Book Review – By the Lake by John McGahern

I discovered John McGahern through an essay by one of my favourite essayists, Anne Fadiman. Later when I went to the bookshop to spend a few pleasant hours browsing books, I saw John McGahern’s ‘By the Lake‘ there and couldn’t resist it. All this happened years back. Since then the book has been languishing in my bookshelves. I finally got around to reading it.

There is a lake in an Irish village. Ruttledge and Kate live near the lake. They’ve moved here from London sometime back, because they wanted to enjoy the quiet rural atmosphere. Their best friends are Jamesie and Mary. What happens to these two couples and their families and friends and other people who live nearby and the animals they take care of, during the course of a year, is described in the rest of the book.

I loved ‘By the Lake’. Some of the characters in the story are rich, some of them are poor, some of them are talkative, some of them are quiet, some of them are religious, some of them are not. But nearly all the characters are charming and likeable, and some of them are eccentric. There is one character, who can be regarded as bad, but he  is also charming in some ways. It was hard for me to pick one favourite character because I loved them all. The description of nature and village life is very beautiful and is an absolute pleasure to read. I highlighted so many favourite passages in the book. I’ve never read an Irish book like this. The Irish books I’ve read till now are typically indistinguishable from English books, or they talk a bit about Catholic religion, and that’s how we know that they are Irish. But this book is very different. It describes Irish village life and it sounds authentically Irish and is very different from anything I’ve read till now. I don’t know whether this is how an Irish village looks like now or whether this is how it looked like once upon a time, or whether this is John McGahern’s imagination on how he’d like an Irish village to be. Whichever of these is true, this book’s version of Ireland and the Irish village life is very beautiful and charming. I loved it and I’m glad I read it.

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.

Quote 1

Patrick Ryan : “How is England?”

Johnny : “England never changes much. They have a set way of doing everything there. It’s all more or less alphabetical in England.”

Patrick Ryan : “Not like this fucken place. You never know what your Irishman is going to do next. What’s more, the chances are he doesn’t know either.”

Johnny : “Everybody has their own way. There are times when maybe the English can be too methodical.”

Patrick Ryan : “No danger of that here. There’s no manners.”

Kate : “Some people here have beautiful manners.”

Patrick Ryan : “Maybe a few. But there’s no rules. They’re all making it up as they sail along.”

Quote 2

“Then the pony took him home. Unless there was wind or heavy rain he was always seen to be asleep in a corner of the trap as they passed between the two bars in Shruhaun. There was so little traffic on the roads, his nature so unassuming and easygoing, his little weakness so well known, that this quiet passage drew no more attention than affectionate smiles of recognition. No one even shouted a mischievous greeting. Generally, he woke coming in round the shore, the pony’s pace quickening in anticipation of being released from the trap and watered and given hay and oats. If the quick change of pace hadn’t woken him, he would be quickly shaken awake by the rutted road.”

Quote 3

“Bill Evans could no more look forward than he could look back. He existed in a small closed circle of the present. Remembrance of things past and dreams of things to come were instruments of torture.”

Quote 4

“As he listened to the two voices he was so attached to and thought back to the afternoon, the striking of the clocks, the easy, pleasant company, the walk round the shore, with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.”

Quote 5

“They could not live with him and they could not be seen – in their own eyes or in the eyes of others – to refuse him shelter or turn him away. 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. Confrontation was avoided whenever possible. These manners, open to exploitation by ruthless people, held all kinds of traps for the ignorant or unwary and could lead into entanglements that a more confident, forthright manner would have seen off at the very beginning. It was a language that hadn’t any simple way of saying no.”

Quote 6

“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.”

Quote 7

“The table was laid, a single candle lit, the curtains not drawn. As they ate and drank and talked, the huge shapes of the trees around the house gradually entered the room in the flickering half-light, and the room went out, as if in a dream, to include the trees and the fields and the glowing deep light of the sky. In this soft light the room seemed to grow enormous and everything to fill with repose.”

Quote 8

Jamesie : “Do you think is there an afterlife?”

Ruttledge : “No. I don’t believe there is but I have no way of knowing.”

Jamesie : “You mean we’re like dog or cat or a cow or a when we are dead we are just dead?”

Ruttledge : “More or less. I don’t know from what source life comes, other than out of nature, or for what purpose. I suppose it’s not unreasonable to think that we go back into whatever meaning we came from. Why do you ask?”

Jamesie : “I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Johnny went.”

Ruttledge : “What do you think?”

Jamesie : “I think if there’s a hell and heaven that one or other or both of the places are going to be vastly overcrowded.”

Ruttledge : “I suspect hell and heaven and purgatory even eternity – all come from our experience of life and may have nothing to do with anything else once we cross to the other side.”

Jamesie : “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.”

Have you read John McGahern’s book? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

One of my book club friends who was running a library, closed her library down and moved abroad. At that time she put all her library books on sale. I got some books from that sale. That is how I discovered ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne‘. I found the title very haunting and that is why I got the book. Later I discovered that it was Brian Moore’s centenary and readers were celebrating it. I wanted to read this book at that time, but couldn’t. I finally got to read it now.

