Michael Magee is trying to write something about The Wizard of Oz. Watching the film as a child was one of his earliest experiences of being in a waking dream, of dissolving into a story. It is a feeling he has chased like an addict in the years since, first unconsciously, now consciously. From childhood play, before he even knew what a sentence was, he recalls banging on an old-fashioned typewriter, slapping ink on to paper, the fascination of individual letters appearing out of nowhere.
The desire to fall into that realm outside of time, an impulse towards connection, an excavation of the self, is what drives him on to write and what has brought us to his masterful novel, Close to Home, which has been chosen as the winner of the John McGahern Prize for debut book of Irish fiction, 2023.
The prize, now in its fifth year, was established by the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies to honour the memory of one of Ireland’s greatest masters of prose fiction, and Magee’s novel was picked by Colm Tóibín from a shortlist that included Noel O’Regan’s Though the Bodies Fall and Colin Walsh’s Kala.
Tóibín comments on the winner: “Close to Home by Michael Magee has an astonishing narrative energy; the rhythms of the sentences and lines of dialogue are powerfully managed. It is the story of a young man’s struggle to live in a society that is haunted by violence and maimed by the present as much as the past. But it is also a novel about love and friendship, with many scenes created with great tenderness and tact.
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“While some sections of the book offer an overwhelming sense of brutality, other sections are brilliant examples of comic writing. It is a novel that re-creates the city of Belfast in its own likeness, effortlessly handling idiom and tone and undertone. Close to Home offers us a new and memorable portrait of a young protagonist, caught between innocence and experience, as imagined by a supremely talented writer.”
That the prize will be awarded to Magee as part of the annual Liverpool Literary Festival on the weekend of October 4th-6th offers a nice synchronicity, Magee having studied in the city as an undergraduate, just like the novel’s chief protagonist, Sean. But it was not on Merseyside, but back in his native Belfast that Magee found the nourishment he needed to begin producing successful fiction.
At secondary school in De La Salle, Andersonstown, he was one of only three boys studying English literature for A Level and he recalls a formative moment when his teacher divided Ernest Hemingway’s complete short stories between the three of them. By a stroke of luck, the first story Magee encountered was Soldier’s Home: reading it changed his life.
Before Hemingway he had, like many teenagers, read a diet of fantasy and science fiction, but here, in this story, he realised that something very different was happening, that, in a few pages, the author had performed a mysterious sleight of hand: “I was staggered by this story ... that so much could be done in such a short space of time.”
Before this experience, he had been reading to escape, but now, “profoundly moved” by the prose, he set about trying to understand the mechanism whereby it had come into existence. As with Krebs, the hero of Soldier’s Home, Sean has come home into a world from which he feels alienated. The years of study in Liverpool have not satisfied his emotional or spiritual needs and yet, now back in Belfast among the working class friends he grew up with, he cannot fully feel a part of things. Hemingway’s Krebs “came back much too late” from the Great War to be considered a hero in his small Oklahoma town. And somehow the same is true for Sean in his post-Troubles, post-economic crash home city.
Magee’s quest to understand where literature comes from would lead, eventually, to beginning a PhD in creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast (nursing ground of another McGahern Prize winner, Louise Kennedy) in 2016 where, inspired in part by the work of Karl Ove Knausgård, Magee played around with various genres somewhere between memoir and fiction.
There were several failed novelistic efforts – “I hadn’t done the thinking ... or acquired a lens through which to see the world” – before eventually deciding on the form that was to become Close to Home. This crucial choice came about via some inspirational advice from his friend and one-time editor of the Stinging Fly, Thomas Morris, who counselled him to write a letter to someone he admired.
The first two sentences he wrote became the opening of the novel: “There was nothing to it. I swung and hit him and he dropped.” 60,000 words quickly followed and a book was beginning to reveal itself. But Magee, still unsure of himself, had to write as though his words “would never see the light of day”. Now, thankfully, they have, and this gift of a novel has entered the light.
“We are delighted and honoured to continue our association with new Irish writing and with the McGahern name”, says Prof Pete Shirlow, director of the Institute of Irish Studies, “and it is clear that in Michael Magee we have an important and compelling voice at the start of what will doubtless be a brilliant writing life.”
Agreement is all but unanimous, with the book gaining rave reviews, Magee named winner of, among others, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the debut fiction category of the Nero Book Awards.
Michael Magee will be awarded his prize of £5,000 and will read from his work at the Liverpool Literary Festival on October 5th. Entries are now being accepted for the 2024 McGahern Prize with details to be found on the Institute of Irish Studies website.
