Love of the World
By John McGahern
Faber £20, 448 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Everything interesting begins with one person in one place.” John McGahern, considered Ireland’s finest living novelist until his death in 2006, was essentially a prophet of the local. From his early experience of life in the “poor heart” of Ireland, his fiction focuses on small-scale events that speak for wider issues. “The universal is the local”, he writes in this collection of his non-fiction, “but with the walls taken away”.

Taking the walls away is a fair expression of what hope springs from the non-fiction essays, reviews and prefaces of a writer celebrated for novels and stories. We want to know what made it happen, where that imaginative richness came from.

The evidence here is mixed: both elating and disappointing. In a review of Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate, for instance, a few hundred words encompass some brilliant insights into “those old, useless arguments about the upperosity of verse contra prose”, as he calls them.

Yet, when reviewing Breyten Breytenbach’s End Papers what he elsewhere calls “the good manners of the intellect” are stripped away to reveal a core of steel. McGahern himself experienced censorship, when his second novel, The Dark, was banned in Ireland; he lost his teaching job when he compounded the crime by marrying a Finnish divorcee. But as he says, “the printed word is pitiless in these matters”; the fact that Breytenbach was imprisoned for his views doesn’t prevent McGahern calling the South African’s book “pretentious and confusing”.

Such excoriation is rare in McGahern. Elsewhere, those manners find too much room on these pages. Reams have been written about the magic of his descriptions of Ireland – so why does a 1995 article on Galway read like the Irish Tourist Board? “[Galway] is a centre for medicine, fishing, light industry and tourism, with easy access to a richly varied hinterland.”

No, there’s only one subject for McGahern. Get him on to literature, on to words themselves, and the pulse starts to beat in his prose, as when he writes on “The Letters of John Butler Yeats”, or Dubliners, or an essay called “What is my Language?”, for example. “Playing with Words”, a single, sizzling page, begins: “I write because I need to write. I write to see. Through words I see.” “The Solitary Reader”, which takes him from his boyhood reading in a remote farmhouse to the 1990 Booker prize dinner, when his fifth novel, Amongst Women, was shortlisted, is one of the great accounts of a writer’s development.

Perhaps the moment in this rich, but variable, book that best reveals the young John McGahern comes in his tribute to Irish artist Patrick Swift. As the pair sat outside a London pub, “the talk turned to Balbec and the sea, to the great passage on memory in St Augustine’s Confessions, and finally to the Image, how all artistic activity centres on bringing the clean image that moves us out into the light. On that we could agree. We could even order a large gin on the strength of it.”

Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor