In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy of Edna O’Brien’s banned The Country Girls is read surreptitiously by the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie Troy; a photograph of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the USA, hangs proudly on the postmistress’s wall. But in the main the rhythm of life persists much as it has for generations.
Like Ronnie, Niall Williams clearly feels that Faha represents ‘the full of humanity, in its ordinary clothes’, since Time of the Child is his third visit to the fictitious County Clare village, following History of the Rain and This is Happiness. Indeed, Noel Crowe, the protagonist of the latter, remains a potent, albeit unseen, presence here.
For his part, Doctor Jack Troy notes that ‘storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life’.
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