This novel runs in two separate narrative strands for its first 200 pages or so, and then intertwines them, allowing the characters from each to come into contact with one another. The first strand tells of the tragic suburban Dublin childhood of Nicholas, during which both his parents have mental breakdowns and separately end up killing themselves. The second is concerned with the youth, particularly the late teenage years, of Isabel, an Aran Island girl who goes to boarding school in Galway, elopes and generally causes her parents grave disappointment.
The plot lines converge when Nicholas, parentless and directionless, goes to Isabel's island to recover from her father a painting by his own father. During his visit, he unintentionally causes Isabel's younger brother to emerge from a prolonged catatonic state that she has always blamed herself for. Unsurprisingly, they fall passionately in love with one another and Nicholas writes Isabel the four love letters of the title.
There is a quality to this romantic novel, comparable perhaps to South American magic realism, that blurs the distinction between what is conventionally accepted as real on the one hand and unreal on the other. Williams has ghosts sit side by side with the living, who are unsurprised by their presence. He makes miracles occur, emphasises divine agency in human affairs and allows characters to communicate without using words.
Significantly, most of the magical or inexplicable things in this novel take place in the west of Ireland. That part of the country continues, it seems, to provide the literary imagination with a locale in which it can take a romantic turn. The west is a place of physical hardship and isolation and as such provides a sublime milieu where psychic and spiritual purity are to be found.
Williams strives for an "elemental" style, referring constantly to the effect of the environment on the senses. The more rough-hewn and harsh a sensation, the more validity it is deemed to have, the more real it is supposed to be. Such a style leads Williams to trade in abstractions and metaphors and similes that anthropomorphise nature: "[she felt] the wind like an embrace and the raw kiss of freedom", or "they already carried with them like a spore the beginnings of their life together. Each time [she] saw him after that her heart filled like a pool".
The scant biographical information about the author supplied on the dust jacket of this book contains little more than the fact that Williams is a native Dubliner who now lives in the west. He has made a journey similar to those that Nicholas makes in the novel, first from Dublin to Clare with his father while still quite young, and then to Galway in his early twenties, after his father's death. As with all places that are portrayed to be primitive and therefore somehow pure, it is almost axiomatic that it is an outsider's arrival that draws out these qualities.
The urbane urban imagination, once it arrives somewhere like the Aran Islands, finds magic under every stone. While Williams's sense of the magic and mystery of the world is also present in the Dublin section of this novel, it is intensified with the westward shift. Rather like the character Nicholas, the full magical possibilities of Williams's romantic imagination are realised only when he is sensually engulfed by the western environment. The romantic mind-set transforms the land of the west into a landscape, an aesthetic object.
For these reasons, this reviewer preferred by far the sections concerning Nicholas in Dublin and his eccentric and almost comically sad upbringing. Often, Williams's manipulation of language can delight in the simplest of ways, coining new phrases out of known words (the path taken by a drunk person is a "whiskeyed"), and forcing words together into unconventional or unexpected compounds ("butterflying hand", "spring-light air"), conveying well the author's sense of the interconnectedness of things.
Cormac Deane is a critic
