Michael McGirr
Things You Get For Free
Picador $20.70 (incl. GST)pb, 296pp
0 330 36227 5
Michael McGirr (photo by Bill Thomas)
I'M NO MECHANIC BUT ONE OF the pleasures I've had from Things You Get for Free is watching and wondering how it's all put together. Paradoxically this is a book that is lucid, immediate and even popular in its appeal, but it is also a professional's book. Michael McGirr, a Jesuit priest in his mid-thirties, takes a six week trip to Europe with his widowed, elderly mother, and nothing much happens. Sure, okay, an unusual enough combination, but, we ask, what is he going to do with this material?
For a start we're getting a journey -- and how far is the metaphor going to be taken? For another thing, we've got a priest writing autobiographically, and so I at least have expectations about honesty and ultimate seriousness. To explain myself -- one of the reasons I find something affronting if not offensive in the Dominican Ephraem Chifley's creamy food column in The Adelaide Review is that apart from exuding expensive tastes it's totally hedonistic. Okay for Leo Schofield, I think, but altogether ho-hum for a mendicant friar. There, that's my serving of prejudices on the table.
Well then, how does Michael McGirr shape up? There's a welter of jokes in his book, and a depth of literary sophistication, but in toto it's something of a benign sermon. The title encapsulates it -- apparently light-hearted and throwaway but with the moralist lurking behind it, finger aloft, pointing out that the really important things, the unlooked-for blessings etc, are the things you can get for free. Inside the clown, there's the preacher, or maybe just the confident philosopher at work, and in this lies the book's distinctive personality as well as a certain problem.
You go along with this preacher because the sermon is to himself as much as to anyone else, and because he's owning up all along to the specifics of being an impaired mortal -- he's a prey to heavy depression, he entered the Jesuits for some leaky reason connected with his father's death and the wish to get away from home. This is a book where the creator, as well as himself as subject, is peculiarly visible in his handiwork. There's a lot of juggling and dispositioning of the roles and possibilities of this text.
The account of the trip to Europe is interrupted shamelessly by recollections or reflections about Mum, and Michael and Mum, and Michael and his Jesuit colleagues, and Michael and his intellectual interests. Not all of these flow seamlessly from what's happening on the trip, but that's fine because the trip isn't so dramatic that its progress can't be interrupted. Mum might have organised the trip to a very tight schedule, but the telling of it is wholly relaxed and serendipitous, there is no factitious evolution towards epiphany much less apotheosis, and McGirr's placement of his flashbacks and obiter dicta is immensely enjoyable to watch. Occasionally he stumbles and excursions can turn into potted literary-historical guides, and they sit lumpily in the text, and the characters are banished offstage to their dressing rooms for too long. More successfully he subtly signals challenges and we wait for his reponse. Most obviously, after all the talk about Mum (and this is the planned honeymoon Mum never had), we start to look for Dad. McGirr finally releases Dad, in vignettes between some of his chapters, usually in love scenes with his truck, and being wilful and irresponsible and bloody-minded. But the son's writing is both detached and compassionate. Dad is revealed to be an analgesics junkie, and the book develops partly as that common contemporary genre, the encomium to the battling woman. Mind you, Mum remains at a distance; we get her quaint sayings and funny little ways and the externals of her career. Mother and son share the Eucharist together, very informally and very intimately, but these pages never let us view a communion of two freestanding adult spirits.
McGirr speaks of his younger self keeping the world at a distance through banter, and I wonder if there isn't something analogous happening with the older man. His jokiness is of the laconic, deadpan variety, and I am reminded uncannily of the late Ross Campbell of Oxalis Cottage. Jan Morris, the travel writer, has said that Harry's has not changed in any detail in fifty years. Jan Morris is an expert on change. She began life as a boy and is currently a girl. She is one of the few patrons to have dined at Harry's as a member of both sexes. You have to respect such a comprehensive point of view.