The Leavetaking

by John McGahern

Widely considered one of the greatest Irish writers by readers and critics alike, John McGahern has been called “arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett” (The Guardian) whose “spare but luminous prose” (Chicago Tribune) is frequently compared to that of James Joyce. In The Leavetaking, McGahern presents a crucial, cathartic day in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who, along with his new wife, returns to Ireland after a year’s sabbatical in London. Moving from the earliest memories of both characters into the present day, The Leavetaking recounts the couple’s struggle to overcome the suffocating influence of the church in order to find happiness in a fulfilling adult love.

Genres: Fiction, Irish Literature, Literary Fiction, Ireland, 20th Century, Modern Classics, Novels

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

McGahern began his career as a schoolteacher at Scoil Eoin Báiste (Belgrove) primary school in Clontarf, Ireland, where, for a period, he taught the eminent academic Declan Kiberd before turning to writing full-time. McGahern's second novel 'The Dark' was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied clerical sexual abuse. In the controversy over this he was forced to resign his teaching post. He subsequently moved to England where he worked in a variety of jobs before returning to Ireland to live and work on a small farm in Fenagh in County Leitrim, located halfway between Ballinamore and Mohill. His third novel 'Amongst Women' was shortlisted for the 1990 Man Booker Prize.
He died from cancer in Dublin on March 30, 2006.

Reviews

[Dem · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Leavetaking by John McGahern was written as a love story, its two parts deliberately different in style and while I enjoyed the first part of the story the second part just didn't work for me and I felt it was out of sync with the usual style of McGahern Novels.

The book tells the story of a day in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher Patrick Moran who has returned to Ireland after a year sabbatical in London. While the story is slow and little happens in the first half of the novel, the author's descriptions and prose keeps the reader interested and turning the pages for more.

The story is quite reflective of parts of McGahern own life experiences as a child and this was the part that I enjoyed and felt he conveyed best in the novel. The mother and son relationship was extremely well written. The second part of the novel is mostly spent in London and I felt the story became unrealistic and the characters actions unconvincing and I was left disappointed on finishing the novel.

I have enjoyedAmongst Women and That They May Face The Rising Sun by this author.


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[A. Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beauty of the boy's misery over the death of his mother is enough to warrant a five-star rating. It is flawlessly paced, dreamlike, wrenching. There are a few bits in this book that cause a stumble, but the telling is quiet, the movement inexorable, the outcome healing. The boy takes his leave of his mother, and then the man takes leave of his mother country. McGahern writes from life, we know, but this not an autobiography at all. He draws on his life and the life around him and makes a lovely story about love and lack of love and loss of love and coming to love. A very warm book in spite of the coldness in some of its characters.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

McGahern is maddening! People from a small country, if they are lucky, will be forever held to the throat by the daggers of realist novelists, with their deft understanding of the country, and their little love for the place. This is honestly a minor work in comparison to something like The Dark, perhaps because of the London section and the weird Freudian love story rings, if not inauthentic, simply discordant in comparison to the evocation of Ireland, mothers and fathers, the Church. Not a place to begin. I do think, as years have passed, that McGahern should be more widely read by my generation, or more publicly read. His prose is essentially flawless, which is why I find the heart of his novels so frustrating and important -- there is nothing to hide behind.

[Ben Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

My least favourite of the John McGahern books I've read so far but this is far from a bad book. The writing as always is superb and the story (which follows a disenchanted Irish schoolteacher) is good but, for me, didn't particularly stand out.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunting and beautiful book about love.

[Rory O’Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant read, really enjoyed the slow pacing. Part 1 is very heavy, while Part 2 (my preferred half) is lighter but still touching. Felt immersed throughout, and could really picture the characters and setting of it all. Describing the church's oppressiveness with such restraint while still making us feel angry about it all is such impressive writing from McGahern, particularly considering his personal life.

The last page or so is written so beautifully that it deserves its own mention.

[Charlie Bailes · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first half of The Leavetaking is the least I have enjoyed any of the McGahern books I've read. Although the themes and oppressive atmosphere are similar to The Dark and The Barracks I felt they were used less effectively. However, this changes as I came to the second half of the book, this breaks completely with the atmosphere of the first half, allowing the characters to find a freedom not fully realised in McGahern's earlier works. The oppressiveness of the first half came to feel deliberate as it made the second half richer and more satisfying.

