BOOK REVIEW : Unlocking the Human Soul’s Secret Code : THE COLLECTED STORIES by John McGahern ; Knopf; $24; 480 pages

The very first tale in “The Collected Stories” of John McGahern--”Wheels,” the story of an Irish homecoming--is barely nine pages long, but there is more resonance in McGahern’s spare prose, more richness of character and setting, than will be found in a shelf of what passes for “smart writing” nowadays.

“All the vivid sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn,” muses the young man whose life is briefly glimpsed, “impatient for the rich whole that never came but that all the preparations promised.”

That’s not to say that John McGahern, Irish novelist and master of the short story, is a miniaturist. His stories are not crammed with description or dialogue. And McGahern is not much interested in building up to a punch-line or tricking up a surprise ending. Nothing much actually happens in many of the 34 stories collected here.

Rather, it is McGahern’s peculiar genius to evoke vast tapestries of experience and emotion with a few spare words and phrases. He sets us down at the kitchen table of a farmhouse, a bench on the promenade of a beachside hotel, a police barracks or a construction site or a pub, and he allows us to eavesdrop on the muted words and ambiguous gestures that amount to a kind of secret code of the human soul. And McGahern, in a real sense, is the code-breaker.

Now and then, McGahern will tell us a story in which the narrative follows a conventional arc of conflict and resolution. In “The Key,” for example, a provincial constable happens across a medical dictionary, convinces himself that he is terminally ill and makes elaborate preparations for his own death, only to discover that he has imagined it all. But the sergeant does not experience an epiphany, he merely steps back from the verge of death and resumes his place on the treadmill of life.

McGahern is purely and thoroughly an Irish bard, and most of his stories are set in the farms and villages of Ireland where time has slowed or stopped altogether. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether we are observing a scene in contemporary Ireland or somewhere in the distant past.

But McGahern is preoccupied with the interior reality of the men and women who live there, and he gives us only an oblique view of the Irish landscape. If Ireland is a quaint or picturesque place, McGahern hardly seems to notice or doesn’t bother to tell us.

Only rarely will McGahern acknowledge the existence of a world outside Ireland, and even then the prospect of escape is illusory. One story, titled “Korea,” actually takes place aboard an eel-fishing boat on an Irish backwater; another, “Sierra Leone,” unfolds in a Dublin pub. And, characteristically, each of the stories is about a profound moral betrayal--”Sierra Leone” is an account of overlapping sexual infidelities, and “Korea” is about the sinister scheme of a father who sees a way to profit by sending his son to America.

McGahern’s vision of Ireland is relentlessly dark and often downright depressive. Failed loves and failed lives are the stuff of his stories, and he depicts Ireland as a kind of metaphysical prison: “We were in the condemned cell,” he writes of two lovers flirting in a Dublin pub, “waiting for reprieve or execution.”

The sheer number of stories in “The Collected Stories”--and, more to the point, the sheer weight of despair that fills the book--make this collection hard to absorb in one long sitting. And, as much as we may admire McGahern’s craft, we come away from his stories with scant hope that the grinding of lives by the wheel of fate can be slowed by a moment of love or mystery or magic.

“Looked at with the mind, life’s a joke,” sums up one of the weary souls who populate his stories, “and felt, it’s a tragedy, and we know cursed nothing.”