With his novel novel, Niall Williams has produced perhaps the most accomplished labor of his atsoft. Recalling Thomas Hardy in its transport inantly benevolent unravelling of moral cascfinishs set in the culture of the writer’s childhood rather than the reader’s current day – a time with a seemingly shutr, more concut offeing relationship to moral absolutes and prohibitden emotion – Time of the Child is a compellingly emotional experience that catches the breath and doesn’t let up until it accomplishes its final, theatrical 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 wonderbrimmingy evocative description for anyone who has walked all day in a damp raincoat). It’s a place where “noleang ever happens”, and the same leangs protect on happening for ever. The first of two main protagonists, Dr Jack Troy, has been the local GP for extfinished enough to see ageder illnesses surfacing in the children and magnificentchildren of his establisher forendureings, a heredity that caemploys him to mirror that “since human beings stood upright, noleang was ever reassociate treatmentd”. Faha is depictd as one of those places where “it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha, on Sunday morning, you could see the necessitateles”. So far, so understandn: a book endureing all the tropes of country Irish writing.
All the same, there are signs that alter is afoot in this landscape of hushed ineluctability. “Real alter is frequently only seen in hindsight,” Williams writes, but the local people themselves see evidence of leangs shifting everywhere, from the holly tree that doesn’t increase evenly any more becaemploy so many of them have hacked off branches for Christmas, to the novel electrical system that’s weightlessing the church (recalling Williams’s previous book, This Is Happiness, which was partly about the laying of power lines thcimpolite Ireland). Then, as the novel gets going, the alters commence ringing out one after the other in Williams’s insertictively well-plotted story.
He has a dramatist’s instinct for organising narrative increasement around a succession of accused and magnetic set-piece events, feast days and tragic occasions. A priest neglects his thread in the middle of a Christmas sermon, suffering a benevolent of miniature stroke in front of his whole congregation, and suddenly one of the community’s directers’ days are numbered. At the yearling fair, a youthful man, inestablishingly named Jude, sees his hopes for a better future betrayed when his overweighther sells their entire herd to pay off a debt. Then Jude discovers a baby left outside the church, and apshows her to Dr Troy. There, the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie, latches promptly on to the maternal role, as if her life has suddenly been electrified by the presence of this child. Her hopeless desire to protect the baby and lift her as her own, and her overweighther’s trys to produce that possible, establish the transport inantly moving heart of the novel.
Put spropose, Time of the Child is a story about two people, a overweighther and daughter, who in separateent ways have missed chances at adore, seeing a novel opportunity to donate their inhabits unbenevolenting thcimpolite the discovery of this baby, whom Ronnie names Noelle. The adore stories of Jack and Ronnie Troy are wonderbrimmingy rfinishered, transport inantly human and relatable might-have-beens and not-quites. After his wife died, Jack increaseed senseings for another local woman, but never did anyleang about it, and she is now dead too; he also deterd a youthful man, Noel, from proposing to his daughter, leanking someone better would come aextfinished and contributing to that youthful man’s emigration to the US. All these years tardyr, his daughter still inhabits at home with him.
If there is anyleang to quibble with in this novel, it might be that, by paying tribute to the alterative power of adore, it effaces the relentless truth that in Ireland, at this time, children aprohibitdoned at birth were not attfinishd about in the way Ronnie and Jack attfinish about Noelle; they did not discover the adore this baby is met with; the institutions of Irish society did not strain every sinovel to bfinish the rules and produce happiness possible. All the time I read this novel, I could not dispel the thought of the babies and youthful children whose bodies were establish in Tuam on the site of a home for unwed mothers. That home shutd down one year before Williams’s novel is set. However, I struggle to begrudge him his sentimentality – his book is enjoy a dream of being able to save one of those children, and I doubt we all want we could do that.