Time of the Child is Niall Williams’s twelfth novel, and his third to explore the fictional Irish village of Faha, located in the rural west where Williams himself, a native Dubliner, has made his home. The first of the sequence, History of the Rain (TLS, October 3, 2014) was a rambling multigenerational saga narrated by a bedridden teenager in the present day. It was followed by This Is Happiness (2019), an equally meandering love story set against the arrival of electricity in the 1950s, as remembered by the elderly Noel Crowe, an emigrant to the US – a moment cleverly chosen to mark the pivotal shift from centuries of insular tradition towards a daunting modernity. Time of the Child revisits the same community in the 1960s. Williams’s many fans will be happy to find that modernity has been gentle on Faha, and little has changed.
This time the third-person narrative immerses us in the life of the ageing widower and local doctor Jack Troy, whose three daughters were wooed in turn by Noel Crowe in This Is Happiness. Two have now escaped this rural backwater via marriage and emigration, and only the bookish Ronnie is left as Troy’s de facto secretary and housekeeper. But the gloomily taciturn doctor fears she will miss out on a life of her own, and when a newborn is abandoned at the gates of the local church, he commits himself to a crazy plan. His daughter will unofficially adopt and raise the child, at first in secret, then in a respectable marriage to Crowe, whom Troy will contrive, without Ronnie’s knowledge, to summon home.
There is little more to the plot. This inciting incident arrives only at the halfway point, and the fabular symbolism and Dickensian overtones – a fatherless child who promises salvation; an innocent saved from a repressive institution – are not tempered by equal doses of novelistic decorum or psychological plausibility. Proper ethical and legal objections to the plan are barely considered, and practical obstacles are of little interest to Troy or to Williams: their house is the town surgery, visited every day by a stream of locals, but the baby simply never cries when a visitor is present until it is dramatically convenient for her to do so.
It is no spoiler to reveal that the novel ends with a twinkling vision of generous…