By the Lake
That They May Face the Rising Sun (UK title)
John McGahern, 2002
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679744023
Summary
With this magnificently assured new novel, John McGahern reminds us why he has been called the Irish Chekhov, as he guides readers into a village in rural Ireland and deftly, compassionately traces its natural rhythms and the inner lives of its people.
Here are the Ruttledges, who have forsaken the glitter of London to raise sheep and cattle, gentle Jamesie Murphy, whose appetite for gossip both charms and intimidates his neighbors, handsome John Quinn, perennially on the look-out for a new wife, and the town’s richest man, a gruff, self-made magnate known as “the Shah.”
Following his characters through the course of a year, through lambing and haying seasons, market days and family visits, McGahern lays bare their passions and regrets, their uneasy relationship with the modern world, their ancient intimacy with death. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 12, 1934
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Death—March 30, 2006
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—St. Patrick's College of Education, Drumcondra
• Awards—member of the Irish Arts honorary organization
Aosdána; Irish-American Foundation Award; Chevalier des
Arts et des Lettres; and the Prix Etranger Ecureuil
John McGahern was the author of five highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories. His novel Amongst Women won the GPA Book Award and the Irish Times Award, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and was made into a four-part BBC television series.
He had been a visiting professor at Colgate University and at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and was the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Award, the American-Irish Award, and the Prix Étrangère Ecureuil, among other awards and honors. His work appeared in anthologies and was translated into many languages. He died in 2006. (From the publisher.)
More
Born in Dublin, McGahern spent his childhood in the parish of Aughawillan near Ballinamore, County Leitrim until his mother, who was the local primary school teacher, died. The family then moved to Cootehall, County Roscommon to live with their father who was a Garda sergeant in the village. John travelled form Cootehall to Carrick-on-Shannon every day where he was educated by the Presentation Brothers.
After secondary school, he was offered a place in teacher-training at St. Patrick's College of Education (Drumcondra). Upon graduation he began his career as a primary schoolteacher at Scoil Eoin Baiste (Belgrove) primary school in Clontarf where, for a period, he taught the eminent academic Declan Kiberd before turning to writing full-time.
McGahern's novel The Dark was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied sexual abuse by the protagonist's father. In the controversy over this he was dismissed from his teaching post. He subsequently moved to England where he worked in a variety of jobs before returning to Ireland to live and work on a small farm near Fenagh in County Leitrim, located halfway between Ballinamore and Mohill.
He died from cancer in the Mater Hospital in Dublin on 30 March 2006, aged 71. He is buried in St Patrick's Church Aughawillan alongside his mother.
McGahern's six novels follow his own life experiences to a certain extent.
• His first published novel, The Barracks covers life in a rural Garda barracks especially from the point of view of the sergeant's wife, Elizabeth Reegan.
• His second book, The Dark covers the teenage experiences of a young scholarship student in rural Ireland.
• The next novel, The Leavetaking introduces us to Patrick Moran, a young schoolteacher in Dublin.
• In 1979, The Pornographer was published. The protagonist who writes pornography for a living is now living in Dublin.
• His fifth and best known novel is Amongst Women, the story of Michael Moran, an IRA veteran of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, who now dominates his family in the unforgiving farmlands of Co. Leitrim, near Mohill.
• His final novel That They May Face the Rising Sun (By the Lake in the US) is an elegiac portrait of a year in the life of a rural lakeside community. McGahern himself lived on a lakeshore and drew on his own experiences whilst writing the book. Lyrically written, it explores the meaning in prosaic lives.
McGahern is also considered a master of the Irish tradition of the short story.
McGahern was a member of the Irish Arts honorary organization Aosdána and won many other awards (including the Irish-American Foundation Award, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and the Prix Etranger Ecureuil).
He taught at universities in Ireland, England, the United States and Canada. In 1991, he received an honorary doctorate of Trinity College, Dublin. His work has influenced a younger generation of writers, such as Colm Toibin. Some of his works have been translated into Japanese and other languages.
McGahern is generally thought to have exhausted the tradition of rural Irish modernism, although many younger writers continue to copy his detached and knowing style. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This stately novel by one of Ireland's foremost writers is, as its title suggests, primarily about the rhythms and cadences of place. The story is an old one: in search of a quieter way of life, Joe and Kate Ruttledge have traded their careers in London for a farm near a small Irish village, where they learn how to raise sheep and are steadily drawn into the lives of their neighbors. There's the Shah, a rich bachelor in search of an heir for his business; John Quinn, a weaselly sexual predator, and a danger to women throughout the county; and Jimmy Joe McKiernan, an I.R.A. leader whose exploits periodically stir up high feeling. McGahern is never sentimental, and the novel's greatest pleasures come from the unflinching probity of his observations: he writes as crisply about the parsimony of a neighbor or sending lambs to be slaughtered as he does about the notion that happiness "should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all."
