The Leavetaking has richest introduction I’ve read into 2025. Style, mood, pace, motif, symbol, characterization, on two sides of a page, a compact but penetrating world with incense shrouding the vision of love (frankincense and myrrh, swung from the thurible, accompanied by the ringing of the bell, all senses alerted the knees to drop, head bow, and thoughts wander).  

“I watch a gull’s shadow float among feet on the concrete as I walk in a day of my life with a bell, its brass tongue in my hand, and think after all that the first constant was water.

                Two boys drag a small boy towards me through the milling bodies. He is sobbing. I have to lean forward to hear in the din.

                “He says Billy Rudge has been throwing pebbles at his glasses, sir.”

                “Tell Billy Rudge from me if it happens again he’ll go to the office.”

                They run, gripping the small boy between them, who is smiling now behind the cheap misted spectacles. I hadn’t to think to answer. After all the years on the concrete everything had become mechanical now, comforting hand on hair or warning tap on shoulder, the Red Cross kit in the office, telephone for the ambulance when limbs were broken.

                I turn to watch the shadows float, calmly crossing and recrossing the milling shoes and hanging for moments still, how calm and graceful they float or hang still: the air above full of squawking gulls, clumsily turning, the hanging stilts of the claws and the bootbutton eyes tacked to the side of the skull as they wait for the abandoned scraps of bread.

                “Bhuil cead agan dul go dti an leithreas, a mhaistir?” a boy asks my permission to go to the lavatory.

                “Why didn’t you go with your class when I rang the bell?”

                “I forgot, sir.”

                “Do you really need to go?”

                “Not really, sir,” he grins and gallops away before I mechanically say, “Why did you ask then?” and I do not call him back but follow a floating shadow again, the brass tongue of the bell warm in my hand; and I shiver, once it had seemed it would go on lunchtime after lunchtime as this until I withered into a pension at sixty-five, and yet today is the last day I’ll walk with the bell. This evening he’ll dismiss me when I meet him at eight. A smell of urine seeps from the lavatories, their small windows half open under the concrete eave.

                The shadows sweep over the concrete, violent and very fast; and I search for one slow shadow to follow before turning to the air, where the violent sweep of shadows is reflected in a white frenzy above as it nears to when they can fall on the scraps of bread.

                I look on the shape of the buildings that on three sides enclose the concrete I walk on. The lavatories and schoolrooms are flatroofed and concrete, the single arm of the assembly hall alone v-roofed. Ragged rose bushes hang limp under its windows, a strip of black earth in concrete, the concrete beginning to crack after ten years, half-arsed modern as the rest of the country; the two halves of the yard slope in opposite directions. When it was first put down the plans had been read wrong and the slope had flooded the rains into the school, one half having to be torn up and sloped back towards the centre.

                Across the low flat roofs of the schoolrooms I look towards the girls’ school, a nineteenth-century mansion framed in beeches. The iron stairs of the fire escape climb to the door and window where the women lunch, low in the window black hair I kissed once, woman that I loved once: that love has gone and both of us live on though it seemed death then. Now that her power has gone she blushes when we meet, she who was indifferent to me or bored when she had power, as if she feels the part of her life that is gone has been enclosed by my love and could be recalled if the love could. She blushes now that part of her life is gone with the love, and still we live on.”

The opening is set at the end, the last day of school for “I” to be dismissed from his teaching post at an Irish school, for marrying a divorced American he met while on leave in London, the leavetaking to escape another fall out of the heart (a different episode after the black hair mentioned above). The narrative was guided by I’s reflection of the lost loves that shaped his life – the death of his mother continued to brood over I’s early adulthood and his dreams of happiness with the right women, but at the wrong pace. Push comes to shove, like waves crashing into the shore next to the small room where I and his wife made love in the last page of the novel. This time, he could finally defend, to pay the price for love – adamantly he refused the resignation the school authorities had staged and pressed upon him (a symbolic sacrament for the sake of the novel, but also reflects the unique set up between the Church and the state in Ireland before the abuse scandals).  

How love pierced through the veil of past lives, the alacrity of falling in love that shook I’s existence to the core and, after it subsided, became water. Clarity of what it was only came through gauging the highs and lows. Can an experience so carefully camouflaged and locked away – for one to go on living as a contributing member of society – be described in such compact and penetrating manner in every language.

In Cole Porter

“When you’re near, there’s such an air of spring about it

I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it

There’s no love song finer

But how strange the change from major to minor

Every time we say goodbye”

Tsai Chin (蔡琴) sang a Taiwanese classic 相思河畔 in 1986, roughly translated to ‘yearning by the riverside’ or something sticky along that line. I wasn’t sure if there had been a Porter influence, but the sentiment carried word by word :

自從相思河畔見了你 就像那春風吹進心窩裡 我要輕輕地告訴你 不要把我忘記

Unlike these songs, John McGahern wrote more than a happy ending with The Leavetaking – long, satisfying, and bittersweet. An addictive, unforgettable, and highly approachable Irish novel.