Williams returns to the fictional Irish village of Faha, where a lone doctor, Jack Troy, sees to the medical needs of those who live there. A widower, two of his daughters have married and gone, while 29-year-old Ronnie keeps house for him. Every day seems much like the last, although it being December (1962), some of the usual seasonal shenanigans are afoot. His patients even seem to have inherited the ills that plagued their parents, as attested to by the notes left by Jack’s father, the previous doctor.
Jack often pulls out his father’s sayings, like smooth stones he keeps in his pockets. “The sick are ourselves . .. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river.” Yet Jack holds himself aloof from others, maybe because of his position and his sorrows or perhaps just the weight of all the secrets his patients confide in him.
I loved Williams’s earlier book This Is Happiness. The man can write about the big emotions without sentimentality. He treats all his obstreperous characters with gentle humor and tenderness and respect. There are some outsized characters here for sure, but he never invites us to laugh at them, just to appreciate them for themselves. I love this description of Ronnie:
Like the triangle that has one leg longer than the other, Ronnie had an asymmetrical relation with Faha. She was and was not part of the community, known by everyone, but kept at that distance that had too many causes, but was condensed into the phrase, the doctor’s eldest. And, because she was the one who opened the door to patients in the morning, the one who wrote their names in the book, helped those who needed help getting to chairs in the waiting room, help rising from them, and getting down the creaking hall into the riverward room of the surgery, she shared the perspective of those statues prayed to across the penny candles: she knew the parish through its illnesses. She was also the only person in the parish you could tell your complaint and not hear that she had that too or was suffering from worse.
As you can see, his writing is extraordinary: tangled sentences that somehow always make sense and capture the peculiar voice—syntax and sayings—of the residents of Faha. And that last sentence!
Although there are brief references to it, starting with the title, the promised child doesn’t appear until almost the halfway mark. Some may complain about that, but I say: Who cares about standard story structure when there is so much entertaining wordplay and so many wild events to enjoy, such as rebellious cattle being driven to a market that itself mixes chaos with kindness? I also didn’t mind the slow pace because every page is so rich with music and humor and heart.
This book is a treasure. I was almost afraid to read it, fearing it couldn’t possibly be as good as Happiness. It’s better: a genuinely moving story about what we are and can be to each other.
What novel have you read about what ties a community together or tears it apart?