We live in an era in which Irish writing is continually slapping itself on the back. There is no regard quite like a jaunty self regard. Some of the celebration is justified; one need look no further than Michael Longley, William Trevor, Derek Mahon and Tom Murphy. Yet for all the talk of the new brash fiction shaped by a changing, urban Ireland, there is scant profundity and even less thought evident in much of it. All of which reiterates the humane, harsh truths of John McGahern's new novel, his sixth, and first since Amongst Women was published 12 years ago.
That They May Face the Rising Sun is an earthy pastoral. It is also superb. Yet again McGahern, the artist of place, demonstrates his understanding of things local as well as those subtle social and political nuances, the very gestures that define a society as closed and as ritualised as that of rural Ireland. His reading of that world is more astute than ever now that rural Ireland has been suburbanised into anonymity. Notions of identity are crucial to this new book, appearing as it does almost 40 years after the publication of his debut, The Barracks, in 1963. The tone of the new novel is a milder variation of that sustained throughout his finest short story to date, 'The Country Funeral', itself a study of modern Ireland finally suspended in weary, resigned acceptance of the once volatile tensions dividing the rural and urban.
A childless married couple, the Ruttledges, live a quiet, lakeside life. It is clear that some years before the narrative opens they abandoned London careers. Having settled in their old farmhouse they appear to have almost become part of the local community. They work their land, raise embarrassingly well-tended stock, keep bees, listen and, above all, are open to each event or small local drama as well as each neighbourly drink. They even wait patiently for a local builder to finally, if ever, finish the job he began - the construction of a shed that has itself become a half-built landmark of sorts.
It is a simple and ordinary story, calmly, wryly crafted with subtle detail - and therein lies McGahern's genius. As sharply, brilliantly observed as any he has written, and as true to the vivid characters he invariably creates through the crease of a smile, a gesture, a phrase that lingers, an old hurt that festers. The non-party-political McGahern again parades his anti-Republicanism, while the reality of emigration and embittered bachelors as ever stalk the narrative. Yet That They May Face the Rising Sun is also somewhat different from his previous work. Much of the natural darkness, brutality, injustice and power swings are absent. Sex is now a joke, neither trap nor sin, although two main characters avoid it. Nor is there the sense of any one individual battling a situation. Instead, he has concentrated on depicting a local society and its specific history composed of lives, events and rituals as it evolves over a year.
Though gentle and slow-moving, it is also a knowing, quick-witted performance; a tale of chat, much gossip, a whiff of menace and some local scandal rooted in the behaviour of John Quinn, a brazen cad given to humiliating women. There are characters such as sharp-tongued Patrick Ryan, the will o' the wisp builder, who, aware that his brother is dying, visits poor Edmund in hospital less for old time's sake than to protect himself from the sting of local censure. Family is a theme, but again here it is handled in a somewhat different way than McGahern's previous books. Ruttledge and his wife, Kate, are, as is obvious, not fully outsiders as Joe is the nephew of a wealthy local confirmed bachelor businessman, the imposing potentate known as the Shah. Through him they bought their farm, the shadowy local undertaker-turned-auctioneer being none other than an IRA leader, preoccupied with, as the Shah once observed, "saving Ireland".
Joe Ruttledge the quasi-"blow-in" is quiet, eager to learn a countryman's ways. He is no fake, nor is Kate. McGahern provides the minimum of detail about them, their personal exchanges are curiously formal - all we know is that Joe supplements their income through freelance writing and that Kate is a designer, good enough at her work for her old boss to visit, hoping to tempt her back to London. The point is made that while others left for England and America, they came to live in a place others had fled. They are ideal witnesses. Much of what we learn about them is derived from watching them engage with their neighbours, the colourful, kindly Jamesie and his wife, Mary. Jamesie is the presiding consciousness of the community, and the novel. He is both great talker and simple philosopher; for all his crude good humour, love of gossip and joy of life, he has his fears. The annual return home from England of his brother Johnny, an exile to failed romance, is more endurance test than celebration.
It is Jamesie who voices one of the many shrewd truths in the novel. "You nearly have to be born into a place to know what's going on and what to do." Through him we find out most of the news; Patrick Ryan provides the darker text. Although it is a narrative of voices, with McGahern drawing heavily on colloquial speech, its rhythms and ritual catchphrase repetitions designed to fill a silence, the descriptive passages, of which there are many, are lyric and often melancholic in tone.
Jamesie and Mary live near the lake where she grew up. Her mother died when she was a child but her father had lived on to become the first man she looked after. His death came like a silent thief. "Then the world she had left, little by little, began to disappear. On a wet soft evening in October, veils of mist and light rain obscuring the hills as well as the water, the pony trotted safely home from the Thursday outing to the town, but the life in the little trap had died somewhere along the road."
More than ever McGahern is determinedly observing the natural world; the lakeside landscape assumes a powerful presence with the lake changing as often as the sky or a human face. This time nature for him is not a backdrop, it is both stage and a major character in its own right. Seasons change, and with these changes come the various rituals of God and the land. The physical setting of the novel is a place where small-town life yields to that of the countryside and where the edges of the Midlands effectively become the West.
For all the reflective quality of the descriptive passages, there is a dynamic at work - time, and with it life, is passing. The central characters are middle-aged to elderly. Just as an old heifer and a young ewe give birth with contrasting results, death is both predictable and sudden. It is in the daily dealings; of favours done, bank loans refused, a disastrous match made at Knock and its comic aftermath, a laying out of a body, animals bought and sold, cruel deeds as well as kind turns, that McGahern, a supreme chronicler of the ordinary as well as of the closing chapters of traditional Irish rural life, has created a novel that lives and breathes as convincingly as the characters who inhabit it. On this performance, Irish fiction deserves to swagger.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
