The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  And to continue the contrast with Heaney, of this dominant space only its surface is ever described. Its depths may be hinted at, but the lake does not contain some hidden level of meaning that precedes experience:

  The lake was an enormous mirror turned to the depth of the sky, holding its lights and its colours. Close to the reeds there were many flies, and small schools of perch were rippling the surface with hints of the teeming energy and life of the depths.

  It is hard not to hear some echo of the play in Hamlet here. ‘An enormous mirror turned to the sky’ is not too far from ‘the mirror up to nature’ in Hamlet’s speech to the actors:

  Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

  For Hamlet, the ‘purpose of playing’ is to hold ‘the mirror up to nature’. Drama must be truth, a form without exaggeration, distortion, bombast or excessive sentimentality. In the theatrical mirror, virtues and vice are reflected back to us in their true shape, which is the moral function of theatre. Looking out towards the sky, the lake reflects all that happens, a reflection which the novel then intensifies through the precise lyricism of its reduced frame. These minimalist portraits reduce the sky, as Ruttledge put it, to undistorted, unexaggerated tableaux of light. The lake is a mirror up to nature, and it is the moral function of the novel to distil these lives to the essence of their being so as to capture that element that is not being.

  From the lake a heron rises each time there is a passer-by. That heron is just that: a heron, not a mythical emblem of something beyond itself but a repetitive part of the repetitive experience of each day. If soil is what land becomes when it is invested or injected with mythic beliefs, the lake is immune to any kind of symbolic appropriation. Around its shores time remains ungraspable as an immediate or full presence:

  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.

  If, as Coventry Patmore says, the end of art is peace, part of the credo of this Irish novel, set near a volatile border, is that peace, in all its mundane, repetitive and unavoidably dreary reality, does not mean the end of art. Surface items – sardine tins, coffee cups, low flying herons – are not repositories of eruptive historical energies. The land around the lake remains arable and economically productive in a way soil never can. The experience of time is unique, lonely and always unwhole.

  The full bleakness of this insight affects Johnny, the failed emigrant dreaming of a return to live with Jamesie and Mary. Redundant in Birmingham, the lake is that place where he imagines a full and harmonious presence. Like Bill Evans, Johnny begins to live in the future. The reality is that Johnny bores Jamesie and Mary and would ruin their family life. His dream is illusory. In Jamesie and Mary’s house, time is a jigsaw of discrete moments that can never be gathered whole: ‘No two clocks were the same or told the same time but all were running. Each one had its separate presence and claim.’ The reality is that Johnny returns home for good only when he is dead. If happiness is possible, it is known only in retrospect. The ‘separate presence’ of each moment inscribes an unbridgeable gulf between meaning and being. Or, again, as Jamesie puts it, ‘Right or wrong, Kate? There’s nothing right or wrong in this world. Only what happens.’

  Because they exist outside the seasonal rhythms pulsing through each day, the past and future are inaccessible zones. Because they work inside the seasonal rhythms contained in a single day, individuals can become curators of their own existence, caught up in some otherwise inexpressible exchange with the totality of their environment. Jamesie, Mary, Kate and Joe stack hay:

  The bales were too heavy for the child but the two women and Jamesie were able to stack them almost as quickly as the baler spat them out. Two bales were placed sideways, sufficiently close to be crossed by two other bales but far enough apart to allow air to circulate. The stack was completed by a single bale on top, the uncut side turned upwards to cast the rain. When they were all stacked, they stood like abstract sculptures in swept empty space.

  ‘Abstract sculptures in swept empty space’ – the image seems more suited to a landscape painting than a kinetic narrative. As a culminating image it is fixed (‘stood’) and it restores or extracts some idyllic version of harmony and order from the seasonal flux, and it shows how culture arises from the cultivation of the environment. Each character becomes the curator of their own existence in this communal aesthetic. It is hard not to think that the novel here is almost too full of goodness, the image coming too close to the top, almost more perfect than any McGahern could have witnessed. When they finish stacking hay, this intensely visual harmony shifts to domestic space:

  Inside the house a reading lamp with a green shade was lit on the big table. On the red-and-white square of the table cloth stood a blue bowl filled with salad and large white plates of tongue and ham, a cheeseboard with different cheeses, including the Galtee Jamesie liked wrapped in its silver paper, a cut loaf, white wine, a bottle of Powers, lemonade. There was a large glass of iced water in which slices of lemon floated.

  After the public seasonal labour, the writer is witness to the implacable stillness and ordinariness of domestic objects. The narrator may not provide analysis of any character’s psychology, but this is still a rich interior life. It is an example of what Amit Chaudhuri in his essay here calls the novel’s ‘special minority gift for the particular that is not to be found in any other form of discourse’. Each object already belongs to some numinous aura simply by being. The ritualistic provision of daily bread and cheese and whiskey and wine draws its aesthetic and sacral grace from a combination of the visual and literary, from Kate the artist and Joe the aspirant priest, from the seasonal context of time passing for these neighbours and the mute stasis of what passes in each moment of time. The table is an offering, an appropriate climax to the ceremony of stacking hay, and its stillness is one way of making time flesh, of arresting the process of decay.

