Compassionate, unassuming and often humorous, John McGahern's novel By The Lake details a little more than a year in the life of a closely-knit Irish rural community. McGahern's graceful, unassuming story centres on Joe Ruttledge, an Irish advertising executive who left London to return to the land where he was born. While other Irishmen were fleeing "to England and America and the ends of the Earth," Joe went "against the tide," and returned to his past. Joe could not bear his life in England. He came home to connect to the land he once abandoned.

In this unnamed rural enclave two hours outside of Dublin, "the days disappear in the attendance of small tasks." McGahern describes the rituals of the farm: cutting and baling hay, birthing calves, auctioning off the cattle, and losing a late-born lamb ("when you have livestock, you're going to have deadstock," Joe is assured).

Amid the particulars of farm-life, there are also hints of a connection with something greater. A deft observer, McGahern skilfully details the seasonal cycles of the natural world. McGahern even occasionally brings his prose back on itself, repeating passages almost word for word as his characters act out an elaborate greeting ritual. The cyclic nature of the work brings a sense of calmness to it, a sense of peace that sets the tone of the novel.

The almost invisible plot purls peacefully, like an ancient steam aware that it does not need to hurry to get where it's going. The relationships between and among the characters form the core of the novel. The Ruttledges have developed a strong relationship with their neighbors, Jamesie and Mary Murphy, and the two couples visit with each other almost daily. Jamesie, the novel's most likable character, is a kind-hearted gossipmonger. He is both nosy and newsy, always bicycling around the lake in pursuit of the latest news. Though he and his wife of 17 years have never left the lake, he has supreme confidence in his sources of information: "I may not have travelled far but I know the whole world," he says.

McGahern excels at building up interesting, distinctive personages, and the novel is full of them. There's Joe's uncle, known as "the Shah," a man who single-handedly built up a business empire, and is now ready to retire and hand the reins over to his partner of 20 years, though the two never speak; there's Bill Evans, a product of an abusive foster home, who, "like something out of a Russian novel," trudges down to the lake daily to draw water, inevitably stopping by the Ruttledges' farmhouse to bum a few smokes; there's John Quinn, the local womanizer who quotes Biblical passages ("tis not good for man to live alone") in the pursuit of his unsavoury ends; and there's Johnny, Jamesie's brother, who left Ireland for England 20 years ago in pursuit of a woman he loved, only to lose her shortly after arriving. Joe Ruttledge remains the most mysterious character. Though the story follows him, much of his life remains in the shadows.

Though his character is not sharply defined, Joe remains the focal point of the story and plays a role in each of the story's subplots. Respected for both his academic knowledge (he began studying as a priest before abandoning the priesthood and taking a university degree) and his wisdom, he is often called upon to help out his neighbours in times of need. He assists with brute physical tasks, like cutting and bringing in the hay before the rains come. But he is also called on for more delicate requests, like negotiating the sale of the Shah's business, the largest in town, to his partner; or the writing of a letter on behalf of the Murphys, to diplomatically inform Johnny, who has just lost his job in London, that it is impossible for him to come and live in their cottage by the lake.

McGahern evokes the particularities of place in such a way as to make the setting one of the novel's highest achievements. His descriptions of the natural world are closely observed and deftly articulated: "The leaves started to fall heavily in frosts, in ghostly whispering streams that never paused though the trees were still." The changes in the landscape make readers aware of the time passing, flowing steadily along. In McGahern's Ireland, religion has declined in influence; it is the land and its history that brings people together, or drives them apart. The land creates the separation between those who left and those who stayed. 

Much of the action transpires in conversations lubricated by whisky and tea. McGahern's dialogue is flecked with colourful Irish expressions: good people are described as "pure fourteen-carat," and when things are well organized and running smoothly, they are "completely alphabetical."

This lakeside community is almost entirely self-contained. People fill multiple roles, with the same man occupying the posts of undertaker and auctioneer, for example. The arrival of visitors is treated with as much reverence as a papal visit, and often threatens to disrupt the enclave's calm. McGahern reinforces the cloistered nature of the community by not dividing the novel into numbered chapters and instead offering line breaks to mark narrative shifts. He also leaves the issues of Ireland's troubles on the outskirts, only occasionally allowing second-hand news of developments to filter down from the north.

McGahern plays with chronology, using an omniscient narrator, who frequently interrupts the chronological plot development by injecting a character's memories into the middle of an unfolding scene. McGahern also refuses to set the novel in any particular year, though he does suggest contemporary times, with the mention that characters are partial to watching Blind Date .

Though firmly set in a small town in Ireland, By The Lake retains a sense of universality. The necessity and value of different interpersonal relations is stressed, as is the merit of a simple life. Midway through the novel, Joe realises that this life may have brought him happiness—but then he checks himself: "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 at all." The novel offers readers the same satisfaction that Ruttledge ultimately gains: a subtle sort of fulfilment that derives from creating so much out of so little.

Though the absence of a linear plot may irk some readers, McGahern's characters and beautiful language will delight many more. And even while the bare-boned frame of the novel may seem simplistic, By The Lake succeeds in an ambitious achievement: the creation of an entirely self-contained world, a comprehensible microcosm of the complex interactions that make up our existence.