Sierra Leone by John McGahern, 1978
The magic trick:
Setting the start of an affair on a night with apocalypse in the air
So begins five days of love stories leading up to Valentine’s Day.
We begin in Dublin with John McGahern.
This isn’t a happy love story, but it certainly is a beautiful love story. Every word feels perfectly placed. You don’t have to worry about feeling slighted by a story that feels like perhaps it was rushed or mismanaged by the author. This is precision writing at its finest.
My favorite aspect is the initial romance. The couple gets together on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is every reason to think that the world is on the brink of annihilation. Talk about atmosphere. Everything is heightened around their night together, including the feeling that tomorrow doesn’t matter. It’s a remarkably electric way to begin a story about an illicit romance.
And that’s quite a trick on McGahern’s part.
The selection:
The Russian ships had stopped and were lying off Cuba, the radio told us as she made coffee on the small gas stove beside the sink in the corner of the room the next morning. The danger seemed about to pass. Again the world breathed, and it looked foolish to have believed it had ever been threatened.
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