Asked if he believed in heaven, John McGahern said it was hard to be sure about such ‘big questions’, but he did know one thing: there were few writers in it. How did he know? ‘Because they’d have nothing to write about,’ he answered, ‘there would be too much happiness there.’ Happiness always seemed to be at one remove in McGahern’s world, but was no less desirable for that.

In an interview with Robert McCrum of The Observer, McGahern suggested that knowledge might get in the way of happiness; as soon as we are aware of being happy, or bring it to mind, it tends to slip through our grasp. McCrum quoted a passage from That They May Face the Rising Sun to the author:

McCrum: ‘He felt this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech. Happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped. It should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed if it ever comes at all.’ Is that your view?

McGahern: That’s exactly it. I think that complete happiness isn’t possible in life and when it happens it’s not noticed. I think people forget that complete unhappiness is as equally unachievable as complete happiness.

‘You were in paradise and didn’t know it,’ Patrick Ryan remarks in the novel to his émigré brother, Johnny, about his upbringing in Ireland before leaving for England. It seems the mark of paradise is that one does not know one is in it.

Elsewhere in the novel the shared life of Joe and Kate Ruttledge, the couple who have returned from London to live in Leitrim, is described: ‘They did not feel particularly quiet or happy but through them ran the sense, like an underground river, that there would come a time when these days would be looked back on as happiness, all that life could give of contentment or peace.’ Happiness is attained in hindsight, as in Johnny’s appreciation of hospitality through the rearview mirror of Joe Ruttledge’s car in the film version of the novel (directed by Pat Collins).

There is a gap between life and our ways of relating experience: in McGahern’s eyes, it is not just happiness but what passes for the ordinary that is subject to degrees of unknowing. In an early exchange with his sister, Dympna, published in his recent Letters, he wrote of his distrust of the high drama of war memoirs, since experience does not speak for itself: ‘It is strange how people who have lived face to face with it in war hardly ever understand it outside some glorification or other, dying for faith and fatherland etc, it saves them thinking for themselves.’ It is for this reason Ernie O’Malley’s memoirs are valued by McGahern for their grasp of the everyday, in country and city, amidst the turmoil of war: ‘Somebody could make a walk through the woods as passionately vivid as an ambush.’

In That They May Face the Rising Sun Jamesie (Joe’s uncle) remarks to Kate, when she fails to pick up on his droll humour: ‘You nearly have to be born into a place to know what’s going on and what to do.’ It may be, however, that even a walk in the woods has to await literary form to be realised in the mind: ‘We cannot fully see because we are too close, still too involved.’ By the same token it is through words taking place that local experience is opened up to the wider world, precisely McGahern’s achievement in his last novel.

In his essay on Tomás O’Crohan’s An tOileánach, McGahern contends that knowing a place is different from merely knowing about it. O’Crohan’s book contains few descriptive passages, with little or no ‘idle stretches to be filled with contemplation of the daffodil’. ‘The scenery is there only insofar as it furnishes the necessary frame and sustenance for life. Places are seen in their essential outline, which is inseparable from their use and function … Always place and action are inseparable.’

In McGahern’s novel this awareness lays down a marker for the kind of knowledge that is the connective tissue of social life. These are the social graces of hospitality, rituals, memory and local idioms that come up in the present day against the instant ‘connectivity’ of social media and information-driven digital culture. Much of the social interaction in the story turns on the hospitality of ‘rambling’, people calling into houses without notice and being made welcome with tea, refreshments or stronger stuff. ‘Expect me when you see me,’ Patrick says to the Ruttledges. With social media, this is now a dying practice. It is no coincidence, however, that the most determined efforts to revive and sustain hospitality at a ground level in the ‘Just Rambling’ project, launched by the sean-nós dancer and cultural activist Edwina Guckian, are based in McGahern’s Co Leitrim.

This is not to look back nostalgically on a world that is lost, but rather to challenge the extension of the market’s built-in obsolescence to cultural activities. It is a strange comment on values and social worth that practices are no longer considered fit for purpose simply because they are out of date or have fallen out of fashion – as if fashion is the test of time. It is perhaps for this reason that the passage of time is questioned in McGahern’s novel through a continual blurring of past and present: in Jamesie’s house ‘no two clocks were the same or told the same time but all were running’. For Kate Ruttledge: ‘The past and present are all the same in the mind … They are just pictures.’ This throws a new light on the tendency of happiness to occur in retrospect, for if past and present are not sealed off, neither is such happiness as we manage in this life: ‘It’s a strange and complete happiness,’ McGahern wrote in Memoir, ‘when all sense of time is lost.’

