Snapshot of a vanishing world

It has taken John McGahern 10 years since the publication of his Booker-shortlisted Amongst Women to write this wonderful book. Although the novel itself covers only a year in the life of its characters, it has the concentrated power of an epic, and evokes lives saturated with history - their own, that of their nation, and even that of the slowly turning natural world, which is the novel's ever-present background.

On the face of it, the novel records a year in the life of a small Irish community seen through the sensitive eyes of Joe and Kate Ruttledge, professionals who have left comfortable lives in London to make a go of it in a rural backwater. So far, so picturesque - and the book is intensely beautiful in its painterly evocation of beefilled summer orchards, a lakeside wilderness, china platters piled high with sandwiches, jugs of flowers on freshly-painted windowsills.

There are weddings and wakes, the annual cattle fair, a sombre nationalist march, neighbourly visits with the whiskey bottle and gallons of tea on the table, pungent turns of phrase and a vivid cast of rogues and saints. But what McGahern makes from these local details, both social and physical, of the Ruttledges' daily life, is a work of universal grandeur.

Neither sentimental nor nostalgic, though definitively elegiac of a vanishing world, this Irish masterpiece ranges in emotional scope from delicate observation of tiny moments of social unease to piercing reflections on time, mortality and the nature of human happiness.

Some years before, Kate and Joe had moved into an abandoned farm on the edge of a lake near the border between the Republic and the North. Kate had fallen for the place straight away. Joe, who, like McGahern, has come from this world and understands its narrownesses and its hardships, had been more fearful, only knowing that he had never found his life elsewhere quite real.

Slowly the quotidian rhythms of the place and its concrete particulars - its gates and trees, bogs and mountains, cows and cars - have taken them over. It is only when Kate is offered, and turns down, a highly paid job back in London, half-way through the book, that they realise quite how knitted their lives have become into the weave of the place.

There is no easy salvation, however, for anyone, in this lovingly rendered world. In counterpoint to the gentle rhythms of the seasons and the rituals, half-pagan, half-Catholic, of the Church, runs a savage brutality that erupts from time to time in cruel language and violent actions, for a moment revealing lives ruined by ignorance, fear, poverty, or raw sexual appetite. While this book is less explicit than McGahern's early work in its exposure of the crimes and hypocrisies that have shaped Ireland's history, it achieves a tone of forgiveness, not by ignoring them, but by placing them in the context of the ordinary human tragedies we each endure.

That forgiveness is summed up in the title. At the novel's climax, a group of men, digging a grave for a local man, Johnny, who has died while home briefly on holiday from a bleak life in England, discovers that they have dug his grave the wrong way round. Ruttledge, a nonbeliever, asks whether it matters. The man's best friend answers: "It makes every difference, lad, or it makes no difference ... He sleeps with his head in the west ... so that when he wakes he may face the rising sun."

Just at its dying moment, an ancient pattern of feeling and action, part of the whole to which Ruttledge has trusted himself, asserts itself to give Johnny's life, too, a kind of meaning.