The New Yorker
McGahern expertly captures the rhythms of smalltown Irish life in a graceful but underplotted novel that takes a diverse and gregarious cast of local characters through a transitional period in a lakeside village. Much of the narrative revolves around the daily life of the Ruttledges, a farming couple who become the focal point of the village's social interaction after they leave the London rat race for a more peaceful life. The most engaging and colorful characters in the book are John Quinn, a local womanizer whose life becomes a source of gossip and controversy when his bride leaves him right after the wedding, and a figurehead known as "the Shah," the richest man in the village, whose decision to sell his business represents a turning point in the town's way of life. Lurking in the background is a shadier political figure, Jimmy Joe McKiernan, whose involvement with the IRA poses a different kind of threat to the rhythms of daily life whenever a bout of upheaval and violence erupts. McGahern gets plenty of mileage from the poignant scenes describing the rituals and chores of farming along with the common social affairs that form the backbone of daily life, but the absence of a strong story line reduces this book to an extended character study. The author's warm, flowing prose makes that study an enjoyable read, but readers who pick this up based on McGahern's track record for well-reviewed and award-winning novels may find themselves disappointed.
Publishers Weekly
Just as one of the characters in this novel walks into his neighbor's house and joins in an ongoing conversation, so the reader enters the lives of these people, who live near a lake in northwestern Ireland. McGahern presents Joe Ruttledge and his wife, Kate, who have moved from London to this rural area and interact on a daily basis with neighbors Jamesie Murphy and his wife, Mary. Also in the picture are Bill Evans, an oddball old-timer; John Quinn, who has marital and sexual problems; and Patrick Ryan, a neighborhood fix-it man who is supposed to be building a new shed on the Ruttledge's property. During the course of a year, a wedding and a funeral take place, along with events such as the cutting and tedding of hay and the livestock auction on Monaghan Day. Though the book is timeless and remote in setting, the political and social forces of Ireland's turbulent history do intrude occasionally. This is not a plot-driven page-turner, as McGahern, a highly regarded Irish author of novels and stories (e.g., Amongst Women), chooses to accentuate the small talk and daily routines of his characters. The novel gathers force as the personalities and customs of rural life ring true and move according to their own rhythms. Recommended for academic and larger public library fiction collections. —Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal
An episodic and subtly elegiac group portrait of life in a contemporary Irish village: the sixth, and best, novel—and first in 12 years—from veteran author McGahern. Originally published in Great Britain as That They May Face the Rising Sun, it focuses on Joe and Kate Ruttledge, a former London couple who live modestly by working their small lakeside farm—and, with gradually increasing clarity and intensity, on the friends and neighbors whose intermittently shared lives become all but inseparable. McGahern introduces his characters in the most natural way imaginable—as casual visitors who drop in for a drink and a chat, and as subjects of stories they all tell about one another. Joe's uncle, the wealthy businessman nicknamed "the Shah," who conceals his lonely vulnerability beneath a veneer of brisk efficiency; neighbor Jamesie, a compulsive taleteller and gossip and his quiet wife Mary; aging pensioner Bill Evans, still traumatized by physical abuse he suffered in boyhood at the hands of wrathful priests; contractor Patrick Ryan, who never finishes anything he starts—professionally or personally; a genial Don Juan, John Quinn, who keeps finding propertied widows to marry: all become part of the comforting (and smothering) fabric that sustains the Ruttledges "by the lake," impervious to the siren call of more lucrative employment in London. Very little happens, apart from Quinn's incessant amours. Jamesie's rootless brother Johnny, an annual visitor, may come "home" to stay; but the threat passes. The Shah retires, and his longtime employee manages (with Joe's aid) to buy his business. Hints of more earthshaking occurrences follow the arrival of an otherwise typical spring, as local IRA leader Jimmy Joe McKiernan leads an "Easter March" through the hamlet that had thought itself immune to such "troubles." McGahern's luminous threnody to the particulars and permutations of aging and change is captured in prose of the utmost simplicity and precision, keenly alert to the rhythms of lives lived close to the bone and in quiet harmony with the natural world.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does McGahern open the novel with the image of stillness on the lake? Why are the swans, the lake, the heron, the farm animals, and the changing seasons constantly juxtaposed against the human action related in these pages? Which descriptive passages are most striking? What is Joe Ruttledge’s relationship to nature, his farm, and his animals?
