SOURCE: "Country of the Aged and the Sad," in The New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1971, p. 30.

Pryce-Jones is an Austrian-born English novelist, biographer, and critic. In the following review, he discusses the bleak vision presented in the short fiction of Nightlines.

The Ireland of John McGahern's stories is not the country other Irish writers describe. Here, to be sure, are the Shannon and Oakport and the hill of Howth—but only as accidents of geography, as parts of a setting into which people have blundered and where they no longer belong, if they ever did. Mr. McGahern is free from the emerald sentiments that have been invested in his native land. He is his own master, and his stories owe nothing to anybody.

If this is an Ireland virtually without a past, it is without a future too. The opening story in Nightlines has a young man...