“Writing toward an invisible ending”

Back in December, we named Niall Williams’ book Time of the Child our novel of 2024. I have been thinking about the book, which takes place in Faha, Ireland, continually since I first read it. It’s a beautifully written contemplation of what it takes to attain greatness of soul in a world that tries with all its might to wear you down. It hopefully explores the mystery of grace in the face of deep sadness.

Mr. Williams chatted with me about the process of crafting the story, how his beloved homeland, Ireland, shows up in his work, and what’s next for his beloved characters. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

The ending to Time of the Child, which takes place in a church, is quite moving—the kind of ending that will undoubtedly lead to tear-stained pages in many copies—yet it manages not to be overly sentimental. A Christmas book about a troubled, aging doctor in a small town who encounters a baby and learns to love again … in the wrong hands it could all go quite badly. Were you conscious of trying to avoid a saccharine or overly sentimental conclusion to the story? Or is that just not a creative bone you have?

When I write, I am inside the story, with no idea what will happen next or how this will go. I am in the skin and shoes of each of the characters and trying to see what they would see, follow what they would do here. So only a small part of me is outside that. I am literally writing toward an invisible ending, hoping that when I get there the ending will appear, as it were. So, no, I am not generally worried about it going badly. I am writing the story first for myself, and hoping that I will like it. Maybe that’s the only readership you can count on. If others come aboard, all the better. The response to the Faha novels has been astonishing to me and renews my faith, not only in fiction.

You speak of “hoping that an ending will appear.” What does that look like? How do you know when an ending is the right ending? And how do you go about shaping it so it fits the novel as a whole?

Well, at all times you are depending on a kind of storytelling instinct. You are feeling your way into the invisible and making it concrete. So the ending is no different. You can recognize strands coming together. The ending is always implicit, it seems to me, and has an inevitability when it finally appears. An easy example is This Is Happiness [another Faha novel], where it stops raining on page 1, and you know it will rain again at the end. That novel takes place between two raindrops, as it were. In this novel it was clear that structurally the novel would run over the season of Advent and end at Christmas Eve Mass.

While reading, it occurred to me that Time of the Child is something of a Scrooge book. Like a Dickens’ character, your protagonist has lost his way as he’s grown older. He may not be the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is known to be, but as you write, “he’s lost his love for the world.” As you were writing toward that inevitable ending, did you always feel as if you were writing toward some kind of awakening for him?

I think the truth is that I am always writing toward some kind of awakening, but in me. I am always trying to find my way. I did not think of the doctor as Scrooge, but I can see your point. I am pretty certain that in Dickens was my beginning as a writer. I was lucky enough to be educated under a system that thought nothing of having 14-year-olds read Great Expectations, reading it aloud line by line in class, day after day, until the world of that novel became part of your own world. So perhaps Dickens has colored everything I have tried to do. If I look back at Time of the Child now, I think that early on, I, like the doctor, thought that Noel Crowe might return and continue his courtship of Ronnie. The doctor’s intention was to take care of his child, he just didn’t know that it would take a child to do that.

Even if Noel Crowe may not return to Faha, you certainly have. Do you find yourself compelled to return to this place and these characters, or do you see a sort of Faha Project set out before you?

Sometime during the writing of This Is Happiness, an unusual thing happened to me. I realized that I didn’t want to finish the book. I had fallen in love with this place and these people. So some of the melancholy that settles over that novel as it comes to an end and Christy leaves Faha is my own. I felt I had found a sense of fictional home. Having lived in West Clare for nearly 40 years, I had finally found the courage to set fiction there. So it was natural I suppose that when I was next ready to start work on a novel I would want to go back to Faha. I have certainly been influenced by those writers I love who have worked a fictional landscape, from Dickens and Hardy to Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez to Wendell Berry. So I am not sure I will ever leave Faha again.

You mention Faulkner and Berry, and both of those great American writers were (well, are, in the case of Berry) preoccupied with preserving the customs, language, and stories of the places they love, and for this they have become voices of those places. Berry is a Kentucky writer even more than he is an American writer. But both are Southern writers, who write in a tradition that itself has its own customs and traditions and forms of language. And that desire for preservation shines forth from their work. Even when Faulkner is at his most obtuse, his work as a preserver is clear.

Do you have a similar compulsion: to preserve something essential about a particular form of Irish life? I for one can’t help but hear an Irish accent in my head when reading your books, although it’s possible that is simply a stereotypical American interest in all things U.K. and Ireland, but I suspect it has more to do with the particularities of the language than anything else.

I think there are two questions here, interlinked, but distinct. First, it is not my prime intention to preserve. I can’t speak for Faulkner and Berry, but I suspect the same answer: My prime intention is to tell a story. That the story takes place, like all stories, in a particular time and place, because all of life is particular and local, means that by necessity it captures that time and place, its customs and ways. So the preserving may happen by default. I am trying to be true to the time period and the people, but it remains a work of the imagination, neither sociology nor history. This Is Happiness takes place in 1958, the year I was born. And I was born on the far side of the country from Faha. So I could only go there at that time in my imagination. But I have lived in West Clare since 1985, so life has given me some clues. And I have been greatly humbled by hearing from many readers who lived through the coming of electricity to their rural Irish parishes, and who felt the books captured that gone world.

The second part of the question is about the narrative language. To tell the story the best way possible, I have to find a language to which this particular story is matched. The style and content must marry. I do write out loud, saying each sentence as I type it, so that I am first telling the story to myself. There is a long and honorable tradition of storytelling in Ireland, and in the west in particular, and I would like to imagine I might be part of that. The language is important to me,

I’m curious to hear your particular perspective on the nature of Irish storytelling. Do stories matter to the Irish in a way that is unique, that is perhaps different from other cultures? From afar it’s easy to point to the tropes found in the folk and fairy tales collected by the likes of Yeats, but is Irish storytelling defined by those things? Or, in your opinion, is there something else that most makes an Irish story Irish?

I can only speak from my own experience. I grew up with a clear awareness of Irish writers as a central part of the culture. There was a pride in the great names, and also of the bardic tradition of the past. So both poetry and story were honored inside the country, and the education system further solidified this. So yes, in the literary tradition, stories mattered. I can’t speak for other cultures, but in Ireland I would guess that there was an element of both proclaiming and reclaiming identity through story and poetry. That as time went on these were most frequently written in the English language added another element, putting a different emphasis on the way of telling, on language and style. The angle of telling too, not so straightforward. Personally I don’t think of folk and fairy tales first when I think of Irish story, but something marked by wit or humor and irony and understatement. And that’s not even touching yet on the oral traditions of storytelling in the Irish language and their influence on Irish writers writing in English. You see, many pages would only touch the surface of this question, and you’d end up in the same head-scratching place. Best to just read them and enjoy.

Thanks for taking the time to chat. Last question: What’s next in Faha? Do you have plans to return in a new story?

What’s next is that I am currently writing the screen adaptation of This Is Happiness.

After that, I will start on the next Faha novel. As always, I know very little about it before I begin. I make notes, there is some sense of not even ideas but feelings gathering, and some sense of the community of characters. I believe we are moving forward six years to 1968. Ten years since electricity came. And I see that young Jude is lingering on the fringes of my imagination, saying there is more to tell of him. I’m looking forward to finding out what.