I think it's best to think of That They May Face the Rising Sun less as a novel without a plot and more as a fictionalised anthropological study of rural Ireland. It's a lucid, serene rendering of the kind of place where I grew up: one governed by the rhythms of the landscape and circumscribed by social ritual and interdependence, by the striving towards modernity clashing with the old, old ways of things. McGahern's prose style is superb, sentences turning on the most precise and illuminating of details, and his ability to capture the rhythms of rural Irish Midlands speech is impressive. Every page brought me some new moment of recognition, new ways of seeing my home and myself. A wonderful, extended meditation in prose.