne is saved from a serious beating because he recognises that the thug is displaying symptoms of a serious degenerative disease — Huntington’s chorea — and fraudulently raises the possibility that he might be able to help his assailant.

The novel has a somewhat pat ending with the hero living happily ever after and the baddie in even more trouble than he was before, but up to then I had found it an intriguing read.

What took me aback was the vehemence of people’s responses to the book. Whenever I mentioned it to friends, the reactions were very sharply polarised. People either admired the novel, or loathed it. There seemed to be no middle ground. And when they loathed it, it was with a special kind of intensity, the product (I inferred) or moral disapproval. They thought that the book reeked of complacency, ostentatiousness and self-indulgence of a particularly despicable kind.

Many critics mentioned a savage review of the book by John Banville in the New York Review of Books. I’m an NYRB subscriber, but I couldn’t find the issue in which the review appeared (May 26, 2005) in the chaos of my study. And, annoyingly, the review was not available online at the NYRB website. I made a resolution to dig it out in the University Library one day, but you know what these resolutions are like…

This morning, however, I began to sort out some of the chaos in my room and came on the missing issue, hidden in some papers I had taken with me on holiday. So I sat down and read Banville’s review. It is indeed very critical. Saturday, he writes,

is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, the squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is [sic] banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew…

Miaow! Lots more in the same vein.

It’s a very hostile review. So what? Isn’t this what highbrow magazines are for? Well, yes. But there is a nice twist to this case. Shortly after the review was published, Banville and McEwen were both shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize — and Banville’s novel, The Sea was declared the winner the following month. I’m sure the eminent judges were not, er, swayed in any way by his savaging of McEwen. But it does show what a snake-pit the literary life can be.