BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: This is Happiness (Niall Williams, author)
historical fiction, County Clare, Ireland, small town, advent of electricity and telephone lines, grandparents, coming of age seventeen year old protagonist, mysterious stranger, unrequited love
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, comes this review of Niall Williams’ This is Happiness. Set in the fictional town of Faha on the west coast of Ireland in County Clare, the novel is the story of a small tight-knit Irish community in 1958, in the days before electricity came to the behind-the-times village. It was a time when neighbors and families communicated and were bound differently, intimately intertwined in one another’s histories, stories and fates. The novel opens with a lyrical description of rain, rain that had lasted nearly a year, rain that was as much a part of life in Western Ireland as was Sunday Mass and the local pub, and small rocky farms where potatoes sprouted. Williams’ writing is beautiful, evocative and poetic. It is leisurely; it does not rush. It moves with the cadence of a rural village before electric poles and phone lines changed the way people communicated and how they structured their lives.
The story is told by Noe Crowe, a seventy-eight year old man looking back on a pivotal year in his life, when he was a seventeen year-old boy who had declined an opportunity to attend seminary, for now at least, and was sent by his parents to live with and help his grandparents in the quiet town of Faha. Shortly after his arrival and the cessation of the months-long rain, Noe encounters a mysterious stranger, called Christy, who is among those who have come to Faha to oversee the placement of electric poles and phone lines, and to sell the service to the village’s residents. But Christy has a backstory—the long lost love of a woman who married another and lives in Faha. Noe accepts occasional work from Christy and slowly hears the story of Christy’s past. Along the way, Noe falls in love, suffers with it, and falls back out.
A book like This is Happiness runs the risk of being saccharine and nostalgic, a telling through rose-colored glasses, romanticizing the past. Williams avoid the sap by deploying both incisive and lyrical prose. His words animates an entire small village in brush strokes of spare language that renders whole the characters that people it, moving in and out of the grasses and roads and rains they inhabit. It is poignant without being sappy. We watch the town shift on its axis with the long-forestalled advent of electricity and telephones that are ubiquitous elsewhere in Ireland and around the globe, but are entirely new and not always welcomed in this small Irish village.
This is Happiness harkens back to a simpler time that was just as complicated as the present in its own ways and not nearly as simple or at least as easy as “simpler” might suggest in the hands of a less skilled writer than Williams may have made it seem. Take a trip to Ireland in the late 1950s, one that of course includes the priest and the pub, but is not rife with repression as other tales set in this time and place. And Happy St. Paddy’s to you.
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