The indeterminacy of time raises questions about when the novel is set. Towards the end, telephone poles are being laid in the fields ‘to connect each house for the same fee’, but this is a countryside already watching Blind Date on television. ‘Take a break. Have a Kit Kat’ has entered into the pleasantries of Jamesie’s conversation, but it is the same Jamesie whose seemingly banal salutation, ‘Hel-lo, Hel-lo, Hel-lo’, recalls his fraught memory of the Selton Hill ambush near Mohill in which six Volunteers were killed by Crown forces, seventy years earlier. Jamesie’s catchphrase was originally the plaintive call for help by the only survivor of the ambush, heard by the young Jamesie in the fields, but frozen into the still-life of a cliché in his memory. A walk in the woods may indeed be charged with the intensity of an ambush.

As ‘the digitalisation of just about everything’ intrudes increasingly into private life, the casual exchanges rendered so faithfully in McGahern’s fiction are precisely those that are not available at the touch of a button or a tap on a keyboard. The corporate aim of Big Tech, as Jonathan Crary has observed in Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, is to identify those ‘forms of sociality that need to be destroyed or deformed to produce acquiescence in the face of … the expanding monetisation of everyday life’. The prose of life as depicted by McGahern resists the clickbait of the commodity just as it does not lend itself to the conventional plot structures of the novel.

This is not rejecting the modern but contesting the inevitability of the forms it is taking in the age of the algorithm. As it happens, digital culture has already arrived in That They May Face the Rising Sun in Johnny’s ‘large silver digital watch, the red numerals pulsing out the second like a mechanical heart eerily alive in the stillness’ as he lies in his coffin. ‘He won’t need this anymore either,’ is the passing comment as the watch is removed from the corpse, ‘but it continued to pulse in the glass ashtray until it distracted Ruttledge and he turned its face down.’ Red numerals also spell the end of the socialising at fair days that punctuated the rhythms of farming life, the impersonality of new cattle marts marked by the ‘big electronic red digits’ of weighing scales, and the silent transactions of payment to farmers, ‘all their attention fixed on the red digital numbers’. Not least of the merits of Pat Collins’s film adaptation of the novel is that it attends to such nuances, slowing the pace of the narrative itself to a world in which people had time on their hands.

So far from being the preserve of the ‘native informant’, the limits of local knowledge are also apparent since, for all the banter and conviviality, there is more to what passes without saying. The ripples set off by the sound of the church bell on the stillness of the lake in the opening lines of the novel point to other disturbances beneath the surface calm of the community, relating to false appearances, double standards, emigration, institutional and domestic abuse and, not least, political and sectarian violence.

It is as if local knowledge becomes uncertain the more it sounds social depths, where there is no privileged access to truth. McGahern relates of his return to live in Co Leitrim: ‘The people and the language and landscape where I had grown up were like my breathing: it would take years to gain that knowledge in a new place.’ It is with this in mind that he writes of the cadences of Joyce’s prose at the end of ‘The Dead’, that its effects have ‘been earned’ by the experiences preceding them, truths that matter refusing to yield themselves up at a glance – in the words of Rilke, a writer much admired by McGahern: ‘Work of sight is achieved / Now for some heart-work.’

Nor does this shared local knowledge circulate with the indifference to context, occasion or milieu that generates the calculus of effects in social media. Rumour and gossip are part of the ‘news’ that is relayed from house to house by the lake, but tact and discretion, and respect for other voices, is central to this aesthetic, preventing the dangers of ‘presumptive speech’. Parading ‘the whole show’ or ‘making a show of oneself’ are shows of force in McGahern’s world. In contrast, there is the sensitivity of John Quinn’s children in the novel towards those who helped them, despite their father’s wanton disregard for others: ‘Now they enjoyed returning these kindnesses in the ease of their prosperity and were too tactful to ruin it with loud display. Their conduct was a direct counter to their father’s behaviour.’

McGahern attracted controversy in exposing the dark corners of Irish life, but there is a studied withholding and reticence in his style, exemplifying the ‘technique and tact and moral sensibility’ he found in the work of F Scott Fitzgerald. Though evoking place in a manner matched by few writers in Ireland or elsewhere, awareness of one’s surroundings is released from the inward-looking gaze of nativism or parochialism. ‘A man could spend his whole life learning the names of places and they’d be still as many as the sands of the seashore left,’ as a character says in the early short story ‘Strandhill, the Sea’.

