‘Time of the Child’ gently pulls back the layers of an Irish village
"Real change is often only seen in hindsight," Irish writer Niall Williams observes in "Time of the Child." This theme runs through many of his novels, which look back on pivotal points when the winds of change, however subtle, could be felt rustling through rural communities.
Williams' latest bear hug of a book takes place in 1962 and is set, like "History of the Rain" and "This Is Happiness," in a fictional Irish village called Faha, on the banks of the River Shannon in County Clare. It's a place where "the line between comedy and tragedy was drawn in pencil, and oftentimes rubbed out." Although "Time of the Child" involves several of the same characters as "This Is Happiness" – which takes place four years earlier, when electricity finally came to town – each book stands well on its own. Together, they paint a shimmering portrait of a gradually shifting social landscape.
The central event in "Time of the Child" is the discovery of an infant in Faha's churchyard on a cold, wet night during the Christmas season of 1962. Twelve-year-old Jude Quinlan, who comes upon the abandoned baby while waiting to usher his unreliable father home from the pub after the holiday fair, brings the baby, cradled in his arms, to the local doctor. This unexpected turn of events proves both challenging and transformative for Dr. Troy, his eldest daughter, and the tight-knit community.
Written in a close third person point of view, the narrative beautifully captures the experiences and feelings of the doctor, who has been caring for Faha locals for decades. His father, who preceded him in the post, passed along some of his hard-earned wisdom, including the lesson that "a doctor's first instrument is one of listening."
Although "vouchsafed a place of honour in the parish by the twin virtues of not leaving and being indispensable," Troy, a widower on the cusp of 70, suffers from exhaustion from his long hours seeing patients as well as regret over a missed second chance at love.
Williams is a lyrical writer who takes his time. He specializes in resonant moments "filled with what the world calls nothing." Plot is secondary to gorgeous descriptions and often sly observations. Rain is a shape-shifting near-constant presence that pelts, lashes, mists, and "tattoos" the landscape and its people. Occasionally, Williams tells us what will happen to characters (including Jude) years hence – a reminder that this story is told in retrospect.
The doctor's daughter and assistant, Ronnie, is solitary and subdued by nature. She is an avid reader stirred by "great souled" literature, including Edna O'Brien's "The Country Girls," which was considered scandalous at the time. No chatterbox, she pours her inner life into her private journals, in which "she had fallen into a habit of seeing in Faha the full of humanity, in its ordinary clothes."
Of course Williams is also describing his own work when he writes about Ronnie's efforts to capture ordinary lives on paper, a challenging enterprise "not least because of the inveterate layering of all Irish life, where the most important things were never said, and depth was more valued than surface."
Williams conveys the incomparable joys of baby love – beautifully expressed by the ordinarily reserved doctor dancing in the kitchen with the infant in his arms, and his daughter happily caring for the baby not as if it were second nature, but first. Williams writes about this man who usually kept his feelings well-hidden behind his mustache: "What was in the kitchen, he knew, was love. But he knew too that love is dangerous, because it brings us to our best selves, and because purity is a commodity the world can only tolerate in thimbles."
But, alas, things in Glocca Morra are not all fine. In 1962, Williams reminds us, Ireland was still "a country where the concept of family was defined along one line, and a baby in the street belonged to the State, who, with haste to be unsoiled, would hand it off to the Church." The doctor is haunted by the infamous, punitive, Magdalene laundries , to which, under his watch, an unwed mother and her baby were sent 20 years earlier. (Even though the laundries were closed in 1996, reckonings of the damage they caused are ongoing. Another Irish Christmas story in which the grim institutions play a more prominent role is Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These," which takes place in 1985.)
Ronnie, without a husband, is not allowed to adopt the child. Her father concocts a far-fetched scheme that depends on the return from America of her friend, Noel, the grandson of one of his dying patients, who featured prominently in "This Is Happiness." This enrages his daughter, and much drama ensues.
With its sweet wrap-up – OK, it's a bit sticky-sweet, but delicious nonetheless – Williams affixes a candy cane to this literary Christmas package about community coming together under new, unusual circumstances. Moist eyes are all but assured.
