Time of the Child is a book that will go down in personal legend as one that all of the stops had to be pulled out for to get it over the line. Is it nearly as accessible as This is Happiness, a book about the simple pleasures of life and the lengths that one might go to to prolong them? It most emphatically is not. Does the promise of a far off hope help to offset the drear and dread that the predicaments of the Troy family engender? Not overly. 

 

Yet in the final analysis Time of the Child is a warm piece of fiction about a village that operates its own way even within the strictures of the heavily Catholic Irish society of 1962. It just takes a bit to get there. 

 

Doctor Jack Troy has kept himself apart from the town of Faha all of his life, despite being raised there. He worries, too, that he has kept his daughter Ronnie from living her own life, and that he has rendered her unlovable. These issues come to a head on the day of the Christmas fair, when a baby left at the church is delivered unto the Troys' surgery and residence. As Doctor Troy tries to protect the child, he has to reconsider everything that he knows about his relation to the town and his perception of his daughter. 

 

Time of the Child has been promoted as both a companion to This is Happiness and an introduction to Faha all by itself, but the reader would be hard pressed to say that this book is quite so immediately accessible, spending most of its first third on a single morning with a man that you would know the basic shape of if you had read the previous instalment, referring to things that nag at you, that you think you should know. 

 

So if you've somehow got yourself a copy of the premier book of the festive season just passed (maybe you were gifted it for Christmas, and haven't got around to it yet?), I would advise putting it down and finding out what happened in Faha before the Electric came. 

 

By the time the titular Child shows up, the shape of the novel has changed. As she shakes up the Troy family, so too does she alter the form of the piece. There are so many ways that it could go, and Williams spends a decent time tottering on the precipice of disaster and creating another, far darker, novel. What seemed like idle thoughts before the Child suddenly become manic fantasies pursued with an unhealthy zeal, and the ends needed to achieve them are dubious at best. 

 

Williams elides much of the horror of what would become a child born out of wedlock in the era in a way that Clare Keegan, for example, did not. Regardless, it is clear that the Child would not thrive if surrendered to the Department. Ultimately Time of the Child is not interested in worst case scenarios beyond the acknowledgment that they are real and perilous, and it opens its heart to a world of possibility, however unlikely it may be. 

 

Unlike This is Happiness, there is not a defined narrator. We already know the fates of some of these residents from what Noel Crowe told us on the last visit, and this time Williams' omniscience is as miserly as he is generous. He knows the future, and tells some of it, but other important factors he leaves up to the reader. This is one of the quiet joys, the mixed ambiguity of a future only half-written. 

 

Time of the Child is a cumulative affair, with less of a carnival feeling than the previous trip to Faha and more of a quiet contemplation. There are many worries along the way, an almost leaden gloom, but it all adds up to a final sequence that at last feels like a proper celebration of Faha, an explanation of why we'd want to spend our time among its lives in the darkest and coldest months of the year. Perhaps that is happiness.