Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
By the Lake
I read By the Lake last year (here’s my post on it). John McGahern just passed away, and while his reputation was already stellar (although not perhaps internationally) he was mainly known as an Irish writer, strictly local. His fame had not quite crossed over to the States, although since his passing I think that has changed a bit. (Interesting thoughts on McGahern from Anne Enright here.) His most famous book is Amongst Women (excerpt here).
The title of By the Lake in England, Ireland, Europe is the far more evocative and moving That They May Face The Rising Sun. What were the publishers in America thinking? Would you pick up a book called By the Lake? Maybe you would if you were a huge fan of Nicholas Sparks … but it sounds like nothing to me, it has no resonance, it doesn’t capture at ALL what this quiet deceptively monotonous book is about.
It is the story of a community of people in rural Ireland who all live around a lake. They are all about at the age of retirement, children grown and gone (those who have children, that is). It’s a slow-moving gentle book, following the seasons: small farms, selling the lambs, the local rake gets married again, worries about their children, etc. There is no plot. It is a loving accurate portrait of a group of people in an Ireland that may be changing in the big cities, but out in the country, things move along in the same slow pace, even though the cars may be flashier, and some of them have freelance jobs out of London.
McGahern’s original title: That They May Face The Rising Sun expresses what the book is ABOUT. The title hovers over the entire book, reminding you constantly of the deeper themes (which is why By the Lake is such an abomination).
The local cemetery is set up so that the graves “may face the rising sun”. For these characters, they are still involved in the every-day business of living, but death is coming. They are in the twilight of their lives.
Irish politics, always raucous and sometimes rancorous, is on the edge of life here. There’s one Republican fellow who haunts the local pubs, aggressively greeting people in Irish, to make his point … but he doesn’t really have an effect. He’s a local eccentric. He’s not well liked. Once people are settled into life, the strain and bump of politics loses its appeal.
The characters leave indelible marks in the reader’s head: there’s “The Shah”, a single man, a devout Catholic, very wealthy, starting to think of retirement. He owns a business, and is looking to pass it off. There is much consternation about this in the community. What on earth will The Shah do without his work?
Kate and Ruttledge are a married couple, with a nice easy air about them. Patrick Ryan is a cynical snarky man, with an invasive manner, trying to get underneath people’s skin. John Quinn is a fascinating character: he marries a widow with 3 grown children, and the entire family of the bride is against the wedding. The marriage lasts less than 24 hours. His bride sits upstairs in her room after the ceremony and decides she has made a terrible mistake and basically flees into the night. It is a huge brou-haha in this small gossipy community.
Bill Evans is a handyman at one of the farms. He’s a simple man, who never got a break in life. He grew up an orphan, and has always worked for his living. I felt protective of him.
To describe “what happens” in the book is to miss the point. It is not about “what happens”. It is about the writing, and the slow deep truths revealed. Nothing hits like a lightning-bolt, there are no huge revelatory moments. Just quiet drinks in the dusk, chatting about their lives, telling stories, gossiping, and then holing up in their own houses, closing down the barriers again.
The rhythm of the book is so compelling. I read it late last fall, when things were starting to go really bad. There were times when I thought: “God, I wonder if anything is going to HAPPEN in this book” … but as I succumbed to the book’s slow rural rhythm, it became the absolute best book I could have read at that time. It felt like it made no demands on me, but that was an illusion. What happened is that the book worked on me in a subconscious way, the deeps were stirred, and I found myself thinking about these characters constantly, even when I wasn’t reading. I was in that world, with the mist and the lake and the dusk and the dry grass …
McGahern can’t be touched, in terms of his skill. His vision of rural Ireland, and the church, and the Irish people itself … is something you don’t hear often, what with all the tormented (albeit eloquent) writhing of Irish literature in general. There’s that great quote from Hemingway, from a letter he wrote after the publication of Ulysses: “Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It’ll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud’s where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week…The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other…”. Ha! One of the things I so love about Joyce is that his books are really about joy and self-expression and domestic humor. They are not grim. For a man who lost the sight in one of his eyes, and lived in a near-state of poverty for his entire life, who was run out of his own country because of controversy and scandal and his own hatred of Ireland’s “priest-ridden” (his words) culture, his books are joyful. McGahern is not in any way, shape, or form a benign writer (see Anne Enright’s comments above), although it seems that with a title like By the Lake, certain elements in the literary world were trying to MAKE him benign.
