For most directors it would be an agonising predicament: how do you translate a novel with no discernible plot, in which nothing really happens, to the screen? John McGahern called his experimental masterpiece That They May Face the Rising Sun, about a small rural Irish community, an “anti-novel” for its rejection of conventional narrative.
“I thought that the act of taking drama out of it, if it was consciously done, could be dramatic in itself,” he told the Observer in 2005. “My whole idea was to take plot and everything else out of the novel and see what was left.”
