My current “favorite author” is Niall Williams! A favorite changes over time, of course, but
I am glad to have discovered this best-selling Irish writer and just finished reading two of his books, “This is Happiness” and its sequel “The Time of the Child”.
There is much to enjoy in Niall Willams’ novel, “This is
Happiness”, set in the village of Faja in Western Ireland in 1958. Above all it is the writing – lyrical and nostalgic,
of a time that Williams paints with lush landscapes and the colorful characters
that populate that time and space. In
some ways the story brought to mind my own experience of growing up in a rural
Minnesota community during that period. It reminded me of Garrison Keeler’s Lake
Woebegone stories, with the often-humorous descriptions of characters and a
time of simpler traditions of Norwegian immigrant culture. I also thought of the way Lars Myting developed
the setting and characters for his saga set in the fictional Norwegian village
of Butangen, in his Bell in the Lake trilogy.
It’s the everyday stuff that makes up life and Williams is able
to capture its essence through rich, descriptive prose, which sometimes
reads more like poetry. Yes, it was a
simpler time that doesn’t exist anymore in Ireland, nor in my home community near
Kenyon, Minnesota. The main character
Noe Crowe, in reflecting on life in Faja at one point says,
“At the time you’re living it you can sometimes think your
life is nothing much. It’s ordinary and every day and should be and could be in
this or that way better. It is without the perspective by which any meaning can
be derived because it’s too sensual and urgent and immediate, which is the way
life is to be lived. We’re all, all the time, striving, and though that means
there’s a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it’s not such a terrible
thing if you think that we keep on trying."
For us readers in the 21st century this novel
brings us back to a simpler time before electricity and telephones (though there
was one telephone in the village) -a slower paced rural life. Those who like a fast past plot won’t find it
here; rather it is the enjoyment of the many beautiful passages that I was
tempted to underline but stopped myself because it was a library book.
The time period in which the story takes place is in the
1950s, when electricity was just coming to the parish village of Faha in County
Clare Ireland. Which is historical fact –
Ireland’s rural electrification scheme came a bit later then in the US.
Why does that ring a bell for me? Because, a decade earlier electricity came to
our farm in rural Minnesota, and I have a vague memory of that event as a boy
of about six or seven at the close of WWII.
Before electricity we lived in the dark, after electricity we lived in
the light. For the first time we had
water from the tap in the house, an indoor bathroom and toilet, a refrigerator
and washing machine that greatly relieved my mother’s work, a milking machine
in the barn instead of milking by hand by the light of kerosine lanterns.
The Rural Electrification Administration was created,
initially through Executive Order by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 and later
codified by Congress as an act of law in 1936.
In my way of thinking that was one of the greatest actions of the New
Deal; an executive order that really made a positive difference for millions of
rural people! For my parents, the coming of electricity after struggling to
make a living off their small farm during the depression, this must have been happiness.
Well, back to Ireland.
So, what is happiness? The old
man, Christy, who comes to Faja with the electronification company but has an
alternative motive of reconnecting with a woman who fifty years earlier he had
left stranding at the altar, says,
“… you could stop at, not all but most of the moments of
your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or
heart, say ‘This is happiness’, because of the simple truth that you were alive
to say it”
Williams
has an amazing ability to put into words the wonder of love, life and even
faith lived out in ordinary ways by the people of Faha. Reading this book made me feel, well, happy!
