BY THE LAKE
By John McGahern
Knopf. 336 pp. $24
Take a year and divide it not into the months and days of the Gregorian calendar, nor the hours and minutes set at Greenwich, but according to the imprecise though inevitable succession of the seasons. Spring will come as surely as the days will lengthen, but the cuckoo whose call marks that season's beginning may arrive earlier or later this year than he did the last, and a sudden gathering of clouds can shorten even the brightest day.
This is the framework of John McGahern's long-awaited new novel -- a 12-month cycle, more or less, in the life of a rural community on the shores of a lake in Ireland's County Leitrim. McGahern's characters are country people. Their days are shaped by the needs of their animals and crops, their years by the few dictates of the Catholic Church, though the rituals that feature most memorably in By the Lake are not the High Days of Christmas or Easter but weddings and funerals, which share the imprecise inevitability of the seasons. Yes, people marry and die, but nobody can be sure exactly when either will happen.
For the most part, McGahern's characters step in time with the gentle rhythms of the land, with the flowering of the whitethorn, the hum of the bees in clover and the annual migrations of the birds. There's the farmer Jamesie, who has the keenest ear for the cuckoo and for neighborhood gossip, and his wife, Mary, whose clocks never chime on the hour; there's Patrick Ryan, the cajoling local builder; John Quinn, a bully and philanderer; and Jimmy Joe McKiernan, the local undertaker and head of the IRA, who wouldn't harm a fly unless "you stood in the way of the Cause."
Just as important to McGahern's scenery and to his depiction of Ireland are the people largely absent from it, those who left the lake to pursue their fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean or the Irish Sea. Among them are Quinn's many children who have found lucrative jobs in London, and Johnny, Jamesie's brother, once the best shot in the county, who left in pursuit of an unrequited love and ended up working in the bleak, automated predictability of a Ford car factory. "You made the mistake of your life when you left here," Patrick rebukes him. "You were in paradise and didn't know it."
This Eden, though, is tainted with human failings, with small grudges and the underlying threat of violence, both sexual and political. It is against this backdrop that McGahern sets Joe Ruttledge and his wife, Kate, who have given up the comforts of successful advertising jobs in London for a lakeside property where they care for their livestock with all the comic concern of amateurs. "Strange to think of all the people that went out to England and America and the ends of the earth from this place and yon pair coming back against the tide," muses Johnny, introducing the uneasy balance between opportunity and simple, if imperfect, contentment that defines the fortunes of this community and of Ireland itself. "I'm not over the moon," says Joe Ruttledge when asked whether he is happy. "I have health, for the time being, enough money, no immediate worries. That, I believe, is as good as it gets." Ruttledge's worldliness and his lack of sympathy for Jimmy Joe's cause set him apart from his neighbors, but for McGahern's Ireland he represents an important change -- an indication that the country can attract its own immigrants instead of continuing to bleed its ambitious young people overseas.
The turning point of the novel is Kate's decision not to accept a job that would have taken the couple back to London and the fast track. It's a critical moment in the lives of two people but an unremarkable climax. For this is a novel of several subplots rather than a defining storyline, a cast of characters rather than any one protagonist. And therein lies its success -- as well as its few frustrations.
There is no doubt of McGahern's literary accomplishments. His previous novel, Among the Women, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 12 years ago, and he is widely acclaimed as one of Ireland's finest writers. His lyrical, almost painterly evocation of the activities he knows so intimately is well displayed here: the gatherings around great platters of ham sandwiches, the anxious discussion of prices at the cattle market, the process of laying out a body for a wake. But with his unhurried, anthropological observations of members of this tight-knit community, his invitation to eavesdrop on their conversations and to observe the "small tasks" that consume their days, McGahern makes few concessions to the short attention span of the modern reader. This is a book that requires a commitment -- and only then yields its rich harvest of rewards. •
Frances Stead Sellers is the deputy editor of Outlook.
