Fr. Walter Macken RIP

I was saddened recently to hear of the death of Fr. Walter Macken, whose life is recalled here in the Garvan Hill blog. It's an interesting slice of social history as well as a fitting tribute.

Fr. Macken was a priest of Opus Dei. I'm not involved with Opus Dei myself, but I've been invited on two occasions to give short talks in their student residence in the city centre. On one of those occasions, Fr. Macken was there, and I found him very kind and courteous. 

I also live in a parish run by Opus Dei. That's how I heard about Fr. Macken's death. (I'm always grateful the parish offers Mass at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays and 9 p.m. on Sundays.)

Fr. Macken was the son of Walter Macken, an Irish novelist who died in 1967. I was an avid reader of his novels in my teens. I didn't just read them once, but (in three instances) several times over. He's perhaps most celebrated for his trilogy of Irish historical novels, but I didn't like those much. I much preferred his novels about ordinary people. My favourite was I Am Alone, a novel that was actually banned in Ireland (I've only learned that now).

I Am Alone follows the experiences of Pat, an Irish emigrant in London...are you yawning just from that description? Actually, it wasn't boring at all, nor was it worthy or whingy. It describes Pat's efforts to find a job in London, his experience lodging with a landlord who's a religious fanatic, his work as a labourer on a building site (and how difficult he finds it), his hopeless love for a beautiful woman who he finally realizes is shallow and selfish, and his eventual marriage to a woman who is not beautiful but is much more worthy of his affections. He also becomes friends with a man who turns out to be involved with the IRA (the pre-Troubles version). I forget what happens to the friend, but Pat does not approve of his activities. The book ends with the birth of his child, who arrives safely after a nerve-wracking labour sequence.

I returned to the book again and again because of Macken's ability to describe the flow of consciousness. Not in a gimmicky Joycean way, but in a very realistic and observational way. For instance, when Pat gets off the boat and takes a train through England, he's taken aback to see how green the fields are, then wonders if he expected them to be red. There's another passage which describes a visit to a pool hall, in the early days of his marriage, when he knows he should be going home to his wife, but he can't help staying for another game, and another... The atmosphere of the pool hall is brilliantly captured, as well as the particular frame of mind of lingering somewhere when you know you should be somewhere else.

Above all, I loved I Am Alone because it took as its subject ordinary life-- it's a very "low concept" novel. It caught the texture of ordinary life brilliantly, which is something I greatly prize in writers.

I also loved his novel The Bogman, about a local poet and songwriter in a loveless marriage. Some of the little poems included in the book are excellent. I also liked (though to a lesser extent) Quench the Moon, the story of a would-be writer and poet enduring poverty and other trials.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear that Walter Macken's son became a priest. His novels are not pious at all, but religion and the clergy are presented in a sympathetic and very human way. (I particularly remember, in I Am Alone, a scene in which Pat unsuccessfully tries to persuade his wife-to-be to become a Catholic. She's insistent she wants to remain Church of England. When he points out to her that she doesn't even go to church, she says: "It doesn't matter. I was born Church of England and I'm going to die Church of England." Pat admits to himself that he rather admires her for this. I think it's probably an accurate description of an ordinary Church of England member at that time, and for some decades after.)

Like J.P. Donleavy or some other writers, he seems to belong to a particular phase of my life, and I can't really imagine revisiting him. But he fed my imagination in his youth, and I'm saddened to hear of his son's passing.