How the Coming of Electricity Changed Everything

 

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 21^st 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!