Books to Enjoy

Bernard Lynch who teaches in Marian College in Dublin enjoys reading Niall Williams and tells us about his third novel, Fall of Light, which he has recently read.

Niall Williams's first two novels (Four Letters of Love and As it is in Heaven) are nothing short of wonderful and even the appearance of the words "famine" and "epic" on the back cover could not deter me from this, his third book. The novel attempts to fill in the gaps in the known history of one generation of the Foley Family, Williams's own nineteenth century ancestors. Although, clearly more a morality tale than a historical account, the writer deals with the familiar themes of suffering, endurance and redemption in his own unique way.

Loaded by the despair that results from a life of subservience, misery and poverty, the young Francis Foley is doomed to spend a lifetime of suffering and contrition for one moment of spectacular pride and madness, a moment that forever changes his own life and that of his four sons. To varying degrees, the story faces the fortunes and misfortunes of each of the Foleys through the following years as their individual and collective destinies are played out in the four corners of the world. Realism and mysticism are subtly interwoven as we follow the family members across Europe and America, as prisoners, exiles, missionaries, railway pioneers and, of course, victims of famine.

Fall of Light has at its core, the same focus of the earlier novels - an intense, almost spiritual study of the relationship between fathers and sons, and the love and heartache silent and unspoken that operate beneath the surface of these relationships. Niall Williams has a great gift for conveying the deepest of feelings in prose that constantly borders the poetic. My only complaint here is that the narrative demands of such an extended storyline to some extent diminish his effectiveness at seeing and describing the extra ordinary and the spiritual in the most ordinary of circumstances.

Niall Williams doesn't need the spectacular and eventful backdrop he creates in Fall of Light. Read all three novels and see if you agree

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Fate and Tomorrow
Rose Doyle's first historical novel, Friends Indeed, took a hard look at the community of unknown and unsung 19th century women known as Wrens who lived bleak, unforgiven lives on the 19th century Curragh of Kildare. For her second historical novel she's chosen to show how the work of Roger Casement in the early 20th century African Congo helped bring to an end the horrors of a dispossessed people. Fate and Tomorrow straddles two worlds: An Ireland (in l902) precariously balanced between a turb-ulent past and uncertain future in which the growth of the nation has begun, in confusion. In Africa at the same time the people of the Congo Free State, King Leopold II of Belgium's vast, personal fiefdom, were suffering the nightmare of slavery, genocide and torture. The novel, through the story of Irishwoman Nessa O'Grady, and with the interweaving of historical fact and drama, links and parallels the frenzied, changing times in both countries.