At the close of Memoir (2005), John McGahern imagines meeting his long-dead mother on the country lanes they walked together when he was a child: ‘If we could walk together through those summer lanes, with their banks of wild flowers that “cast a spell”, we probably would not be able to speak, though I would want to tell her all the local news.’

The tension here between the demands of accepting silence as the only possible conduit towards deep feeling and the excited desire to speak is at the heart of McGahern's aesthetic vision. It is the recognition that there is nothing to be said of a world that will go on without any heed of, or care for, the things of human utterance. And yet the fragility of the human imagination in the face of this vast indifference means that speech is never too far away. McGahern's fictive rendering of the world is thus packed with everyday bric-à-brac with the overall effect generated reminding the reader of the centrality of place and location, and of the words we use to connect with that world out there, beyond us. Images of the solidity and continuity of the world abound: natural images, but also more mundane objects – clocks, tables, umbrellas – interact with the human world and human perception. The discrepancy between the realm of the consciousness ‘in there’ and the reality ‘out there’ is stressed, the human and the natural spheres colliding with differing perceptions of time.