Gentle modernity

Time of the Child is Niall Williams’s twelfth novel, and his third to explore the fictional Irish village of Faha, located in the rural west where Williams himself, a native Dubliner, has made his home. The first of the sequence, History of the Rain (TLS, October 3, 2014) was a rambling multigenerational saga narrated by a bedridden teenager in the present day. It was followed by This Is Happiness (2019), an equally meandering love story set against the arrival of electricity in the 1950s, as remembered by the elderly Noel Crowe, an emigrant to the US – a moment cleverly chosen to mark the pivotal shift from centuries of insular tradition towards a daunting modernity. Time of the Child revisits the same community in the 1960s. Williams’s many fans will be happy to find that modernity has been gentle on Faha, and little has changed.

This time the third-person narrative immerses us in the life of the ageing widower and local doctor Jack Troy, whose three daughters were wooed in turn by Noel Crowe in This Is Happiness. Two have now escaped this rural backwater via marriage and emigration, and only the bookish Ronnie is left as Troy’s de facto secretary and housekeeper. But the gloomily taciturn doctor fears she will miss out on a life of her own, and when a newborn is abandoned at the gates of the local church, he commits himself to a crazy plan. His daughter will unofficially adopt and raise the child, at first in secret, then in a respectable marriage to Crowe, whom Troy will contrive, without Ronnie’s knowledge, to summon home.

There is little more to the plot. This inciting incident arrives only at the halfway point, and the fabular symbolism and Dickensian overtones – a fatherless child who promises salvation; an innocent saved from a repressive institution – are not tempered by equal doses of novelistic decorum or psychological plausibility. Proper ethical and legal objections to the plan are barely considered, and practical obstacles are of little interest to Troy or to Williams: their house is the town surgery, visited every day by a stream of locals, but the baby simply never cries when a visitor is present until it is dramatically convenient for her to do so.

It is no spoiler to reveal that the novel ends with a twinkling vision of generous acceptance by the open-hearted local community. But it would be redundant to indict this ending, and the novel itself, for its sentimental whimsy, since this is the furrow Williams has chosen to plough. Whether it’s your thing will be a question of personal taste, but from the practitioner’s perspective it is fascinating to see such hoary old hokum spun from the pen of a real virtuoso. Though he has little interest in conventional plot, Williams has a remarkable facility for inventive narrative digression, and the material texture and procedural detail of mid-century Irish life are brilliantly rendered. Barely a sentence goes by without some striking quirk of Hiberno-English (a cat finds a dirty sock “thin of interest”; a hawthorn tree is “all thorns and quarrels”), and almost every page pauses to admire the spiritual scenery or draw out a universal observation. This exuberance also feeds the book’s greatest flaw: at times a torrent of platitudes and lyrical folderols risks diluting the resonant insights; too often Williams lacks the discernment to thin out the weeds that threaten to choke his blooms.

There is also the adjacent question of political taste. Williams covers similar territory to that of many lauded compatriots, including Sebastian Barry and Claire Keegan, yet in spite of healthy sales, critical acclaim and prize recognition, his name rarely appears in the British broadsheet surveys that jealously celebrate the rude health of Irish fiction. The difference is this: these canonical contemporaries set out to critique the nation’s recent past – the moral hypocrisy of the Church, the corruption and inertia of the state, the oppressive silences of rural life. Williams, by contrast, is a true believer in Panglossian harmony and holds such forces to be essentially benign. Even small-town omertà is cast as a valuable strategy to allow maximum moral flexibility.

I detect no regressive political agenda in Niall Williams’s rose-tinted rear view, which is that of a genuine romantic who yearns for the innocent simplicity of bygone times. Yet this surely puts him out of step with the mainstream of a national culture that has built its considerable reputation, from J. M. Synge and Flann O’Brien to Sinéad O’Connor and Father Ted, on mocking and subverting such pieties. As Ireland begins its second century of independence, troubled by painful spasms of right-wing populism, the question of who gets to tell its story, and what story they tell, remains as urgent as ever.

Michael Hughes teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. His most recent novel is Country, 2018

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