In the West Irish village of Faha, on a winter night in December 1962, an abandoned infant is found barely alive on the steps of the local church.
For Faha’s sole doctor, widower Jack Troy, the baby’s arrival at his surgery will change everything. He and earnest eldest daughter Veronica take the child in, nurse her back to health and, in the process, fall helplessly in love. “For a duration it was to both as though nothing outside the house existed … Nothing mattered but the slow transit of the floorboards that kept the baby sleeping.”
But beyond the doctor’s walls, an unforgiving church and state are hovering. And in a village that can’t keep a secret, particularly one that involves a foundling – at Christmas, too – what hope is there for the Troys’ unexpected happiness?
For a writer less accomplished than Niall Williams, the twinkle of fairy dust in this scenario might warn of dangerous emotional territory ahead. But Time of the Child is a novel grounded in the austerity of its setting. Faha is “that sinking parish on the edge of nowhere”, a community that “had not so much stepped up as seeped out when the ice retreated”. In this unforgiving place, dreams rarely come true – even for humans as deserving as the Troys.
Faha will, of course, be familiar to the many fans of Williams’ more recent bestsellers. Time of the Child is the third of his novels to be set there: the Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain was first, followed by 2017′s This is Happiness, in which Faha is forever changed by the 1958 arrival of electricity and a young priest dealing with a crisis of faith.
One of the pleasures of a book series – and, in this case, each novel can be comfortably read in isolation – is that loved and familiar characters might reappear. In Time of the Child, it’s ex-priest Noel Crowe who re-enters the spotlight: he becomes the unwitting “solution” to Jack Troy’s hopes for the baby and his daughter to remain together.
Noel, now building a life for himself in New York, was once a former suitor of Veronica’s – a suitor Jack had actively discouraged. Four years on, the doctor has not only changed his mind, he is determined his plan to reconnect the pair will work. “In parishes everywhere, stratagems around babies were as old as the codes that tried to contain them,” he reasons. “Noel – even the name had the prompt of a Christmas visit – was the solution.”
Jack’s machinations may or may not run to plan, there’s much more at play in this novel than the Troys’ happy ending. Time of the Child is simply a joy to read. Faha and its people are unpacked in prose so sparkling that readers will want to underline passages to return to. The mood is lyrical and dark one moment – clouds are “the colour of new welding, heavily made”; trees “loom against the heaven in the charcoal of a demented line drawing, all thorns and quarrels” – and Irish-funny the next. Here comes Gertie, the village’s unofficial hairdresser: “With the sweetness of her smile, and the truth that men believe they are better-looking once women tell them they are, even those with bald lumpish heads of last year’s potatoes had a handsome moment.”
The one agreed fact about Faha, we are told on the novel’s opening page, is that “nothing happened here”. If the joys and tribulations of its down-to-earth locals don’t count then maybe that’s true. But this latest offering in Williams’ catalogue of runaway bestsellers proves that in Faha at least, humanity still shines.
Time of the Child, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury, $37), is out now.
