It was while my reading group was discussing Niall Williams’ This is happiness that a certain penny finally dropped, and it happened like this. My reading group’s practice is to start our meetings with each of us sharing our first impressions of the chosen book. The first three at this meeting said they had trouble getting into the book. It was slow and they didn’t know where it was going. As one said, it just didn’t start off with a strong plot the way Williams’ Time of a child does. I was starting to feel somewhat despondent, that again I’d be an exception to the general opinion, but then the next two said they loved it from the get-go. I relaxed, because I realised I wasn’t alone. I should say, before I get to that dropped penny, that those first three did end up liking the novel – a lot – once they got into it.

Now, the dropped penny. As many of you know, I am one of those readers who says, regarding my general lack of interest in genre novels, that “I don’t need a plot”. But, this has always felt a bit weak, and I’m sure it raises a few eyebrows. I don’t blame those eyebrows, but I’ve never been able to properly articulate what I mean. Niall Williams, and our opening discussion, however, provided me with my answer – and it’s this. I don’t need a plot, I just need a good story. There is a difference, and it relates to that issue of fiction being plot-driven versus, say, character- or ideas-driven. A good plot will, almost by definition, also be a good story, but it is the what-will-happen-next that drives these books. A good story, however, doesn’t have to have a strong plot. It is something else that drives the book, often, but not always, the characters, their lives and relationships, their choices and ideas. This is what I love, and is where Niall Williams comes in.

This is happiness is set in a fictional place called Faha in County Clare, West Ireland. The main action occurs over the summer of 1958, though there are flashbacks and digressions into the past, and some occasional foreshadowing. Its narrator is 17-year-old Noel (Noe) Crow, who has left the seminary, putting his future on hold, to stay in Faha with his grandparents, Doady and Ganga. Soon after he arrives, so does the quintessential outsider, 60-something Christy, whom Doady has taken in as a boarder to boost their tiny income. It is Christy – one of those “people who change the air about them” – who provides the main catalyst for the novel’s action, or inaction, depending on your point of view. As one member said, why doesn’t he just get on with doing what he came to do?

“there’s an infinity of ways to tell the same story” (Ch. 22)

But, here’s what I think … while what Christy comes to do does provide the main narrative arc, it doesn’t drive what this book is about. This is happiness is about something far bigger than one person seeking forgiveness for something he’d done decades before. Superficially, the novel offers an affectionate portrait of a remote community. It is set in a simpler, less bureaucratic time when people lived according to their own rules. However, it is also set at a time of change. Electrification is finally on its way. Our narrator says,

an easier and more natural way of living was nearing its end. Because, it occurred to me, in Faha, and places like it, people had been making it up as they went along and making it up out of no rule book but the one they had been born with, that is an innate sense of right and decency, the rough edges of how to live alongside others having been knocked off not by ordinance or decree but by life.” (Ch. 27)

Christy is at the centre of this too, because he has been employed by the Electricity Board to confirm landholders’ agreements to have electric poles on their land. Now, this is Ireland, and Williams is an Irish storyteller, so there is much humour in the telling. Change, after all, is hard, and the rural Irish, used to their way of life – despite its difficulty – were not easy to convince. Indeed, is change always good, is one question this book poses. The outsider, Area Organiser Rushe

knew he was advocating for the single greatest change in the way of life there but didn’t have the acuity to understand why anyone might object. (Ch. 8)

From the novel’s opening pages, I was awed by Williams’ warm-hearted but self-deprecatingly humorous building of a complete community. It is told first person by Noe, who is now 78 and looking back to this pivotal time in his life (because this is also a coming-of-age novel):

I know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s Lexicon. (Ch. 2)

In my reading group we touched on whether the novel is a bit “schmaltzy”. Some felt it was, just a bit, but I don’t agree. Early on Noe says:

Now, it is not my intention to paint the parish in an overly rosy light. It had its full share of villains, in due course some of which were found out, and some of which were not, as is true anywhere … Faha was no different: cruelty, meanness and ignorance all had a place then, but as I’ve grown older the instances and stories of them seem less compelling, as if God has inbuilt in me a spirit of clemency I wasn’t aware of when younger. It may be, of course, that I’m just grateful to be above ground and what seems more significant to notice is human goodness. (Ch. 7)

This brings me to another point I want to make about story, which is that This is happiness is also a book about storytelling. As Noe tells his story, he reflects on his own learning, on what he didn’t know at 17 and what he learnt about himself and about human nature. I could write a whole post on this, reflecting how his change mirrors the town’s. But I want to move on to his observations about story, and its intertwining with life, because this story about Faha, is also about the stories of our lives, about how our lives are story. It’s beautifully done, because it’s self-conscious and yet natural at the same time. Noe explains it well in his description of the delightful Ganga:

A key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way. (Ch. 7)

The idea of story, and people’s awareness of it, threads through the novel. We learn that Fahaeans “had an insatiable craving to be part of a good story” (Ch. 42), and that story is not static, but can change over time:

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic. (Ch. 11)

Late in the novel, using Irish music as an analogy, Noe speaks directly of his storytelling intentions:

Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and … in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.
Which, in some ways I suppose, is what I’m trying to do. (Ch. 42)

Here, Noe doubles as the author’s mouthpiece, because this novel, with its digressions and its large cast of characters is, ultimately, a story about humanity. It is, yes, set in a gorgeously specific place and time, but its comprehension of humanity is timeless. That it achieves this with more than a dash of humour, not to mention a wry irony, is the icing on the cake. Chapter 1 comprises one sentence, “It had stopped raining”, which heralds 43 chapters of record-breaking sunshine in Faha. The novel’s last line, which occurs just after the big light-turning-on ceremony, is, “It had started raining”.

Interpret this as you will, but for me it means a return to normality in Faha. Sure, electrification will bring change, but the people will go on, much as they always have – and this, as Christy would say, is happiness.

Brona also reviewed (and loved) this book.

Niall Williams
This is happiness
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020 (orig. ed. 2019)
380pp.
ISBN: 9781526609359