Once upon a time, John Montague wrote about his home place in Co Tyrone, Garvaghey - the rough field - as a site of some complexity, of grafted tongues and severed heads, troublesome legacies and modern difficulties. Time has softened his perspective on that "harsh landscape that haunts me", as he once called it, and instead of the "failure to return" with which his celebrated verse sequence The Rough Field concludes, A Love Present reverts with a will.
Not all the stories are confined to Garvaghey by any means, but the place is the book's presiding presence. Many of the stories sketch the way it was with them there way back when, and the influence of the townland's formative manners and morals on a frail, sensitive, emotionally precocious wee chap as he tries to rise beyond the narrow ground of both his respectable upbringing and local mores is palpable throughout.
Not that the adult world of Garvaghey is portrayed with very much sophistication or depth. The old people stand around like dumb-bells here, rather than like the venerable dolmens of the author's much-anthologised poem, stunted equally by petty snobberies and an essential sexlessness. However, and against the odds, the Garvaghey stories' various indistinguishable youthful protagonists, willy-nilly, manage to retain the sensuality and instinctiveness of childhood and to evolve with just the flame of those two properties to guide them.
Sure enough, the child is father of the man, and he in turn proves quite a swordsman, graduating with honours in "Pilgrim's Pad" from a varied course of instruction under Wandy Lang, an American in Florence. (This story is "a shorter version" of the author's "The Lost Notebook".) God bless America; it wasn't only Marshall Aid and the Cold War it brought but the hot peace (spelling varies).
"Pilgrim's Pad" and a rehearsal of it entitled "Sugarbush, I Love You So", featuring a generous Garvaghey girl liberated through working as a "clippie" on Glasgow buses, are yet two more cantos in the long-running seduction fantasy that recurs over and over in Irish male fiction. The overall title of this peculiar and intriguing work by various hands could be something like, "I Was Putty in Her Hands, As God is My Judge: An Aisling" - aisling or wet dream?, as perhaps some graduate student is beginning to wonder.
As Part Two of The Love Pres- ent ends with a carnival of copulation, "Pilgrim's Pad", and the third and final part of the book consists of two stories about death, perhaps the first part may be about birth. And indeed these opening stories are about the birth of awareness, not only in "The Letters", in which a child learns family secrets by reading other people's correspondence, but in, for instance, "Off the Page", in which a complacent Dublin historian of Northern origins lectures in Belfast only to be berated afterwards by a friend: "You and your history - you can't see it when it hits you between the eyes" (dialogue is not a strong suit).
Another story in this section shows broadcaster Mike Byrne being pleasantly surprised when a convent prize-giving turns out to be a booze-up with the nuns (a socio-cultural variation of the aforementioned aisling?).
Some of the stories are anecdotes, some are sketches, and some - "The Last Three Things", a portrait of a woman dying - are somewhat more substantial. But much of what's being told here has been told before. Wasn't it John Montague himself who, 30 years ago, said: "Puritan Ireland's dead and gone"? The tone throughout here is a bit too coy and knowing for its own good. One story is dated 1952. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem all that much out of place. It's entitled "The Limits of Innocence". As much contemporary Irish fiction has shown, we're way over on the other side of those limits now.
George O'Brien wrote the Intro- duction and Notes for The Ireland Anthology, published recently.
