Brendan by Frederick Buechner (Atheneum: $17.95; 240 pp.)

Nearly 20 years ago, my wife and I found the Irish village called Carrowtaigue. We reached it by driving through bog lands toward the sea. There were no signposts for it then; and had you not known exactly where you were going when you left the “main” road, a winding, wispy thing, you would never have reached the village, or even imagined that a human settlement flourished somewhere between the wild heath and the cliff’s edge.

What we found at Carrowtaigue was a complete world, one virtually cut off from our own. (Though we were Americans, the villagers called us “the people from Dublin”--as unlikely a place as they could imagine.) This Irish Brigadoon was rough and harsh. The beds were damp, the flowing poteen --which one could decline only at one’s peril--dropped like poison into the gut. Law--in our sense--was absent (though retribution was not).

But here we heard a kind of English (translated by the speakers from the Irish racing through their heads) that possessed all the metaphorical power of Synge’s plays, and we were told of wonders (a man without a head, the devil at dawn) that the speakers themselves had seen.

In places like Carrowtaigue, as folklorists have found to their astonishment, an ancient past lives on in the present, and, if one listens properly, one can come in touch with human feelings and attitudes that may go back to pagan times.

For good reason, then, Frederick Buechner puts his tale of St. Brendan the Navigator on the tongue of an Irish bog man, who accompanied the 6th-Century saint on his journeys and voyages but who could just as easily be a character out of Synge or a citizen of Carrowtaigue. Buechner’s success in fashioning the language of his narrator, Finn, is little short of amazing. He must have perfect pitch. He must, I think, have spent much time in Carrowtaigue--or in another of the Gaelic-speaking remnants tucked in along Ireland’s Atlantic coast. He must have found a way--most miraculous of all for a plain-speaking American--of adjusting the pulse of his own imagination to the beat of this elusive, passionate culture. Here is Brendan converting the bard MacLennin to Christianity:

Christ was the king of all kings, Brendan said . . . the wizard of all wizards. He turned water to beer easy as breathing. . . . When He called out of darkness the first light that ever was, the morning stars sang together at the sweet ring of it, and all the sons of heaven shouted for joy.

“Ah well, he was a bard then,” MacLennin said. It was the part about Christ’s voice that struck him hardest.

The second wonder of Buechner’s book is its characters--solid as early Romanesque statues when necessary; otherwise, airy and evanescent as the serpents that twine and dance their way through “The Book of Kells.” He understands how an early saint like Brendan could be “a braggart and a hot-head”--as far away as can be from the humble, patient saints of, say, 19th-Century France. He understands the strong-breasted, tenderhearted women of Ireland, who march through the story like queens on a chessboard. He sets scenes that are dazzling in their display, variety, and authenticity--Cashel Rock on the eve of the High King’s election, the court of King Arthur just before his death, the lush, peopled paradise of Florida that Brendan and his monks mistook for Tir-na-n-Og, the Land of the Living. He understands how pagan early Christianity could be, how Christian the pagan can be--astoundingly precise and just insights to come upon in any modern writer, downright inexplicable in a noted Calvinist theologian.

But the Rev. Buechner’s best wonder is the meaning of his tale. Early in the novel, Brendan and Finn go in search of Bishop Erc, once a druid. Erc “said he knew we was coming from the flight of gulls. A gull has a way of tilting her wings when she wheels and has lines she draws across the air soaring and swooping that is plain as words if you can read them.” Buechner’s “Brendan” is a lusty, bawdy, teeming, festooning, dancing marvel of a book for anyone who cares about Ireland or Christianity or paganism or history or sailing or--reading. Within its crafty interlacings, we can read its buoyant meaning: that life, for all its woes, is essentially a comedy.