Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
The remote, rain-soaked village of Faha is to the brilliant Irish writer Niall Williams what Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner. On the surface a quotidian place, yet one where all of life happens. Three of Williams’ novels take place in Faha — History of the Rain, This is Happiness, and coming this November, Time of the Child. Situated on the western edge of nowhere, Faha seems as immutable as the nearby river and estuary. Electricity and the telephone arrive late. The young are easily outnumbered by the old.
Privacy is hard to come by in a place of such close living. As Williams writes, “The lid never stayed on a story. It blew off through pressure and confluence, the need of things to be told and the porous nature of people living every day inside the same rain.”
The residents of Faha invest the parish priest and the local doctor with authority. Like his father before him, Jack Troy is a General Practitioner. Faha born and bred. He’s a widower with three grown daughters. Annie Mooney, the last woman he loved, died four years ago though her memory is fresh in Jack’s mind. “He had no photograph of her. He had nothing of hers, but the knowledge that she wore the Guerlain perfume she said was the favourite of Katherine Hepburn.”
It’s 1962 and as Jack approaches his seventieth year and another Christmas season, he recognizes in himself what Williams refers to as a dangerous innocence of the old, a secret desire for a last chance to love properly. That chance will come in a form Jack never imagined, and immediately disrupt the settled routines of the Troy household.
A GP in a place like Faha carries the burden of knowing too much, being too familiar and available; everyone in the parish is Jack Troy’s patient and operating hours never end. Even after mass on Sunday morning lines form, questions are asked, a hand, ear or tongue extended for a quick exam and diagnosis. Exhaustion, of body and spirit, is an occupational hazard which Jack keeps at bay by hiding behind a bushy mustache, a shield of polite indifference and a glass of brandy.
As with History of the Rain, the relationship between a father and his daughter is central to The Time of the Child. Unlike her sisters, Ronnie remained in Faha, more or less accepting its limits and boundaries. When she’s not assisting her father with his practice or handling domestic chores, she writes stories in notebooks. She’s efficient and patient, but neither simple or passive. Until the child comes into their lives Ronnie finds emotional succor and an interior life in books and words.
When the boy Jude Quinlan brings the infant he found to Avalon, Jack Troy’s home and office, he says simply, “I found it.” Jude is sure the infant is dead. She’s not. Jack breathes life into the tiny body and instantly falls in love.
“What had come over him was as old as life on earth, a pulsed response to another, outside of and even before the existence of reason, a prime and primal engagement that took its continuance from the expression in the baby’s features.”
Ronnie is equally transformed, finding in herself a maternal nature she never knew existed, one that feels as normal and natural as the constant Faha rain. It’s as if the infant and Ronnie had closed a circle. Jack Troy can’t help but think that his daughter “is more substantially herself” with the child, but he also knows they can’t keep the child’s existence a secret, not in Faha, and before long the church or the state will come.
A significant portion of the novel deals with Dr. Troy’s machinations to create circumstances that will enable Ronnie to keep the child. This entails a desperate ploy to reunite Ronnie with a boy she’d once shown an interest in. One problem: the boy, Noel Crowe, is now a young man living in the United States. Another problem: Jack neglects to include Ronnie in his scheme. I won’t disclose anything more.
I confess to a great love and admiration for Niall Williams. Time of the Child is a Christmas tale of the very best sort, one that reminds us of the fundamental mystery of being human. Even in this sinking parish on the furthermost edge of nowhere, in the dark and dying time of the year, there’s something in the air that speaks of the miraculous.