You are challenged after the fact, with By the Lake. Not one of the characters you have met will leave you. They take up residence in your mind.
The book works slowly, inevitably. It took me a long time to read it. I kept dipping into it in the free moments I had, and it became a wonderful escape for me in the darkness of last fall. I loved talking with my dad about it, he’s the one who made me read McGahern in the first place. While By the Lake – no, That They May Face the Rising Sun – did not have the same shattering effect on me as Amongst Women – it packed a huge punch. It works on you almost the way a dream works on you. You’re not sure what has happened, but you know things have changed. And they may change back, you can’t tell, some things aren’t permanent … but you know you will not forget any of those people. They live.
McGahern’s writing is often so good it is COMPLETELY INVISIBLE. I do not know how he does it.
EXCERPT FROM By the Lake
There were many days of wind and rain. Uneasy gusts ruffled the surface of the lake, sending it running this way and that. Occasionally, a rainbow arched all the way across the lake. More often the rainbows were as broken as the weather, appearing here and there in streaks or brilliant patches of colour in the unsettled sky. When rain wasn’t dripping from leaves or eaves, the air was so heavy it was like breathing rain. The hives were quiet. Only the midges swarmed.
The hard burnt colour of the freshly cut meadows softened and there was a blue tinge in the first growth of aftergrass that shone under the running winds. The bullfinch disappeared with the wild strawberries from the bank. The little vetches turned black. The berries on the rowans along the shore glowed with such redness it was clear why the rowan berry was used in ancient song to praise the lips of girls and women. The darting swifts and swallows hunted low above the fields and the halflight brought out the noisy blundering bats.
There was little outside work. The sheep and cattle were heavy and content on grass. Radish, lettuc, scallions, peas, broad beans were picked each day with the new potatoes. In the mornings Ruttledge worked at the few advertising commissions he had until they were all finished. Then he read or fished from the boat. Kate read or drew and sometimes walked or cycled round the shore to Mary and Jamesie.
Even more predictable than the rain, Bill Evans came every day. All his talk now was of the bus that would take him to the town. For some reason it had been postponed or delayed for a few weeks but each day he spoke of the imminent arrival of the bus. They were beginning to think of it as illusory as one of the small rainbows above the lake, when a squat, yellow minibus came slowly in around the shore early on Thursday morning and waited. In the evening the bus climbed past the alder tree and gate, and went all the way up the hill.
He had always been secretive about what happened in his house or on the farm unless there was some glory or success that he could bask in; it was no different with the welfare home.
What he was forthcoming about was the bus and the people on the bus and the bus driver, Michael Pat. Already, he had become Michael Pat’s right-hand man: the two of them ran the bus together and he spoke of the other passengers with lordly condescension.
“I give Michael Pat great help getting them off the bus. Some of them aren’t half there. They’d make you laugh. Michael Pat said he wouldn’t have got on near as well without me and that I’m a gift. He’s calling for me first thing next Thursday. I sit beside him in the front seat and keep a watch.”
If a strange bird couldn’t cross the fields without Jamesie knowing, a big yellow minibus coming in round the shore wasn’t going to escape his notice, but he didn’t want to seem too obviously curious. He took a couple of days before cycling in around the shore. The Ruttledges knew at once what brought him and told him what they knew. They were inclined to make light of Bill Evans’s boasting.
He held up his hand in disagreement, knowing several people on the bus. “Take care. He may not be that far out. With people living longer there’s a whole new class who are neither in the world or the graveyard. Once they were miles above poor Bill in life. Some of them would have tossed him cigarettes after Mass on a Sunday. Now they are in wheelchairs and hardly able to cope. The bus takes them into town. It’s a great idea. They get washed and fed and attended to and it gives the relatives looking after them at home a break for the day. People fall very low through no fault of their own. Compared to some of the souls in that bus, Bill Evans is a millionaire.”
The bus was a special bus, with safety belts and handrails and a ramp for wheelchairs. The following Thursday Bill Evans sat in the front seat beside Michael Pat and waved and laughed towards the Ruttledges as the bus went slowly down to the lake. Under the “No Smoking” sign he sat puffing away like an ocean-going liner. The faces that appeared at the other windows were strained with age and illness and looked out impassively. Many did not look out at all.
