In his latest novel, Niall Williams returns to the fictional village of Faha in west Ireland, the setting for 2019’s This Is Happiness. It’s December 1962, and in what the parish has come to call “the time of the child”, doctor Jack Troy and his eldest, unmarried daughter Ronnie find their lives upended when an abandoned baby girl, at death’s door, is brought to their home. Jack saves her life and Ronnie takes on the role of carer. They fall in love with the baby Ronnie names Noelle.
There is a cinematic quality to the opening chapter as Williams introduces us to his characters, the rhythm of their lives (“in Faha time did not go straight but round and round”) and the emotional landscape they inhabit: “The inveterate layering of all Irish life, where the most important things were never said, and depth was more valued than surface.”
The tweed-wearing postmistress Mrs Prendergast likes to be “the first to spread the word” and will listen unabashedly to the parish’s telephone conversations while operating the switchboard. Every fair, Pat Quinlan drinks or gambles away everything he makes from the sale of his livestock. Father Tom is beginning to forget his sermons mid-sentence, and Mrs Crowe lies dying.
The rain, a constant presence in Faha, making “all the seasons one”, is imbued with human qualities such as “mournful”, “soft”, “blown”, “apologetic” and “stale”, and Williams vividly conveys the fortitude of the local community who “had the tidal eyes of estuary people and the translucent flesh that comes from living in absolute humidity”.
A slow-burning, finely crafted novel about second chances, humanity and familial love, Time of the Child rewards close reading. While outwardly everything remains the same, interior lives are profoundly altered. Williams’s descriptive language is extraordinary – his use of understatement and irony artfully deployed, his characterisation sublime. I find it astonishing that, despite his global success, he has yet to win a big award.
• 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
