In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy of Edna O’Brien’s banned The Country Girls is read surreptitiously by the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie Troy; a photograph of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the USA, hangs proudly on the postmistress’s wall. But in the main the rhythm of life persists much as it has for generations.
Like Ronnie, Niall Williams clearly feels that Faha represents ‘the full of humanity, in its ordinary clothes’, since Time of the Child is his third visit to the fictitious County Clare village, following History of the Rain and This is Happiness. Indeed, Noel Crowe, the protagonist of the latter, remains a potent, albeit unseen, presence here.
For his part, Doctor Jack Troy notes that ‘storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life’. This is definitely not the case with Williams. In the first half of the novel he focuses on the quotidian, delineating the rituals of village life and some of its choicest characters: Father Tom, struggling with dementia at mass; Tim-Tom, identical and indistinguishable twin farmers; Pat Quinlan, an inveterate drunk, who once tossed his infant son Jude into the air for a bet and failed to catch him.
The narrative gathers pace when Jude, now 12 years old, stumbles upon an abandoned baby during the Christmas Fair. He and Tim-Tom take it to Troy who, recalling an earlier foundling cruelly institutionalised by the state, swears the three to silence while he and Ronnie secretly care for the baby.
The doctor is consumed with guilt for having destroyed Ronnie’s hopes of happiness with Crowe, who subsequently emigrated to America. Seeing her devotion to the baby, he hatches a hare-brained scheme to lure Crowe back to Faha to visit his dying grandmother, hoping that it will rekindle his love for Ronnie, so that they’ll marry and raise the baby together. Needless to say, this doesn’t go according to plan.
Williams’s portrait of village life is affectionate and detailed. The problem is his prose, which is riddled with unwieldy metaphors, strange coinages (a car ‘unbodied’ its passengers; the doctor ‘bulbed’ his cheek; a long finger ‘Michelangelo’d’ beyond the horizon). At times the circumlocutions resemble a Flann O’Brien parody. For all the acute anatomising of emotions, this makes for a taxing read.
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