Readers looking to get into the Christmas spirit early this year will find plenty of it in Niall Williams’s new novel, Time of the Child, a warm and life-affirming story about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths. Set during the advent season of 1962 in the fictional village of Faha on the west coast of Ireland, the grimly familiar scenario of an abandoned baby becomes fresh again through the heroic acts of a local doctor and his eldest daughter, as depicted by a writer who has long been interested in the wonders of the everyday.
After a busy fair in early December, a young boy, Jude, finds an infant girl on the steps of Faha church and brings her to the house that Dr Jack Troy, a physician in his 70s, shares with his unmarried eldest daughter, Ronnie. Together they decide to care for the child in secret rather than give her up to the authorities, a decision that is facilitated by a parish priest in the early stages of dementia.
That’s largely it in the way of plot, but Williams fleshes out the story with intricate character studies and complicated relationships. The milieu is well drawn, from the excitement of fair days, the wins and losses, the lure of the pub thereafter, to the finely sketched customs of a close-knit community in the run-up to Christmas.
Faha’s inhabitants have “the tidal eyes of estuary people”, while their houses have crocheted doilies on the armchairs. In a lovely layered line where tradition meets modernity, we’re told that, “Above the front window was the lamp of the sacred heart that had been installed in every house that was to take the electricity.” Secondary characters are fully realised through succinct descriptions that go beyond the visual: “A soft and kind woman, with blue eyes of long hurt, and the anxious look of one married to an instability.”
Williams was born in Dublin but lives in Kiltumper, Co Clare. His fiction has been shortlisted for The Irish Times Literature Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award.
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Time of the Child, his 11th novel, is similar in backdrop and theme to Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, but the style is very different. Williams favours lyrical language, lines that run on with an abundance of detail, lush and opining, a style not dissimilar from the historical fiction of Paul Lynch.
Doctor Troy “had lived long enough to understand that, in an island country, sideways was the way all stories wanted to go, roundabouts the native way of getting anywhere,” which could double as a summary for the discursive storytelling in the book as a whole. Occasionally one wishes for a plainer phrase – “his flesh was pumping out a dewy response, lending his forehead a semblance of lambency”, or in a word, sweating – but Williams packs his sentences with so much insight and soft humour that such issues are often followed by something to admire.
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Particularly effective is the characterisation of Jack as local doctor, the way he has learned plenty about human nature from tending the sick over the years, and is beloved by the townspeople for his tact and demeanour as much as his medical nous: “What the patient wants is for you to be a doctor, not wringing your hands, not weeping, not anything in fact like a human being.” This same discretion proves problematic in his relationship with his loyal daughter, Ronnie, neither of them able to articulate their feelings until a melodramatic crisis point.
Throughout the book their consideration for each other, and for the infant girl, feels real and full of depth, loaded with observations that make for a compelling and poignant father-daughter dynamic: “It had to be his fault that she always found fault in herself, he thought. Her first instinct was always failure.”
Time of the Child is sustained by these wise lines on nearly every page and by certain set-piece scenes that show the breadth of Williams’s skill. The backstory of the young boy Jude and his beleaguered family, at the mercy of an alcoholic father in a patriarchal society, is one such example. With careful strokes and subplots, Williams expands on his central themes.
A line towards the end, attributed to Jack’s father but echoing the Russian philosopher Solzhenitsyn’s views on the meaning of life, says “the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along”. Time of the Child is a window into a different, better past in this old-young country of ours, one where no human being is ever truly abandoned.
Sarah Gilmartin is a critic and author. Her latest novel is Service
