Review: Niall Williams’ ‘Time of the Child,’ set in Ireland, is one of the year’s finest novels

To use a word that appears often in the novel, “Time of the Child” is a miracle.

Niall Williams’ gorgeous, wry and humane book is set in the fictional Irish hamlet of Faha, where much of his work (which also includes “Four Letters of Love” and “This Is Happiness”) takes place.

It’s 1962 and nearing Christmas, which is important because the events of the book — which are foreshadowed for 100 pages and then seem to happen all at once — recall the life of the figure for whom Christmas is named. A baby is found outside, dies, then comes back to life. And the question of who will accept the child hovers over the rest of the book.

“Time of the Child” may have the best sentences of any novel this year. Williams has an extraordinary gift for describing shabby Faha, as in this little gem that characterizes a rooming house where “the whole of the interior was without a straight line, each wall only meeting by the obligation for a ceiling.”

He’s equally good on character details that summon people to life, such as a trio of sisters whose views of the world were established as soon as they met their first bottles of milk: “Sophie who near-slept while she fed, Charlotte, who would not take the bottle, and Ronnie who reached up to try and hold it herself.” Even the idiosyncratic use of commas in that sentence seems designed to tell us how different those three sisters are from each other.

Ronnie is the one the book is most concerned with. When the baby girl is found, she’s brought to Ronnie and her father, Dr. Jack Troy, who practices out of their home. Jack sees how important the child is to Ronnie, so they try to keep her secret, rather than consign her to government care. In part, this is because Jack blames himself for having thwarted Ronnie’s romantic prospects but also it’s because both Jack and Ronnie mourn the wife/mother who was taken from them at a young age and whom Ronnie echoes in her interactions with the baby: “Ronnie floated into a doubled peace, in which she was both the one holding the baby, and the one being held.”

It’s an essentially realistic book that lovingly observes the minutiae of its characters’ day-to-day lives but there’s an element of quiet magic afoot, too. For one thing, the subject of the child’s biological parentage is barely broached, as if it’s understood she was destined to be placed in a Faha alley on a cold winter night. And, while the narrator of “Time of the Child” is never revealed, it’s clear it’s someone who knows the people well and who slyly makes room in the story for its readers.

Williams’ tale uses reading, which I’d argue is a kind of magic, as both plot point (Charlotte’s theft of Ronnie’s book is character-defining) and metaphor, like the reference to Jack having “had the same feeling as all readers who are approaching the narrow end of a book: How is this going to end?”

How, indeed?

Obviously, it’s impossible to keep a baby secret forever and, equally obviously, a single woman in 1960s Ireland wouldn’t get custody of a child. But things resolve themselves in a finale in which a community of people gather for a jam-packed Christmas mass. I read it multiple times to figure out how Williams achieved the emotion and truth of that scene, about which I will just say this: The answer to “How is this going to end?” is, “Perfectly.”

Time of the Child

By: Niall Williams.

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 297 pages, $28.99.