New Irish fiction has moved increasingly to the city experience, which is increasingly seen as violent. Irish small town life has not become any calmer either, judging by the work of Pat McCabe, and the urbanisation and secularisation of Irish society are now major pre-occupations for a generation of writers who have shaped a literature which, in time, will be assessed for its socio-cultural significance as much as its literary merits.
Niall Williams's first novel, Four Letters Of Love, has managed to break free of many of the familiar themes of Irish fiction, while at the same time availing of most of them, including the romantic theme of fated lovers. At the heart of his story is a three-way struggle between city life and its expectations, a wilder, more romantic notion of life, and the familiar Irish fatalistic realism born of alcoholism. One man is both poet and drunk, another is a civil servant who wants to be an artist. Their respective daughter and son are caught in the confusion and God presides over it all.
As romance or fable or both, Four Letters Of Love manages to be very gentle, even hopeful, and yet bleakly melancholy. And although it is obviously set in Dublin, Galway and on an island off the west coast, it is not an Irish novel: it could be set anywhere and at any time. Williams says he deliberately tried to free it of distracting detail.
The real and the surreal at times meet in a narrative which often has echoes of the American writer Alice Hoffman. Interestingly, not only has Williams not read her work, he has never heard of her, although he says other readers have said the book reminds them of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a writer Williams has read and "adores". But unlike Marquez, Four Letters Of Love is not magic realism. Most of its surrealism coincides with the religious sequences. It is a careful, deliberate book which draws the reader in initially with the somewhat bewildered voice of Nicholas, who is part-narrator and central consciousness. As the story unfolds, he becomes so drained by the developments that he no longer speaks, yet continues to direct events. He is the truth teller, he is also a Christ figure, a healer who is pushed to exhaustion.
Niall Williams appears at the petrol station in Kilmihil, Co Clare, probably the only person within 100 miles to seem utterly indifferent to the county's All Ireland double. At first he seems exhausted and certainly looks older than his age, which is 39. Resigned weariness appears to be his natural demeanour. "You'll never find the house on your own," he says.
He is as diffident as he is confident; as precise as he is vague and seems haunted, somewhat obsessive. Above all, he believes in his book and states "people will either love it or hate it. But it's impossible not to have a strong opinion on it."
Living in a village, and dividing his working time between teaching in Ennis and in the local school, he is in the curious position of hearing very little about his book, while knowing that reviewers in London have liked it. "I'm the last person to speak to about it," he says - but knows it very well: exact phrases from it come to his mind with the ease of someone who, having written it from the heart, appears to know it by heart.
Four Letters Of Love is about more than just the search for love, it is about feeling on all levels. It took four years to write, but the first sentence was written years ago and as Williams says: "I kept starting it, leaving it and returning to it. Every time I came back to it, I began all over again, so every sentence has been worked and worked." Born in Dublin in 1958, he grew up in Stillorgan and attended Oatlands College there, before moving on to take a degree in English and French at University College Dublin. After a year teaching in France, he arrived in New York, his wife Christine's home, and in the time-honoured tradition of arts graduates found his degree secured him a job in a bookshop. Copy-editing proved an effective alternative career and, as Williams says, he soon progressed to an office with a view over Central Park. "That usually means you've arrived."
But he wasn't happy and soon realised what his life, as yet another New Yorker commuting into the city from the suburbs, would become.
His facial expression alone evokes the world of John Cheever's short stories. Sitting at the wooden table in the sort of house most people only dream about, William recalls in his peculiarly Americanised accent how his life flash-forwarded to the age of 65 and retirement. Back to that day in his New York office: "I closed my eyes, and opened them again - in 20 years, I'd be vice-president. I felt there was a challenge, and kept thinking `if only I had time'. It came to me to take up that challenge."
Ireland was the only place offering Williams his chance. It was an indirect route. Christine's grandfather had left the cottage in Kilmihil, where we are sitting, "about 1906". The house had remained in the family and cousins were living there up until 1980. When Christine's uncle died, his wife sold the house and Christine's father bought it. Niall and Christine decided to try to make a life in the old Breen home. Aware of the irony of having found a different kind of life in Ireland through the Irish family of the American he married, Williams agrees that in fact, Christine has introduced him to an Ireland he didn't really know. "I'm living in a landscape peopled by the ghosts of my wife's dead," he says.
Life in the cottage at first was not easy: "It was no romantic trip to the west," he says. Even now, Williams remains a city type and has yet to take the absolute silence and darkness of the countryside for granted. The couple supported themselves by writing an interesting, de-romanticised series of books chronicling their attempts at mastering a very different lifestyle. Published in America, the books remain popular and pilgrims still arrive to wonder at the beautiful paradise they have created.
Now the extended building, approached through a courtyard created by the remains of a still older building, is surrounded by Christine's magnificent, traditional cottage garden, full of light and texture, stone and timber. The history of the house is part of their everyday life. The family ghosts still gather at the huge, walk-in fireplace.
Quiet, dreamy and intense, Christine Breen is an artist, admires the work of Howard Hodgkin and has an extraordinary feel for colour. She and Williams met at UCD while she was completing an MA in Anglo-Irish literature, which included a thesis on the work of John Banville. The expected bookishness of the household is countered by the sound of workmen and more importantly, by the presence of their friendly children, Deirdre and Joseph. If his father sounds like an Irishman with an Irish-American accent and his mother sounds like an American who has lived in Ireland, Joseph sounds like John McEnroe. Although this is his first novel, the unreality of being an overnight success is not seducing Williams. Writing the non-fiction books introduced him to the business of publishing, while having two plays produced at the Abbey also opened his eyes and replaced the romance of being a writer with the reality of living partly according to the reactions of a few - the critics. Though it pleased the public, The Murphy Initative had some harsh reviews and as Williams, whose third play will be directed by Garry Hynes next year, says dryly, of A Little Like Paradise, "the fact that it was about someone who'd come back from the dead is not a coincidence".
"Writing is full of surprises," he says. Despite the fact that the book is so deliberately constructed, he says, "you follow your instinct: if the story says `white birds are flying' why then white birds are flying. It's like drawing a thread." He looked for a voice and found that of Nicholas the son who witnesses the artistic selfassertion of a father whose bizarre death is in fact more of a triumph - as well as the slow defeat of a mother who just wanted things to stay the same. Outside in the cottage garden, where everything is thriving in near supernatural splendour, Christine's delphiniums are blooming for the second time this year. Magic realism is certainly at work here. But Four Letters Of Love is not about magic: it is concerned with experience, suffering and slow, painfully learned wisdom.
Four Letters Of Love is published by Picador.
