This book does a great job of making sure the narrative moves through detailed descriptions of hunting, cooking, planting, building on an island not fit for any of those actions. On top of everything else, the monks engage in the work of creating manuscripts of the bible, and the description of that process shows how the medium sometimes pushes back against writing and sometimes gives in:

"With the ruler and his knife tip, he measures and pricks the margins around the square that will contain his text, with bounding lines to stop the words from spilling. Twenty-seven lines, he decides, just under half an inch each. He rules them in hardpoint, scoring firmly with the back of his knife. (In training, he cut a page right through; Brother Óengus called it an error ever scribe makes once, but that didn't ease Trian's guilt when the page had to be thrown away.)" (149)