Once they started nailing the rafters, the frame to hold the roof took shape. Each new rafter formed its own square or rectangle, and from the ground they all held their own measure of sky; in the outer rectangles leaves from branches of overhanging ash and sycamore were mixed with the sky.

“What are you looking at, lad?”

“At how the rafters frame the sky. They make it look more human by reducing the sky, and then the whole sky grows out from that small space.”

“As long as they hold the iron, lad, they’ll do,” Patrick Ryan laughed sympathetically. “There was a time when people were locked up for saying less than that. If you came out with a spake like that they’d think you had gone off like one of the old alarm clocks.”

~ John McGahern, By the Lake

John McGahern’s novel By the Lake (a yawn of a title that for some reason replaced That They May Face the Rising Sun for the US edition) reminded me of George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. But in McGahern’s novel the central character who moves to a rural village (not a protagonist so much as a hub around whom others tell their own stories) decided at some point not to become a priest, and that decision allows him to relish the contradictions of his neighbors rather than suffer for them as Bernanos’ priest does. Both novels skewer the image of idyllic villages filled with cheerful, apple-cheeked natives living close to the earth, and each does it with grace and with love, but McGahern’s vision is so much more generous. In Bernanos’ novel, someone must suffer to redeem the cruelty and hypocrisy of the village, while in McGahern’s it is simply the way of the world and a dispute in the morning doesn’t keep neighbors from sharing a drink in the afternoon. Both villages are warrens of rumor and secret, but only one is rotten at its heart and ultimately fatal, as the village’s rot is absorbed and atoned for by the country priest’s stomach cancer. McGahern, on the other hand, offers a generous sense of humor, both about his own characters and about those who would idealize their rural lives:

“Another thing that brought them here was the quiet. Will you listen to the fucken quiet for a minute and see in the name of God if it wouldn’t drive you mad?”

As if out of a deep memory of timing and ensemble playing, both men flung themselves into a comic, exaggerated attitude of listening, a hand cupped behind an ear, and stood as frozen as statues in a public place.