Edna O'Brien sets her tragic Irish tale at the crossroads where the modern meets the rural.

Ireland may be the only place in the world where talk is cheap and also priceless. The island's oral sensibility is one of gossip bumping into literature: a collision of pub fights, fence-hanging yarns, and the poetry of the gods. Joyce understood this first and best, of course; his exaltation of the ordinary simply and forever changed the face of fiction. His intrepid heiress-apparent, Edna O'Brien, has spent the last four decades celebrating a similarly fecund narrative world of the bawdy and sublime; for her efforts, she saw her first seven novels banned in her homeland - the first one toasted on the chapel grounds by her own parish priest.

And in "Wild Decembers," she has given talk itself the power of a sweet-tongued devil. It's there in the ancient legends that hover over rural Cloontha, "a locality within the bending of an arm," and there in the old grudges and new rumors that dictate the order of things. It's there in Cloontha's bars and beauty salons, in its misunderstandings and land disputes and murderous threats. Most of all, it's there in the evolution of narrative: the way we hear, interpret, then reweave the facts into intractably human truths - where fields "mean more than fields . . . fields lost, regained, and lost again in that fickle and fractured sequence of things."

In other words, this is a story about ceaseless rain and turf-cutting and tragedy, more Thomas Hardy than Joyce in its mists of preordained misery. The final volume of a trilogy, "Wild Decembers" follows "House of Splendid Isolation" and "Down by the River"; what links the novels is not a specific story line, but the shroud of Irish history, where passion begets violence and where honor generally commands the price of blood. You can tell from the first paragraph this is O'Brien country, with its sucking calves and golden bogs and too-sweet smells of earth and death. Few other writers take you inside a fictional realm so utterly and swiftly by way of language - by the sheer internal sounds and look of words upon the page.

The feuding sons of her classical story are Mick Bugler, returning from a few years of self-exile on a sheep farm in Australia, and Joseph Brennan, the elder brother of a sheltered young woman named Breege. The two men's ancestors fought for years over rights to their abutting lands, the history of which is recorded in pub talk and memory, and maybe in the dusty archives of a land office miles away. With the look and air of a dark-horse charmer, Bugler possesses the only tractor on the mountain - and, within a matter of weeks, the heretofore-unclaimed attentions of Breege. The Brennans' parents died when Breege was a young girl, and Joseph moved in to fill the void; his subsequent protectiveness of his sister her is only slightly mollified by his initial affection for Bugler.

Circumstances conspire to alter this fleeting harmony. Angry sentiments are exchanged over the tractor, which, for all its suggestion of modernity's forward march, winds up broken down on Joseph's land. Word arrives of a fiance, Rosemary, soon to join Bugler, thereby eclipsing any idea of a future for him and Breege. These embers of discord are transformed into a brushfire by the collective mischief of Cloontha's residents. A pair of conniving sisters, Rita and Reena, decide to torment and even ruin Bugler after they've failed to draw him into their web. The local misfit, known as the Crock, is a physically deformed man who has led a life of humiliation and rage; his bitterness has festered over the years into malevolence, and Breege - by the simple fact of her innocent disregard - becomes his target. Within a matter of months, rumor and malice have turned into allegations and court fights, with Joseph and Bugler each threatening the other through hired solicitors as well as physical assault. Breege, her loyalties divided but her heart resolute, finds herself alone in the barn with Bugler for one splendid moment - which is just long enough to change everything, forever, for them both.

This is an old, old story - I kept thinking of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" and Hardy's "Tess" - with a darkness you can see coming from clear across the moors. And yet O'Brien has filled it with a resplendent ache that is hers alone. The novel breathes with animal symbolism: a martyred greyhound, named after her birthplace of Violet Hill; lowing calves, crying for their mothers; a lost and exquisitely fragile butterfly, hostage to the mercy of the man who holds it. These moments imbue the novel with a sense of mystical doom, as unstoppable as spilled blood or a setting sun. At such times the narration is Faulknerian in its alliterative march toward destiny; when Breege's voice occasionally takes over, the story feels stripped-down and piercing. This is an etching of a tragedy, perfectly delineated, its boundaries set by land rights and misdeeds and the very limitations of the human heart - an inner territory of beauty and imprisonment that is Ireland on the edge of time, what O'Brien calls "the confines of the place, back out to the far reaches of the mountain, the ballerina birch, and the fugitive amethyst river."

O'Brien has taken the title for "Wild Decembers" from an Emily Bronte poem, and with it she has brought the same heather-tinged heartache that clung to all those 19th-century heaths. It's testament to the old-fashioned feel of the novel that you hardly notice what decade it is until Rosemary arrives wearing thigh-high boots; much of rural Ireland, after all, is a stubbornly sovereign land of preindustrial passions. And when progress does arrive at little, well-insulated Cloontha, it does so with all the power and destructive possibility of a freight train. "You can go years and years of normal life," thinks Breege, "all day, every day, milking, foddering, saying the given things, and then one day something opens in you, wild and marvelous, like the great rills that run down the mountain in the rain, rapid, jouncing, turning everything they touch into something living; a mossy log suddenly having the intent and slither of a crocodile." It's that crocodile, heavy-eyed and treacherous, arriving at the end of a passage of great beauty, that sets Edna O'Brien apart. No mere lush romantic, she knows that great change and desolation are two different aspects of the same darkening sky.