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, somewhat wistful look at the last day that a young schoolmaster will spend at his school.

We explore the master's thoughts and see his pupils, hear the bell ring in the playground to call the boys in to class. Why is he leaving his job? We learn that it is because of the strict morality and disapproval of the priests who run the school.

McGahern was showing how the secular state was still largely run by the Catholic church in Ireland, asking us to consider the actions of a man who was putting love before obedience and conformity.

While little appears to happen, the book is one to which we can return to savour the writing and reflect on the past, especially now that so many hidden truths have surfaced about church-run institutions. No hint of the irony shows; McGahern was just presenting life as people then experienced it and showing that not everyone was willing to live under the thumb.

I recommend this book for many reasons. It's not cheerful, but neither is it sad. The prose is gentle and lovely.

[David Crowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. The book moves quietly, but the images stay sharp, the shadows of seagulls drifting across the pages, the Irish slipping into speech without notice, the rhythm of prayers drilled into children who barely know what they mean. McGahern shows the Church at its most foolish and its most powerful, and he does it without raising his voice. A small book that feels larger the more you think about it.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Realistic take on love, sex, and much in between (‘the room redolent of slime and fish’). More polished than the earlier work but not as zesty as The Pornographer.

[Sean Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hauntingly beautiful… masterful McGahern

[David Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the introduction to this second edition of 'The Leavetaking', McGahern refer to the deviation in style between the first part and the second part. The first part is temporally fluid, deeply lyrical and tense in its prose and its feeling. The second part is more temporally linear and is dominated by dialogue with rarer flourishes of lyricism. McGahern describes the latter section as being a reflection of the mindset of a man in love and as being intentionally stylistically different to reflect this. Not to contradict the author but I felt that the first segment was so rich in feeling, so generous in style and in substance relative to a more threadbare and restrained second portion. The protagonist seems resigned and disillusioned in the second segment as he traverses London, even after meeting his wife. Memory is the true safekeep of love in this novel - in my view, McGahern fails to depict romantic love in a compelling or serious way in the second segment. I just didn't buy it and this detracted hugely from this piece.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really shouldn't rate it as I didn't finish it. It bored me. I don't speak Irish so the dialogue in Irish was lost on me and so, I feel sure, was an important meaning in the sentence. I really felt in the reading that I did in this book that the author expected me to know things about it without his having to tell me about them. I've read many Irish writers works that were brilliant but this isn't one of them.

[Russell George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading John McGahern can take a little getting used to, but it’s always worth it. This felt very Joycean at points – the whole lyricism of everyday experience. Preferred the first half to the second, tbh. The author admits in the preface that they were written separately, and that shows at times. Still enjoyed it though.

[David McEwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first part seemed good - great language and serious ideas - but I felt there was some padding out going on. This should have warned me because the second part was pretty awful: a really artificial first-person narrator and a contrived storyline. The author could well have kept part one only and turned it into a novella

[Ruth Loizides · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough slow read

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed...nice story and take on Irish personalities...
McGahern weaves the story around his own family memories so it is somewhat repetitive from previous books..but more straight forward,

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another beautiful work, does anyone feel the human condition as deeply as John M. Gorgeous

[Susan Lanigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hard, sad but meditative work.

[Joel Gladstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new author to me, but a magnificent introduction. In particular, the first of the two parts is brilliant in its economy yet lyric prose.

[Pádraig Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and inspiring

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this novel. The first part is quite good. It jumps back and forth between the protagonist's last day as a schoolteacher and his childhood, and the switching is done quite well, without ever being confusing. There are a lot of well done and fascinating scenes in the boy's childhood revolving around the death of his mother, and though I've never experienced a death that close to me, based on my experience grieving, everything was quite realistic. The writing is generally good, and there are some nice images, like the narrator's meditations on a flock of birds that give my edition its cover. However, the second part isn't anywhere near as good. The protagonist now discusses his adulthood and the year long sabbatical he took in London. Here he meets an American woman and the novel almost seems to slip into an entirely different story. Whereas the protagonist is from a poor rural area of Ireland, his American lover is rich and so he gets dragged into a serious of complicated situations with her and her father. I found this to be quite jarring. The characters do continue to be fairly well written, and the father is especially disturbing. However, the romance between the two characters proceeds rather too quickly for me, and I never get a sense of why they love each other. Further, the deft jumping back and forth between past and present that occurred in the first part of the novel is largely missing here. Thus I definitely did not enjoy the second part anywhere near as much as I did the first. As a result, I can really only rate the novel overall as average - the first and second parts sort of balance each other out. Had the whole novel had the same quality as the first part, this would easily have been worth four or even five stars, but as it is, I can only give it three.

[Sanjuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel is broken into two parts - the first part I found to be uncharacteristically dull for McGahern, but the second part is really beautiful and moving, and much more in keeping with what I expect from McGahern's work. As a whole, the themes are familiar for a McGahern novel - family, Ireland, the abuses of the Catholic Church - all represented. The story is rooted in a stern sense of reality, and although inconsistent, it's a good read for a McGahern fan.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unusually structured book, broken in two halves but both dealing with a fateful day in the life of an Irish schoolteacher, the day when he takes his leave from the schoolteaching profession in Ireland he presumed would support him for the rest of his life. McGahern himself had experience with such a leavetaking, though in his case it was involuntary and in retaliation for a novel considered scandalous and corrupting in its influence. The first half of the book focuses on the first love of the protagonist's life, his love of his dying mother; the second half deals with his efforts to emancipate himself from the pain of his first love and the events leading up to his second love, in which he is awakened to the joys and torments of sexual maturity, and finally the third love which forces him to choose between fidelity to its calling and fidelity to the demands of the church. The prose is slow in pacing, but thoughtful and deliberate, and the end effect justifies the seeming slowness of the novel, which is after all rather short. McGahern could have used the novel as a platform for hurling brickbats at a narrow Irish parochialism that threatened his livelihood, but instead he deals with his homeland with a sorrowful compassion and artful gentleness that is far more persuasive. The mirror he holds up to his homeland though as the protagonist and his wife leave Ireland behind to return to the comparative open-mindedness of England, is far from flattering.

[Bill Keefe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Working backwards with McGahern, this book came as a surprise. Seems like I'm working backwards from a writer who increasingly found simplicity in his writing. Thus, this book came as somewhat of a shock. This is the "Joycean" McGahern critics refer to. Not a robust tale, no twists in turns; you know what's coming from the get go. McGahern's gift is that in the simplest, most mundane of life's experiences he brings to the reader the richness of being human. And he does it with tight - and in this book, challenging - prose.

Unfortunately, working backwards with McGahern put me in the position of reading Part I of this book after having read his memoir. They are almost identical; portions of the latter lifted directly from the former. It was so confusing. I'd read this before. Why? Will I have to read the remaining 150 pages of parallel prose. This encounter with a writer's fiction miming his life and his autobiography lifting passages from his fiction was, and still is, very unsettling. I still don't know how to approach this. This struggle, this discomfort of reading the same thing twice, of repetition, of confusion is the only reason I didn't give this book a four star. It was really a wonderful read.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story about a school teacher at a Catholic school in Ireland. He marries a divorcee which creates problems with the town priest and the school's head master. The story is told in two halves. The first half is well written stream of consciousness writing where the school teacher at one moment is thinking about his position in the present, then in the next moment he is remembering his upbringing and his relationship with his parents and grand parents and his first girlfriend. In the second half of the novel the story telling is much more straight forward. It's the story of Isobel, the woman he is to marry. It is a good read.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

About half way through part two I struggled to make the connection with part one both in style and content. That he tool the threads and brought them together at the end was not enough to earn five stars. The prose and the jdeas around leaving, ending, disconnecting throughout was, despite that, enough to give it an easy 4 stars - or perhaps on a scale more familiar to the hero of the story, a straight A.

[Suzette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whew! Its a hard read. He moves from time to time and place to place all in the same chapter, the same page, and even the same paragraph. Very difficult for me to follow. Helps to have my Irish husband next to me while reading to translate some of the Irishisms....."the comagie field"

Just ready to start Part II

[Saima · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was not an easy read, moving back and forth between different times and scenarios within a paragraph wasn't easy for me to grasp. I finished reading it, because I like to finish what I start. Otherwise, it was boring and dry for me..

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A single, final day of reflection by a school teacher about to be dismissed on what has brought him to this point. As ever I envy the Irish their writing, their ability to be gentle, poetic and compelling and to speak so eloquently of what drives us through life.