Belonging, therefore, is not at the expense of the outside world but takes place within it: ‘You’d wonder what all those silly fools are doing rushing off to places,’ the Shah remarks dismissively of foreign travel in That They May Face the Rising Sun, to which Joe Ruttledge answers: ‘Maybe it renews and restores a sense of their own place?’ At one point Joe Ruttledge is helped by his shiftless neighbour, Patrick Ryan, to complete a roof on a shed and notices how the frames of the rafters open up rather than close down the sky:

‘What are you looking at, lad?’ [asks Patrick]

‘At how the rafters frame the sky. Squares of light are more interesting than the open sky. They make it look more human by reducing the sky, and then the whole sky grows out of that small space.’

The capacity of small, enclosed spaces to open onto the world provides an insight into how locality provides an angle of vision on an increasingly globalised society. McGahern liked to quote (or slightly misquote) John Donne’s apophthegm, ‘mak[ing] one little room, an everywhere’, adding: ‘Everything interesting begins with one person and one place.’

The deliberate blurring of inside and outside is central to McGahern’s vision, the writer at once being absorbed in his surroundings, and yet stepping back to articulate what goes without saying in the daily round. In this, it is as if home and belonging have somehow to be lost to be rediscovered: ‘The journey out of that landscape became the return to those lands and small fields and hedges and lakes under the Iron Mountains.’ Instead of reproducing what is there already, or what is taken for granted, language reinvents the familiar and the commonplace: ‘What is general and true has to be found again. If we resort to what is already general in this quest, all we are likely to find is the stale air of the imitative.’

It is not surprising therefore that one of the most sustained recent engagements with McGahern’s work comes from the distinguished American-based Chinese writer Yiyun Li, in her memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. To grasp the resonances of his work she accepted an invitation to read at the McGahern Summer School, Carrick-on-Shannon, and visits places brought to life in his writing such as the barracks and Jim Henry’s bar in Cootehall, and Corramahan in Leitrim near the graveyard where he is buried beside his mother, close to Dolan’s house. ‘To recognise the path and the house and the story behind it,’ she writes, ‘was the closest to clarity I felt on that trip. Not peace but solidity. An unmistakable event from someone else’s life had left unequivocal evidence.’

This captures the tone of McGahern’s writing, creating spaces for outsiders and recent arrivals, and opening new doors on the world. ‘Half strangers sometimes know more about a place than the people who live there,’ remarks the emigrant Johnny in the novel, home from England for what turns out to be the last time. The pathos of distance here is an attempt to renew contact and extend it to others. In this, a literary vision can be said to enact the revitalisation today of Leitrim by newcomers and migrants, the invitation to the stranger extending the shelf-life of communities considered otherwise long past their sell-by date. Hospitality again becomes the order of the day, duties of care extending to those from far-off places.

Hence the KiltyLive initiative, which has rejuvenated the dying village of Kiltyclogher, following heavy emigration that led to the shutting down of the barracks (as in McGahern’s native Cootehall), and the threatened closure of the post office and school. Attracting newcomers from home and abroad, including two families from South Africa, school numbers almost doubled. ‘The new people,’ as one local expressed it, were giving the village ‘an opportunity to grow from the inside’. Opening a coffee shop as a meeting place, one of the South Africans said: ‘I’ll be a blow-in forever but part of the furniture now.’

Hence also the welcome shown to the over one hundred Kurdish refugees who have made their home in Carrick-on-Shannon and its hinterland, including the musician Mohammad Syfkhan, who plays in traditional music sessions (often as accompaniment to the dancer and ‘rambler’ Edwina Guckian). This is also true of the Kurdish athlete and writer, Zak Moradi, who won an All-Ireland medal in 2019 playing for Leitrim’s senior hurling team in the Lory Meagher Cup, and is the author of Life Begins in Leitrim: from Kurdistan to Croke Park. McGahern once remarked in an interview that ‘the beautiful English word for the other is thou’; in his way with words, the stranger is no longer an outsider but is invited to feel at home in the world.

This is an abridged version of a talk delivered by Luke Gibbons as the inaugural John McGahern lecture at the Iron Mountain Festival in Carrick-on-Shannon, and is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death in March 2006.