PASTORAL.

By the Lake
John McGahern
Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 336 pp.

John McGahern's latest novel, the first since his celebrated Amongst Women won several awards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize a decade ago, continues in the lyrical voice he introduced there. Gone are the sharp conflicts of husband/wife, parent/child, priest manager/teacher that characterized his earlier novels. Even the political metaphors that overlay Great Meadow, in his last, have given way to a straightforward celebration of place and people in the full course of a year.

Indeed, the lake by which they live, with its neighboring fields and meadows, looms as large as the characters themselves. Its ever-shifting moods and colors, gleams and shadows evoke some of McGahern's most nuanced prose. "As the stacks [of hay] disappeared from the meadows and the shed filled, the sun coming and going behind the dark, racing clouds, they were able to stack the last loads at their ease, chatting and idling. Swallows were sweeping low about the empty meadows. The wing beats of swans crossing between the lakes came on the still air and they counted seven in formation before they disappeared below the screen of trees. For such elegant creatures of the air and the water, their landing was loud and clumsy." That final sentence deliberately undercuts the lyricism and returns us, along with the birds, to finitude, without in any way negating what has gone before.

At other times McGahern essays a full-scale Homeric simile: "Patrick Ryan's reemergence into this slow mindlessness was like the eruptions of air which occur in the wheaten light of mown meadows in a heatwave. Dried grass and leaves, and even bits of sticks, are sent whirling high in a noisy spinning cylinder of dust and violent air, which then as quickly dies, to reappear like a mirage in another part of the meadow." This to describe a tough laborer under attack by a swarm of bees.

The Homeric intrusion is no accident, rather a subtle clue to the novelist's real purpose here. The poet Patrick Kavanaugh famously asserted the validity of rural realities for Irish literature, distinguishing the "provincial" sensibility from the "parochial." The former is always looking back to the capital for affirmation, while the latter cherishes the local as the only true matter for art. He concludes his sonnet, "Epic," having Homer speak these words: "I made the Iliad from such/A local row. Gods make their own importance."

As do novelists. By keeping his art sharply focused on the particularities of place and persons, McGahern succeeds in drawing us into his created world of "ordinary" people over the course of a year. At the center are the Ruttledges, English Kate and her Irish husband Joe whose first name is hardly ever mentioned; they met and married in England but later decided to settle permanently in Ireland. Their circle includes "the Shah," Ruttledges' uncle and the wealthiest bachelor in the district, as well as Jamesie and Mary, neighbors across the lake, and Patrick Ryan, a talented builder who works and lives to his own schedule, and Johnny, Jamesie's brother, who pursued an unrequited love to England and now returns only for his annual summer holidays. It is Johnny's last visit that punctuates the narrative: Jamesie announces his imminent arrival as the novel opens, and his funeral and burial bring the story to a conclusion.

Though a peripheral character in the story, Johnny serves as a counterweight to the Ruttledges. Having acted foolishly in his youth, he stayed put and single in England for want of a better offer when he was jilted. The Ruttledges, conversely, had successful careers there but left them to take up farming in Ireland; in the middle of the novel, Kate turns down a lucrative offer to return, though Ruttledge himself still counts on occasional freelance contracts to supplement their income. A shift in paradigms? The return of the wild geese? Certainly, the picture of rural Ireland McGahern paints bears little resemblance to the destitution of the 1930s, or even the poverty of the early 1950s when I first visited Donegal as an eight-year-old and was shocked at the dirt floors in some houses and the absence of electricity and telephones almost everywhere. By contrast, there's plenty of hard work in this story but little of hardship, except for Bill Evans, the product of a harsh orphanage and victim of an even crueler peonage system.

To say that nothing happens in the novel would be both an understatement and a failure to observe its rhythms. What happens is simply life itself: the change of seasons, the birth of one calf and the selling of several others, the passing of a modest business from one eccentric bachelor to another, the deepening of friendships and the ending of a foolish marriage between an old rake and a deceived widow. None of the characters would make extravagant claims for any of it, except perhaps the aging Lothario who may already be planning his next conquest.

Ruttledge is an agnostic who once apparently considered the priesthood. He refuses to go to Mass because he no longer believes. Jamesie mocks him for his seriousness in the opening scene:

   "I don't believe," he mimicked. "None of us believes and we go. That's no
bar."

   "I'd feel a hypocrite. Why do you go if you don't believe?"

   "To look at the girls. To see the whole performance," he cried out and
   started to shake with laughter. "We go to see all the other hypocrites."

In the closing pages, after the burial of his brother, Jamesie raises the question of belief with Ruttledge in a quite serious mode as they walk toward the lake and the Ruttledges' home.

   "Do you think is there an afterlife?" His question startled Ruttledge
   because it was so uncharacteristic.

   "No, I don't believe there is but I have no way of knowing."

Ruttledge is uneasy with his friend's sudden somber turn, but Jamesie will not be so easily deflected. Like a wise peasant, he wants to cover all bets: "At the same time you wouldn't want to leave yourself too caught out in case you found there was something there when you did cross over," Jamesie said doubtfully.

He then goes on to praise Father Conroy for his pastoral zeal and fine sermon at Johnny's funeral and to defend him against his local detractors who falsely accuse him of money-grubbing.

   "I like him too," Ruttledge said.

   "Then you should go to Mass," Jamesie whispered mockingly.

Another circle is closed and the novel ends on a pitch-perfect note of relaxed indecision, ostensibly about finishing a shed:

   "What are you going to do?" Kate asked as they passed beneath the alder
tree.

   "I'm not sure," he said. "We can talk it through. We don't have to decide
   anything till morning."

John B. Breslin, S.J., teaches contemporary Irish literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.