A Languorous, Lakeside Tale

The glass flowers at the Peabody Museum could not have been crafted with a more deliberate delicacy than the lilting scenes of John McGahern’s new novel By The Lake. The story recounts a year of everyday labors and occasional intrigues in a small village. A meditative eye for the details that color passing moments gives this novel a quiet integrity, unrivaled by works that impatiently resort to plot twists, muddled psychology and politics for their excitement. McGahern’s story recalls that while societies seem to be progressing and deteriorating at a dizzying pace, most people are just trying to live their lives as best they can.

McGahern is one of Ireland’s most prominent contemporary writers, claiming an accompanying slew of awards and visiting fellowships. Most of his novels unfold in Irish villages, the sort of quiet rural places where one generation stays and tends the farm while the children leave to make a life in a faraway city. Don’t expect quaintness though: the villages are as modern-minded as Dublin or London. There is a lot of “post-” to the small lakeside village of By the Lake: post-World War II, post-migration, post-soccer riots, post-Irish Republican Army. It is a place where grandparents tune into “Blind Date” but do not have telephones; where combine machines ease the labor of the summer hay harvest; and where a sheep rancher supplements his income by writing for an ad agency in London.

It takes a special kind of character to stay in a village when the rest of the world is rushing off to the city. Besides the occasional grandchild on holiday, no young people populate the lovely countryside. Bachelors predominate: there is the entrepreneur known as The Shah, who resolutely refuses marriage; Patrick Ryan, a gruff builder; Bill Evans, a survivor of Ireland’s horrific orphanages, who made it into old age quiet and strangely asexual. Gentle, blithe Jamesie and his wife Mary have grandchildren faraway in Dublin, while their friends Ruttledge and Kate, transplants from London, are childless. Because of the absence of children, the days carry a bittersweet sense of life living itself out rather than skipping hurriedly on to the next generation. Neighbors show each other a regard unknown in places where nuclear families tend to be insular.

Of course, village life means accommodating bad neighbors along with the good. When Ruttledge and Kate are called upon by John Quinn, the local womanizer always looking for chances to “get into the boggy hollow,” they are obliged to welcome him just as they would their best friends. The villagers’wry, patient sense of humor makes such a mix of people endurable; gossip makes them interesting. Jamesie is guilessly fascinated by the details of other people’s lives. But his wife recognizes that the importance of knowing other people runs far deeper than entertainment. “‘People we know come and go in our minds whether they are here or in England or alive or dead,’ Mary said with a darkness that was as much a part of her as the sweet inward-looking smile. ‘We’re no more than a puff of wind out on the lake.’”

One of the most compelling aspects of By the Lake is the ripening of the friendship between two couples—Jamesie and Mary and Ruttledge and Kate—through shared traditions. Their relationship passes imperceptibly over time from acquaintanceship to friendship to the deepest affection. Their daily rapport is pleasant as the couples take turns calling on each other, sharing meals and drinks, helping with birthing cows and stacking hay. Their interactions are refreshingly free of gender-war stereotypes; the women do not gather to commiserate, the men do not spend their time talking about sports or politics. With their honesty and warmth, Jamesie and Mary become something of role models for the younger couple, who quietly rejected upward mobility in London for a simpler life in Ireland. Both couples made a deliberate decision to bind themselves to the village, to its people and especially to the land.

The overarching presence of the lake sets the rhythm of the human year. The way McGahern describes the changing lights, the colors of the foliage, the life of the animals and the demands of planting and harvest is intuition distilled to intensity—a mellow intensity, so to speak. His careful attention to the way people more in their environment is evident even in the brief appearance of a London visitor: “He washed, walked around the lake, read a newspaper. The way he crackled the pages as he read created a space around the rocking chair.”

Everyone in the village knows that close by runs a world of factories and unemployment; a little further out, migrations, cities, anonymity. To live in peace, characters create a space small enough to feel snug but wide enough to see clearly. Take, for instance, the exchange between Patrick Ryan and Ruttledge as they are erecting the rafters of a shed:

“What are you looking at, lad?”

“At how the rafters frame the sky. How the squares of light are more interesting than the open sky. They make it look more human by reducing the sky, and then the whole sky grows out from that small space.”

“As long as they hold the iron, lad, they’ll do,” Patrick Ryan laughed sympathetically.

McGahern has created a vivid portrait of a peaceful corner of a demanding world. An uncomfortable conversation between Ruttledge and the leader of the local IRA chapter reveals the conflict between devoting oneself to the community and confronting the outside world. “Ruttledge knew that as he was neither a follower nor a leader he must look useless or worse than useless to this man of commitment and action. As far as Jimmy Joe was concerned he might as well be listening to the birds like an eejit on the far side of the lake...” But Ruttledge is convinced that for himself a life by the lake is the most honest choice. The lakeside is not a paradise, but a place where people also live and work—where they manage to live their days in a comprehensible rhythm and not a passing rush.

books

By the Lake

By John McGahern

Knopf

384 pp., $24