Judith Hearne is a forty-something woman. Recently she has moved to a new place. Her fellow lodgers are a diverse cast of characters. One of those lodgers is the landlady’s brother. The landlady also has a grown-up son living with her. The landlady’s brother shows interest in Judith and starts courting her. Judith feels that he wants to marry her. But things don’t go as she thinks. As Judith gets hurtled from one thing to another and as her life crashlands, our heart breaks as the story hurtles to its tragic end.

When I first discovered the book, I thought the title meant that Judith Hearne was a woman who was quiet, lonely, passionate and who yearned for love and who was probably in love with someone but the other person didn’t love her back. I thought that the story was about that. But after reading the book, I felt that this was not what it was about. The word ‘passion’ in the title is probably closer in meaning to the way it is used in the phrase ‘The Passion of the Christ’. Here the word ‘passion’ describes the suffering that Jesus went through during the last period of his life. This book seems to have a similar theme – it describes the suffering that Judith Hearne went through most of her life – how she lived with her aunt and her aunt refused to let her get independent, refused to let her stay in a job, and whenever a man tried courting Judith how her aunt put an end to that, and how Judith finally ended up taking care of her aunt full-time and when her aunt passed Judith hoped that she might get some inheritance but she didn’t get much, and she ended up being middle-aged with no employment and no husband and family, how Judith regarded the O’Neills as her friends and visited their home every weekend and how they put on a mask and treated her nicely when she went to their place but treated her with contempt and laughed at her behind her back, how she went to church to confess but the priest didn’t show much interest or sensitivity to her confession, how she started losing faith in God and hoped for a sign but nothing happened and she felt dejected and depressed – these and other things which happen, this is Judith Hearne’s modern day passion, this is her suffering. The ending is heartbreaking. Why a simple person with small wishes and desires, who wishes to find happiness in small ways is treated badly and crushed by people and society – it is heartbreaking to read. We’d have met a few Judith Hearnes in our lives – I have – and reading this book brought back old memories of them and made me cry.

Some of my favourite parts from the book.

“For it was important to have things to tell which interested your friends. And Miss Hearne had always been able to find interesting happenings where other people would find only dullness. It was, she often felt, a gift which was one of the great rewards of a solitary life. And a necessary gift. Because, when you were a single girl, you had to find interesting things to talk about. Other women always had their children and shopping and running a house to chat about. Besides which, their husbands often told them interesting stories. But a single girl was in a different position. People simply didn’t want to hear how she managed things like accommodation and budgets. She had to find other subjects and other subjects were mostly other people. So people she knew, people she had heard of, people she saw in the street, people she had read about, they all had to be collected and gone through like a basket of sewing so that the most interesting bits about them could be picked out and fitted together to make conversation.”

“If no one hears?

No one.

No one. The church, an empty shell, nobody to hear, no reason to pray, only statues listen. Statues cannot hear.

And if I am alone?

If I am alone it does not matter what life I lead. It does not matter. And if I die I am a dead thing. I have no eternal life. No one will remember me, no one will weep for me. No one will reward the good I have done, no one will punish the sins I have committed.

No one.”

“She was feeling tired. Why, the Mass was very long. If you did not pray, if you did not take part, then it was very, very long. If you did not believe, then how many things would seem different. Everything : lives, hopes, devotions, thoughts. If you do not believe, you are alone. But I was of Ireland, among my people, a member of my faith. Now I have no – and if no faith, then no people. No, no, I have not given up. I cannot. For if I give up this, then I must give up all the rest. There is no right or wrong in this. I do not feel, I do not know. Why should I suffer this?”

Other reviews

Lisa (ANZ Litlovers)

Claire (Word by Word)

Caroline (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat)

Have you read ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’? What to you think about it? Which is your favourite Brian Moore book?

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Book Review – Love and Summer by William Trevor

I discovered William Trevor through Kim’s posts (from ‘Reading Matters‘) last year when Kim hosted a year long William Trevor festival to celebrate his work. Then when I was wondering which William Trevor to read first, my friend gave me William Trevor’s ‘Love and Summer‘ as a Christmas present. I was very excited to read it.

A young woman who is an orphan comes to a farmer’s place to work as a maid. A young man comes to that town to take photos. Their paths cross and they fall in love. There is only one problem. The young woman is married to the farmer now, to whose place she had come to work. Also, the young man is carrying his family debt and the only way out of that is to sell the family house, pay off the debts and move out of town. So there are two problems. As if this is not enough, the young woman’s husband is a kind man who loves her very much. So that is three problems. What happens after this forms the rest of the story.

I loved ‘Love and Summer’. The story happens during the course of a summer. The story starts slowly but later at some point it picks up pace, and towards the end the tension is so high that we can almost touch it. The pages just start flying by! William Trevor’s prose sparkles in many places and it almost feels like he wrote the novel in his sleep. I’m wondering how much more beautiful his writing would be in his earlier work, where he would have spent a lot of time sculpting sentences and passages. Towards the end of the story, we can almost feel the author’s pen poised over paper, waiting to decide the fate of the main characters. Our heart is almost ripped with anguish as we pray for our favourite characters and we wonder whether the author is going to give a happy ending or whether he is going to break our heart. I’m not going to tell you what happened. You’ve got to read the book to find out.

Sharing one of my favourite parts from the book. It made me cry.

“Jessie wasn’t there, waking up in the open doorway when Florian did. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and he looked for her in the garden and then walked to the lake, calling her. He was still in his pyjamas, which had become sodden where they trailed through the long grass. He searched the garden again, and then went back to the house, to the sculleries and the unused dining-room, the drawing-room, and what had once been his darkroom. In one of the empty attics, huddled into a corner, she tried to wag her tail at him.

‘Poor Jess,’ he murmured.

He warmed milk in the kitchen and took it back to her but she didn’t want it. He cradled her in his arms but she struggled slightly and kept slipping away. He put her down in the place she’d chosen and crouched beside her.

‘Poor Jess,’ he said again, and she made another effort to move her tail, to thump the floor the way she knew she should. An eye regarded him, demanded nothing, trusting features that had always been trusted. Her tongue lolled tiredly out. She tried to pant. A few minutes later she died.

He dug her grave in a corner where she used to lie when the sun was too hot, or in spring, watching for rabbits. She had been fetched from somewhere a couple of miles away, the last one in a litter. His father had walked there, returning with the small bundle in his arms. ‘Peko,’ his father had suggested. ‘Jessie,’ his mother said.

Florian carried her downstairs, through the kitchen to the garden. He sat on the grass, his arms around her, her body stiffening, still warm. Then he buried her.

Afterwards, in the house, he sensed an eeriness, as if it had been waiting for this particular departure, another in an exodus that was now almost complete.”

Other reviews

Kim (Reading Matters)

Lisa (ANZ Litlovers)

Jacqui (JacquiWine’s Journal)

Have you read ‘Love and Summer’? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite William Trevor book?

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Book Review – Dubliners by James Joyce

I thought I’ll dip into James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners‘. I read one story and then another, and before I knew, I was immersed into the book!

‘Dubliners‘ has fifteen stories. It depicts the Dublin of a hundred years back, through the stories of its inhabitants. Most of the stories are 10 pages or less. One of them, ‘The Dead’ is the longest one, at 35 pages. I think that it is Joyce’s masterpiece in the short form.

My favourite stories in the book were ‘Eveline‘, ‘A Little Cloud‘, ‘Clay‘, ‘A Painful Case‘, and, of course, ‘The Dead‘.

‘Eveline‘ is about a woman who keeps sacrificing her life and serving her family, and she falls in love. She is torn between her sense of duty towards her family and her desire to pursue personal happiness. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking story. I wonder whether Colm Tóibin’s ‘Brooklyn’ was inspired by this.

‘A Little Cloud‘ is about a man who meets an old friend who has become successful. This man wonders whether he can change his own life and get away and realize his dreams.

‘Clay‘ is about a woman who takes off from work and goes to meet her former employers who treat her like family. It is a beautiful story.

‘A Painful Case‘ is about a shy, introverted man who meets a woman and they fall in love. It is an unusual situation for him, and it makes his life complicated. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking story.

‘The Dead‘ is about a family celebration during festival time. It is a beautiful, complex story. For a short story, it is quite epic in scope, and it almost feels like a novel. It has some of my favourite passages from the book. This story made me remember Thomas Dylan’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales‘.

I loved ‘Dubliners‘. I’m glad I read it. It made me remember one of my favourite books, ‘Up in the Old Hotel‘ by Joseph Mitchell, which is about the New York of a bygone era, seen through the stories of normal people and some eccentric characters. ‘Dubliners’ is probably the first and last book that James Joyce wrote in the traditional style for a normal reader like me. Then he decided that he was done with it, and went and wrote experimental and difficult books like ‘Ulysses‘ and ‘Finnegans Wake‘ which are beyond the comprehension of a reader like me. Wish he had alternated between the two kinds of books, so that there are more accessible books for readers like me. Unfortunately, this is all there is. But I’m glad that he atleast wrote this one accessible book. I’m thankful for that.

Have you read ‘Dubliners‘? What do you think about it?

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Seamus Heaney on Michael McLaverty

Seamus Heaney waxing lyrically in purple prose in his introduction to Michael McLaverty’s Collected Short Stories 😊 Wish I could write like this 😊

“But realism is finally an unsatisfactory word when it is applied to a body of work as poetic as these stories. There is, of course, a regional basis to McLaverty’s world and a note-taker’s reliability to his observation, yet the region is contemplated with a gaze more loving and more lingering than any fieldworker or folklorist could ever manage. Those streets and shores and fields have been weathered in his affections and recollected in tranquility until the contours of each landscape have become a prospect of the mind…in his best work, the elegiac is bodied forth in perfectly pondered images and rhythms, the pathetic element qualified by something astute…His voice was modestly pitched, he never sought the limelight, yet for all that, his place in our literature is secure.”

Left : Michael McLaverty; Right : Seamus Heaney

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