Carson McCullers writes in polished Southern tones, and this novel is written in language of singular beauty with not a word out of place. Her explorations of the frustrations of love are never bleak but seem to celebrate human love at its oddest and best, turning humdrum lives into heroic ones, and making a sad love story endearing and droll.
Carson McCullers was born in Georgia, and wrote the equally famous novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946).
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.
Ian McEwan 1948–
1978 The Cement Garden
This novel was published in the year before Margaret Thatcher took power in Britain, and its tone and content seem to imply that there was a very great need for her. The house where the four children — Julie, Jack, Sue and Tomare — are being brought up by their parents is in sight of new tower blocks, and the proposed motorway which caused the houses around them to be knocked down, has never been built. Neither parent has any siblings so there are no relatives. The father dies first, and then the mother after a long illness. The children, three of whom are in their teens, decide to bury her in the cellar and tell no one. This is presented as perfectly normal by Jack, who narrates the story. They loved their mother, but they want the giddy freedom which running the household will offer them.
There is not a false note in the whole book; McEwan makes you feel that this is, perhaps, what you would do too under similar circumstances. In any case, the siblings are locked into their own dramas. Tom, the youngest, wants to dress like a girl and is allowed to do so, then he wants to be a baby and this too is arranged. Jack is obsessed with his own adolescent body. Sue keeps a diary. Julie gets a boyfriend. They settle down into an uneasy and fragile harmony, broken only by Derek the boyfriend and the gradual rise of the smell from the cellar. Their world has been so perfectly created that you feel miserable at the prospect of its being broken up.
Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire. He published his first volume of stories, First Love, Last Rites, in 1975. His other novels include The Child in Time (1987), Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam, which won the Booker Prize in 1998, Atonement (2001), which was made into an Oscar-winning film in 2007, Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007) and Solar (2010).
Age in year of publication: thirty.
John McGahern 1934–2006
1990 Amongst Women
In all of John McGahern’s fiction — he wrote five novels and three volumes of stories — there is an air of perfection. He works on a small canvas; the same figures and the same landscape and indeed the same hard-won bleakness appear in much of his work. There is a timeless beauty about his fiction which means that it is unlikely to date or seem out of fashion. The opening pages of his first novel, The Barracks (1963), contain some of the best prose written in English in the second half of the century.
Twenty-seven years later McGahern’s fifth novel Amongst Women tells the story of the War of Independence veteran Moran, his three daughters, his two sons and Rose, his second wife. Besides having one of the best first sentences in recent fiction (‘As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters.’), the book is remarkable for the plainness of its prose, its seamless structure and its careful delineation of the dark forces which gather around family relationships. Moran is both a violent bully and a man with an enormous capacity to charm; his daughters fear him and love him at the same time. McGahern’s genius lies in the relentless accuracy of his prose, and the graceful portrayal of his characters.
John McGahern was born in Dublin and lived in County Leitrim. His novel The Dark was banned by the Irish Censorship Board in 1965. The Leavetaking (1974) and The Pornographer (1979) were followed by his magnificent Collected Stories (1992), That they May Face The Rising Sun (2001) and Memoir (2005). Amongst Women won the Irish Times Literature Prize.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Patrick McGrath 1950–
1996 Asylum
This novel is written in a language which has been created to preserve order, to describe precisely, to win the reader’s trust. This is the first sentence: ‘The catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession has been a professional interest of mine for many years now.’
The narrator is the psychiatrist Peter Cleave, who works in a top-security mental hospital in England in the 1950s. He tells the story of how his colleague Max Rafael’s wife Stella ran away with the brutal murderer and sculptor Edgar Stark, an inmate of the hospital. As with all of McGrath’s work, every word and phrase is carefully weighed and placed; from early on, you cease to trust Dr Cleave’s narrative, but despite this, the figure of Stella, obsessed with Stark, becomes more and more clear and engrossing. Her introduction to Stark, his efforts to escape, her flight to London, her life with him there, and all the inevitable consequences are narrated with an almost prurient zeal by Dr Cleave. Her state of mind and the desires which impell her are utterly convincing, and the way in which Stark deals with her and Cleave watches over her make the book dark, disturbing, Gothic. The scenes in a Welsh farmhouse are particularly bleak. This is the sort of book that when you finish, you immediately want to hand to someone else to read.
Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was Medical Superintendent. His other books include Spider (1992), Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), Port Mungo (2004) and Trauma (2008).
Age in year of publication: forty-six.
Larry McMurtry 1936–
1985 Lonesome Dove
It is extraordinary and unexpected that two of the best American novels of the past decade have centred on the Wild West. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove lacks the poetry and intensity and fierce power of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, but it makes up for that in the quality of its characterization and its plain, careful, perfectly pitched style. It is almost a thousand pages in length, the sort of book that you would stay up all night to finish; it has many old-fashioned virtues: a gripping story, action, sex, death, strong silent types (McMurtry is very good on these), human weakness, strong-willed women, harsh landscape.
It tells the story of a journey of a group of men, one woman and a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana at a time when the Native Americans have been all but wiped out and America has been tamed for the white man. It reads like a book of the Old Testament, a battle against nature at a time when old virtues are being replaced, with constant setbacks caused by the weather, cruel Indians (the few remaining), the crossing of rivers and the vagaries of the human heart. The fact that the tone of this book has been unaffected by the advances made in prose fiction by Joyce and Beckett, Faulkner and Pynchon does not lessen its impact, which is immense, or its status as a modern American masterpiece.