2. McGahern introduces a number of characters in the Ruttledges’ circle: Jamesie and Mary, Johnny, Patrick Ryan, John Quinn, and the Shah, among others. How does McGahern make these people seem real? What are their defining qualities? Which characters are most likeable and why?
3. When asked what’s wrong with his life in London, Joe Ruttledge replies, “Nothing but it’s not my country and I never feel it’s quite real or that my life there is real. That has its pleasant side as well. You never feel responsible or fully involved in anything that happens” [p. 23]. How is Joe’s reply to Jimmy Joe McKiernan understood in the context of the rest of the novel?
4. How does McGahern use the character of Johnny to depict the emigrant’s life and the painful uprooting of so many of the Irish who left home? When Jamesie says, “He’d have been better if he’d shot himself instead of the dogs” [p. 9], what does he mean? How welcome is Johnny when he comes home?
5. The brutality of Bill Evans’s life as an orphan [pp. 10–16] casts a shadow on the kindly behavior that seems to pervade the novel. How has Bill Evans, now an old man, been scarred by his experiences? Why is Joe Ruttledge willing to be unfailingly generous and patient with Bill Evans?
6. By the Lake is a novel of manners that, like the work of Jane Austen, scrutinizes the ways in which human beings interact in a small community. What is most noticeable about how Joe, Kate, Jamesie, and Mary behave toward one another? How important are the qualities of generosity, humor, and patience? Why is so much careful attention paid to certain ceremonial aspects of life, such as when the Ruttledges host a dinner party for Jamesie’s extended family
[pp. 288–92]?
7. There is much talk in By the Lake; the rhythms of talk and the sound of human voices are central to the novel. Why is Jamesie so thirsty for gossip? Why is the need for stories so important in a small rural community? Why do some people reveal a lot about themselves, while some reveal almost nothing? For instance, why do we learn so little of Joe Ruttledge’s private life while we learn so much of John Quinn’s?
8. The novel is marked by a distinct lack of action. At one point, Joe realizes, “The days were quiet. They did not feel particularly quiet or happy but through them ran the sense, like an underground river, that there would come a time when these days would be looked back on as happiness, all that life could give of contentment and peace” [p. 234]. Why is contentment difficult to describe within the conventional expectations of plot in fiction?
9. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, John Sutherland pointed out that “One cannot appreciate McGahern’s prose unless one understands the strenuous purging that produces his final text. For every published page, he writes about six that are discarded. By the Lake we have is the redaction of a novel of more than a thousand pages. Pruning is the essence of McGahern’s art.” What light does this shed on the novel’s prose style, its structure, and the arc of time it covers?
10. Given that Jamesie and Joe are very good friends, is it surprising that Joe refuses to speak about the reason he and Kate have no children? Does the episode of the black lamb shed any light on this issue? How does McGahern comment on the curious relationship between what is shared and what is kept private in such a tiny community?
11. Does Joe Ruttledge, given his education and his time spent in London, fit in socially when he comes to live by the lake? Are Joe and Kate unusual in their willingness to give up a cosmopolitan life for a rural backwater? Does McGahern imply that it takes a very alert, observant sensibility to enjoy life in such a quiet place?
12. Why are details of historical time, as well as the characters’ ages, deliberately withheld? How relevant is the fact that this community is close to the border with Northern Ireland, or that we hear of an atrocity that took place at nearby Enniskillen? What is the significance of Jamesie’s story about the ambush by the Black and Tans, which is commemorated every year [pp. 271–278]?
13. Discuss the crisis caused by Johnny’s decision to return home to live with Jamesie and Mary. The narrator tells us: “The timid, gentle manners, based on a fragile interdependence, dealt in avoidances and obfuscations. Edges were softened, ways found round harsh realities. What was unspoken was often far more important than the words that were said.... It was a language that hadn’t any simple way of saying no” [p. 210]. What is valuable, and what is less so, about such manners? Is Joe right to offer to intervene in this family matter?
14. What narrative effect is achieved by the description of the laying out of Johnny’s body? Why does Joe volunteer to do this? How important is the fact that the novel includes a death, a wake, and a funeral? Why does the story end as it does, with the shed unfinished, and Ruttledge thinking that he’ll decide whether to take Patrick Ryan up on the offer to finish it?
15. Some of the most important questions addressed by this novel were asked by reviewer Hermione Lee, who wrote in the London Observer: “This great and moving novel, which looks so quiet and provincial, opens out through its small frame to our most troubling and essential questions. How well do we remember? How do we make our choices in life? Why do we need repetition? What is to remain of us? Above all, what can happiness consist in?” How does McGahern’s novel address these issues?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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