[In the following review, Barnacle offers a positive assessment of That They May Face the Rising Sun.]

A couple of downshifters, Joe and Kate Ruttledge, have left their advertising jobs in London and moved to a small farm in Ireland near where Joe grew up. John McGahern walks us through a year in the lives of the Ruttledges and their neighbours [in That They May Face the Rising Sun]: the cycle of the seasons, birth and death among animals and humans, simple tasks, complex rivalries, gossip. If McGahern is familiar with Cold Comfort Farm, he certainly doesn't let it put him off.

The nearest railway station is Dromod, so we soon know we're somewhere in the middle of County Leitrim. It takes a little longer to work out that we're also somewhere in the past. Nobody's on the phone. The men all wear dark suits on Sundays. Old bachelors abound. The farm up the hill actually has a bonded labourer, Bill, one of those “orphans” raised by the religious orders and simply indentured to farmers according to a custom that Joe says “wasn't a million miles from the slave trade.”

Well, there might still be rural pockets like that and, after all, Bill is elderly. But then “the Shah” leaves Joe, his nephew, a box for safekeeping while he's on holiday. The banknotes inside it come to £43,000. “You could buy a house and land with this,” says Joe. Not nowadays, you couldn't.

The Ruttledges' closest neighbour, Jamesie, can remember the Black and Tans ambushing an IRA squad in the bog across the lake, yet he isn't ancient, even though he is a grandfather. Joe can remember wartime, when the trains burnt such low-grade coal that the passengers had to get out and walk up the hills because the engines got puffed out, yet Joe is barely middle-aged. Eventually, a reference to the Enniskillen bombing pins the time frame down to the late 1980s.

This gives an elegiac slant to the portrayal of characters who are deeply set in their ways. Jamesie's bachelor brother Johnnie, who works at Ford in Dagenham and visits every summer, is practically an anachronism. Soon, not only will Ford be downsizing, but the English will be heading to Ireland for work, instead of the other way round. As for Bill, the unpaid serf, his type is “almost as extinct as the corncrake,” and towards the end he is found a place in a nice new sheltered housing development.

Joe himself is a harbinger of change, one of the educated types who are beginning to migrate home in numbers. He and Kate can afford to run the farm only because he still does freelance copywriting. (In practice, he, Jamesie and the others would be doing well out of subsidies and the notorious “red-diesel culture”: selling their tax-free red-tinted EU fuel for illegal profit. But that would spoil the prelapsarian atmosphere, and McGahem, perhaps wisely, doesn't go into it.)

The Shah, meanwhile, is thinking of retiring. He would quite like to sell the business to his sole employee, Frank. But Joe has to act as go-between. This is because, it emerges, the Shah and Frank “don't talk.” Ever. They haven't spoken in the 20 years and more they've been working together. The most Joe has known them to do is, if absolutely necessary, to utter “statements that were intended to be overheard, sometimes with their backs turned or delivered sideways but never face to face.”

Joe finds that the two men hold each other in great respect, and that there is no grudge on either side. McGahern does not attempt to explain, but merely lets us deduce that people can be somewhat reserved in these parts—when they aren't gossiping to the four winds, that is. Jamesie's love of “news” is widely condemned and widely shared. Everybody knows that Jimmy Joe McKiernan the undertaker is also the IRA's chief of staff. The bank has to refer Frank's loan request to Longford so that he feels safe from prying ears. The marital hopes of the shifty widower John Quinn keep the population entertained for months.

With McGahern's calm, chaste prose style and judicious humour at work, the novel never quite tips over into self-parody, despite the odd try-hard stab at timeless significance. It should give great satisfaction.