By John Spain

THE acclaimed Irish author John McGahern — universally recognized as Ireland’s greatest living writer — died suddenly in the Mater Hospital in Dublin last Thursday. His passing, at the age of 71, was followed by an unprecedented wave of emotion which swept across the country here.

McGahern was not only our best contemporary writer, but uniquely among authors here, he had a deep, personal connection with so many Irish people, whether they had ever met him or not. His writing so moved people that they felt a powerful personal bond with him.

They saw themselves in what he wrote. Their eyes were opened again to the beauty of their own country and way of life and the value of the precious things that really matter.

To so many ordinary people here, McGahern was far more than a brilliant writer. He had become a kind of philosopher of the Ireland we are in danger of losing, a national seer.

And so, especially in recent years, McGahern had achieved a kind of national sainthood, something which caused him some amusement and which he was good at puncturing when necessary. But for which he was also deeply appreciative.

I first became conscious of the extraordinary regard and affection so many people here had for McGahern a couple of years ago when I went along to a public reading he was giving in the National Gallery in Dublin. It was not only packed to capacity, but the entrance hallway and staircase were jammed with people trying to get in.

The atmosphere was electric. You could have heard a pin drop. The applause when it was over was thunderous.

We knew then, of course, that he was ill, and that added a lot of highly charged emotion to the evening. He had been fighting cancer for two years at that point. And he had been fighting it since, looking frail recently but still energetic and making regular appearances in public.

There was no hint that the end was near. So when it came last Thursday, it caught everyone by surprise.

McGahern had been attending the Mater Hospital in Dublin from his home in rural Co. Leitrim once a week for the last year for a combination of chemotherapy and stem cell treatment, a new method of combating the disease.

Unfortunately, it was too late to stop the progress of the cancer which was well established when it was first detected in 2002. McGahern was aware that his time was limited but had been hoping that the revolutionary new treatment would give him another few years of life.

Last August the Irish Independent launched a book collection called Great Irish Writers, for which I was responsible. The weekly collection of 20 books began with McGahern’s last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun, and after the launch we went for a drink and he told me he was hoping that what he jokingly called “the monkey gland treatment” would buy him extra time.

He spoke candidly then about how the disease had been missed and that he was aware that if it had been spotted earlier it could have been treated. But typically he did not bear any bitterness for the failure to detect the disease in time, even though he had been telling his doctor that he thought something was wrong.

Sadly he got even less extra time than he himself or anyone else expected, and the announcement of his death last Thursday caused widespread shock and upset. No one had expected him to go so soon, or so suddenly.

As I said above, McGahern held a unique place not only in Irish literature but in the hearts of so many ordinary Irish people who loved books. More than any other writer he captured the Irish psyche, the experience of being Irish, who we are and where we have come from.

He wrote beautiful and perfectly measured prose with a deceptive simplicity. You did not need a dictionary by your side to read him, yet in spite of being so accessible he was more profound than any of his contemporaries, even than John Banville or Seamus Heaney. His writing had no need of literary artifice or intellectual complexity.

He was also quintessentially Irish. That They May Face the Rising Sun was a book about how it is possible to live well and find happiness even in contemporary Ireland. Because of the growing realization that in the Celtic Tiger Ireland of today we have lost something very important, the theme of that extraordinary book resonated strongly with Irish people.

Published in 2002, 12 years after his award-winning Amongst Women, the novel was set in the enclosed world of a small community living around a lake in a quiet part of rural Ireland (like McGahern himself). It was worth the wait.

Not much happens, yet the book somehow manages to be about everything. The small world of rural Ireland is transformed into an everywhere. Through the spiritual depth of McGahern’s writing, the local becomes the universal.

This deep spirituality in McGahern’s writing reached its fullest expression in his last book Memoir, which tells the story of his traumatic childhood, the death of his beloved mother from cancer when he was still a boy and the way he and his siblings suffered at the hands of their violent father, a police sergeant in a rural backwater in the Ireland of the 1940s.

We already have a fictional account of this in his first novel, The Barracks. The difference here is that this is fact, and it is fact recalled with a ferocious yet dispassionate precision.

Nothing prepares one for the impact of this powerful memoir, for the intensity and clarity with which McGahern remembers his painful history, or the remarkable serenity with which he now writes about it. The book is, at times, truly heart-breaking.

But it is heart-breaking and entrancing at the same time because, in spite of the pain, the book is suffused with the joy of living, with McGahern’s extraordinary empathy for other human beings, with his sense of wonder at the beauty of the Irish countryside, with his understanding of the rhythms of everyday existence and the importance of finding contentment in an ordinary life.

In that sense, his Memoir is his most philosophical book, written in beautiful, lyrical prose and leavened with wry observations and a quiet humor that lighten some of the darker pages.

As in Rising Sun, what McGahern deals with in Memoir is not just his own story but, in passing, the most fundamental questions about Irish society, how it developed after independence, the values which emerged as the nation was built, who we are and how we live.

Instead of only looking back in sadness at a terrible time for himself and his sisters, McGahern also looks back with affection to the richness of a childhood at the time deep in the Irish countryside, a time when kids could mend bikes, harness a jennet, save turf.

So Memoir is about more than McGahern’s own story. It is about his own trauma and the societal constraints of the time which allowed it to continue.

But it is also about the better side of the Ireland he grew up in and what we all have lost in the meantime — the self-reliance, the humor, the extended family networks that created a more limited but perhaps richer world than the one we live in today.

As well as his extraordinary Memoir and Rising Sun, McGahern was the author of other acclaimed novels, collections of short stories and plays. His career took off in the 1960s with his novel The Dark, which was banned and which famously resulted in him being dismissed from his job as a teacher in Dublin.

After that, he left Ireland for a while and worked abroad. But inevitably he was drawn back and, although he spent some periods teaching in universities in America and elsewhere, he was most at peace on his small farm beside a lake in Leitrim, where he lived for the last 30 years with his second wife, the American photographer Madeline Green. Over the years, his work has appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies and has been translated into many languages.

Although I knew him only slightly, I will miss him greatly. His Memoir is my bible. If by any chance you have yet to discover McGahern get that book and prepare to be overwhelmed. Even if you never read books, you will be enthralled.

Memoir is upsetting and uplifting at the same time. But what stays in the mind at the end of it is a vision of a lost Ireland — the country lanes along which McGahern and his mother used to walk to school together and where they found such peace and beauty together. McGahern’s lyrical description of the green tunnel lanes is replayed in repeated passages in the book to mesmerising effect.

The following lines from page 80 of Memoir, in which McGahern recalls walking through the lanes with his mother on a morning when she has recently returned again from hospital after cancer treatment, give a flavor of the spiritual nature of this magical book:

“I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.”