With his new novel, Niall Williams has created perhaps the most successful work of his career. Recalling Thomas Hardy in its deeply compassionate unravelling of moral crises set in the culture of the writer’s childhood rather than the reader’s present day – a time with a seemingly closer, more constricting relationship to moral absolutes and forbidden emotion – Time of the Child is a compellingly emotional experience that catches the breath and doesn’t let up until it reaches its final, dramatic conclusion.
The setting is the town of Faha in Ireland in 1962 – “a parish that had the character of the bottom of a pocket” (a wonderfully evocative description for anyone who has walked all day in a damp raincoat). It’s a place where “nothing ever happens”, and the same things keep on happening for ever. The first of two main protagonists, Dr Jack Troy, has been the local GP for long enough to see old illnesses surfacing in the children and grandchildren of his former patients, a heredity that causes him to reflect that “since human beings stood upright, nothing was ever really cured”. Faha is described as one of those places where “it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha, on Sunday morning, you could see the needles”. So far, so familiar: a book bearing all the tropes of rural Irish writing.
All the same, there are signs that change is afoot in this landscape of quiet ineluctability. “Real change is often only seen in hindsight,” Williams writes, but the local people themselves see evidence of things shifting everywhere, from the holly tree that doesn’t grow evenly any more because so many of them have hacked off branches for Christmas, to the new electrical system that’s lighting the church (recalling Williams’s previous book, This Is Happiness, which was partly about the laying of power lines through Ireland). Then, as the novel gets going, the changes start ringing out one after the other in Williams’s addictively well-plotted story.
He has a dramatist’s instinct for organising narrative development around a succession of charged and magnetic set-piece events, feast days and tragic occasions. A priest loses his thread in the middle of a Christmas sermon, suffering a kind of miniature stroke in front of his whole congregation, and suddenly one of the community’s leaders’ days are numbered. At the yearling fair, a young man, tellingly named Jude, sees his hopes for a better future betrayed when his father sells their entire herd to pay off a debt. Then Jude finds a baby left outside the church, and takes her to Dr Troy. There, the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie, latches immediately on to the maternal role, as if her life has suddenly been electrified by the presence of this child. Her desperate desire to keep the baby and raise her as her own, and her father’s attempts to make that possible, form the deeply moving heart of the novel.
Put simply, Time of the Child is a story about two people, a father and daughter, who in different ways have missed chances at love, seeing a new opportunity to give their lives meaning through the discovery of this baby, whom Ronnie names Noelle. The love stories of Jack and Ronnie Troy are wonderfully rendered, deeply human and relatable might-have-beens and not-quites. After his wife died, Jack developed feelings for another local woman, but never did anything about it, and she is now dead too; he also discouraged a young man, Noel, from proposing to his daughter, thinking someone better would come along and contributing to that young man’s emigration to the US. All these years later, his daughter still lives at home with him.
If there is anything to quibble with in this novel, it might be that, by paying tribute to the transformative power of love, it effaces the relentless truth that in Ireland, at this time, children abandoned at birth were not cared about in the way Ronnie and Jack care about Noelle; they did not find the love this baby is met with; the institutions of Irish society did not strain every sinew to bend the rules and make happiness possible. All the time I read this novel, I could not dispel the thought of the babies and young children whose bodies were found in Tuam on the site of a home for unmarried mothers. That home closed down one year before Williams’s novel is set. However, I struggle to begrudge him his sentimentality – his book is like a dream of being able to save one of those children, and I suspect we all wish we could do that.
• Time of the Child by Niall Williams is published by Bloomsbury, £16.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
