Novel: That They May Face the Rising Sun

Overview
John McGahern's novel That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) sketches a quiet, exacting year in the life of Joe and Kate Ruttledge after they leave London and return to their native rural Ireland. The narrative moves through the rhythms of seasons and small-town routines, tracing the couple's slow reacquaintance with landscape, neighbors and memory. McGahern attends to ordinary acts, work, meals, conversations, and through their accumulation reveals deeper shifts in identity, belonging and time.
The book is both a homecoming story and an intimate study of how two people carry the past into the present. Everyday scenes are infused with absence and continuity: familiar fields and faces provoke recollection even as domestic negotiations and local tensions expose how much has changed. The novel's calm surface conceals a keen moral intelligence that watches the small, persistent ways lives are shaped and eroded.

Plot
That They May Face the Rising Sun follows Joe and Kate as they settle into a modest life back in their native village. The narrative is less driven by dramatic incidents than by the accumulation of days: visits with neighbors, trips to the post office and church, occasional arguments, and the steady work of tending house and land. These episodes are framed by seasonal markers, planting, harvest, winter gatherings, that structure the year and highlight the passage of time.
Interwoven with daily events are fragments of the couple's pasts: years in London, family histories, earlier losses and satisfactions. Memory arrives in sudden intimations and in the quiet retelling of stories at kitchen tables. Encounters with villagers, old acquaintances, strangers returned, younger people moving away, expose differing senses of attachment, obligation and exile, and push Joe and Kate to negotiate who they were, who they are, and who they might become.

Characters
Joe and Kate Ruttledge are observed with sympathy and restraint. Joe is contemplative, shaped by long habits and a sense of duty; Kate is practical, emotionally attuned, and often the more grounded partner in daily affairs. Their marriage is depicted as companionable but layered with unspoken regrets and compromises, a relationship maintained by routine and small acts of care rather than grand declarations.
Supporting figures, neighbors, parishioners, younger locals, populate the village with varying degrees of warmth and suspicion. Each character functions as a mirror for the couple's changing place in the community, and their interactions reveal both the comforts and constraints of rural life: a readiness to help and an equally persistent conservatism that can stifle.

Themes
Belonging and displacement thread through the novel. Return is not a simple restoration; it is contested by the traces of life elsewhere and by the slow modifications time has made to familiar ground. The narrative probes how identity is rooted in place and language, yet never fully immune to the dislocations of migration, social change and memory.
The passage of time, the persistence of the past, and the ethics of everyday life are central concerns. McGahern examines how small choices, who to visit, what to forgive, how to speak, shape moral landscapes as surely as any grand historical event. The novel quietly registers mortality and continuity, asking how people live decently amid loss and continuity.

Style and tone
McGahern's prose is spare, precise and quietly elegiac. Sentences are economical but richly observant, attentive to objects, gestures and silences. Dialogue is naturalistic and often elliptic, revealing character through what is left unsaid as much as through direct speech. The tone balances warmth with a disciplinary scrutiny that refuses sentimentality.
The novel's stillness is a deliberate aesthetic choice: slow pacing and detailed domestic attention create a meditative atmosphere that invites close listening. This restraint gives emotional moments a particular weight and lets the ordinary accumulate moral and aesthetic depth.

Conclusion
That They May Face the Rising Sun is a subtle, humane novel about return, memory and the quiet architecture of daily life. It rewards patient reading with an intensified sense of how place and habit shape the self, and how small, sustained attentions can hold the seams of a life together.