  The communal codes underpinning this collective life exist in ‘that space between the need to be heard and the fear of being heard’. When Jamesie enters the novel and the Ruttledge home he is like a preordained presence, something silent and non physical yet still felt, a bit like the wind:

  Jamesie entered without knocking and came in noiselessly until he stood in the doorway of the large room where the Ruttledges were sitting. He stood as still as if waiting under trees for returning wildfowl. He expected his discovery to be quick. There would be a cry of surprise and reproach; he would counter by accusing them of not being watchful enough. There would be welcome and laughter.

  And two pages later, in anticipation of Johnny’s annual return,

  The house and the outhouses would be freshly whitewashed for the homecoming, the street swept, the green gates painted … Mary would have scrubbed and freshened all the rooms. Together they would have taken the mattresses from the bed on the lower room … the holy pictures and the wedding photograph would be taken down … his bed would be made … an enormous vase of flowers from the garden and the field … would be placed on the sill … the order for the best sirloin would already have been placed at Carroll’s in the town.

  The future perfect ‘would’ is one of those key McGahern words, and here it is freighted with anthropological weight. ‘Would’ means that experience always awaits its consummation as an act to be made flesh amongst individuals. The cleaning, pictures, flowers and steaks ‘would’ happen; they are all rituals, and what ritual tacitly communicates are the deepest values of all the individuals performing it. Ritual expresses wishes at
odds with conscious experience – the ritual of hospitality disguises the boredom of Johnny’s visits, for example. Ritual establishes separateness, a mode of individual and collective being whose deepest coordinates are derived from a distinct cultural identity. Ritual distinguishes life round the lake, exalting the primacy of place and race because its underlying patterns are accessible only to those already within the community. Or as Jamesie tells Kate, ‘You’d nearly have to be born into a place to know what’s going on and what to do.’

  ‘Going on and what to do’ – the phrase combines procedure and activity, life as an unending and renewable process. Johnny dies but Ruttledge delivers a calf and it is the ‘beginning of the world’ again. But with so little civic society – Patrick says ‘Only for the football and the Mass and the Observer on Wednesday people would never get out of their frigging houses. They’d be marooned’ – interaction becomes a focus for inaction and inactivity. Patrick Ryan’s unfinished shed is a statement against closure, for closure would rule out contact, and round the lake talk not money is the primary means of exchange. So the shed is, like the novel itself, a structure in perpetual process. Like the novel, the shed mingles various genres – it is symbolic and substantive, a fertile source of gossip for Jamesie and the Shah on Ryan’s uselessness, and something caught up in the commemoration of Johnny’s being. ‘Going on’, Ruttledge realises early in the novel, is more important than getting it done. Patrick says to Ruttledge,

  ‘I’ll be round tomorrow. We’ll finish that shed …’

  ‘There’s no hurry.’

  ‘You were anxious enough to get building done once …’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  As the novel ends, Patrick is insistent on what needs to be done:

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll make a start, in the name of the Lord, and we’ll not quit until that whole cathedral of a shed is finished,’ he said in the same ringing, confident tone that had ordered Johnny’s head to lie to the west in Shruhaun so that when he rose with all the faithful he would face the rising sun.

  ‘There’s no great need or rush with the shed, Patrick,’ Kate said uncertainly, surprised by her own forwardness. ‘Maybe it could be left there for another summer in deference to Johnny?’

  This cathedral of a cattle shed is another abstract sculpture in swept space, an image through which to mediate belief in some element of being that is not being. And like ritual, this use of image as a means of devotion is drawn directly from Catholic practice. In the novel’s concluding scene, Patrick asks Ruttledge for a definitive answer on the shed, yes or no, built or unbuilt, finished or forever unfinished, unwhole.

  ‘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 in the morning. We don’t have to decide on anything till morning.’

  Ruttledge knows that finishing the shed would impoverish a public segment of their existence. Kate and Joe as woman and man, artist and the once-aspirant priest, merge their uncertainties within nature, beneath the alder tree, and take solace from talk, that non-material means of exchange. Solace is the simple availability of another day, the chance to deflect Patrick’s harsh certainties. The unknown segment of existence that only the novel knows is that, on this final page, Joe and Kate repeat Jamesie’s entrance to their home on the first page – ‘He stood as still as if waiting under trees for the returning wildfowl.’ The year ends in some echoing format of its beginning, nature a constant, human activity round the lake sheltered by it, experience cyclical and repetitive.

  *

  Kundera claims that ‘Knowledge is the novel’s only morality’, but the economy of McGahern’s style, and the layers of being it encodes, provide something more and less than knowledge. It is less a moral vision of how to live than a creed on how the enormity of life can be contained and conserved within each day. It is a creed that believes in something holy and still within the ordinary and also something ghostly and numinous beyond it. It derives its unconscious public practices from the Catholic use of ritual and image, and it gathers together a communion of individuals that looks to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.

  Is it too good to be true? A feature of life round the lake is the absence of children. Calves and sheep may breed but Jamesie’s niece is the only child in the novel, and even she belongs to Dublin. Nature is endlessly fertile but this community is aged – the Ruttledges’ childlessness is too sensitive for direct address, but it is still a feature of their relationship. The only overtly sensual moment between Joe and Kate is similarly indirect. Kate’s cat kills a young hare. As Kate sleeps, the cat drops the leveret across her throat with Joe ‘trapped in the fascination of watching’:

  The flesh was still warm. A trickle of bright scarlet ran from the nostrils. There was a thin red stain along the white cover of the bed, like a trail.

  This sacrificial offering of the hare is erotic because of its excess. Drawn from a wildness in nature – now tame, the cat had ‘never lost her wildness completely’ – it exceeds what Joe can aspire to. The once aspirant priest relishes this ideal, untamed image of seduction, the thin red stain against the white bed offering not just a vivid image of virginal possession, but also some reticent allusion to the Christian sacrifice in a wild setting. The point is not that this fantastic offering of warm flesh to his wife, the artist, is unavailable to Joe. The point is that this does not make the image any less potent. The point is that these sensuous energies – predatory, religious, dramatic – are present in this ostensibly inert, isolated environment.

  It does not really matter if the scene is too good to be true. What matters is that it captures some of what would be lost if this community dies. To return to Kundera, the morality or good of this novel belongs primarily to a style that conveys something more and less than knowledge about the known and unknown segments of this world. Little happens, the people are aged, loneliness is an ever-present, death and the world to come a constant preoccupation. But it is still a novel of resistance. It resists incorporation into the values of status and consumption that mark the wider world it enters. It describes a version of freedom that does not need to be reconciled to what surrounds it. McGahern does not overtly write against the grain, of course (moving some of his cruder critics to describe him as ‘retro’), but his novel does describe the ethical and aesthetic good of a community cultivating its environment and conserving grain and hay, of people passing on news and extending hospitality to one another, of enduring the ‘fucken quiet’ so that silence and stillness become part of life’s texture.

  Part of McGahern’s attraction is his strange quotidian nobility. He conscripts the Yeatsian tradition of custom and ceremony for precisely the Catholic bourgeois class Yeats thought would ruin these virtues. ‘I may not have travelled far but I know the whole world,’ says Jamsie near the novel’s end. ‘You do know the whole word,’ Ruttledge said, ‘And you have been my sweet guide.’ ‘Sweet’ is a discriminating word, one that captures Jamesie’s ethical, aesthetic and civic goodness, and shows that goodness to be a matter of exquisite taste as well as a testament to what keeps people going day after day, knowing there is nothing new under the sun.

  In this his last novel, written when McGahern must have known that the end of his life was near, McGahern’s main character, Ruttledge, concludes with ‘I’m not sure. We can talk it through. We don’t have to decide on anything till morning,’ phrases that find some resonance in Edward Said’s description of late artistic style:

  This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.

  That heron no longer flies because of the telegraph pole
s dotted round the lake. The landscape is slowly changing, time and communication are being altered too, but still Joe is unable to contemplate deviating from the daily customs and ceremony of their existence. It was McGahern’s ‘power to render disenchantment and pleasure’, his spiritual fusion of the ordinary and the uncanny, ritual and repetition, that moved those one thousand people in Dublin to greet him with such rapture.

  Contributors

  AMIT CHAUDHURI was brought up in Bombay. He has contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to numerous publications including the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker and Granta. His books include A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), Afternoon Raag (1993), Freedom Song (1998), A New World (2000), The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (editor, 2001), Real Time (2002), D. H. Lawrence and ‘difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (2003), St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005) Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature, and Culture (2008) and The Immortals (2009).

  JASON COWLEY is a journalist, magazine editor and writer. He is editor of the New Statesman and was previously editor of Granta magazine and of the award-winning Observer Sport Monthly. He is the author of a novel, Unknown Pleasures (2000), and of The Last Game: Love, Death and Football (2009), and is a director of Zamyn and a founding member of the council of the Caine Prize for African Writing.

  TESSA HADLEY teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four novels, Accidents in the Home (2002), Everything Will Be All Right (2004), The Master Bedroom (2007) and The London Train (2011); she has had stories in The New Yorker, Granta and the Guardian, and brought out a collection, Sunstroke and Other Stories, in 2007. She has also written a critical book on Henry James, and writes for the London Review of Books.