Why do Irish novelists strike so effectively at the heart, managing to be both unsentimental and timelessly true to heartbreak and joy? Claire Keegan’s 2022 masterpiece, Small Things Like These (see my review), affected me as few recent novels have, and I did not expect, as I began to read Niall Willams’s Time of the Child, to tap into deep emotions as strongly. This is especially true as Williams is a starkly different stylist to Keegan. Time of the Child commences with a seemingly rambling, person-by-person tour of the small town of Faha as Christmas approaches in 1962, the swirling introduction centered around older Doctor Jack Troy and his bookish, stay-at-home daughter Ronnie. And then a baby lands on their doorstep, a baby seemingly inevitably destined to be snapped up into the retrograde Irish orphanage system. The novel takes some time to settle into the tale of Jack, Ronnie, the baby, and yes, Faha (for the town is, yes, a character). Williams’s style is Irish-raconteur, full of sly asides, jammed with affection … the novel becomes a yarn building up with tension as a time of reckoning about the baby approaches. In lesser hands, Time of the Child would be a limping domestic drama; under the grace of Niall Williams’s pen, it is a triumph, surely a 2025 highlight.
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