Four Letters of Love

Nicholas Coughlan, the novel's first-person narrator, recounts the day his life changed: when he was 12, God spoke to his father, William Coughlan, a thin, silver-haired civil servant in Dublin, and told him to become a painter. William announces to his wife, Bette, that he is quitting his job, revealing he has already sold the car. Bette is furious, but William insists it is what God wants him to do. The household transforms overnight: Furniture is sold and a worktable installed in the living room as a studio. Bette takes to her bed in protest. Nicholas becomes the little man of the house, scavenging extra food from the local shopkeeper while his mother tells him to study hard.

William disappears for the summer to paint in the west of Ireland. When he returns in September, the canvases he brings home are not pastoral landscapes but chaotic, abstract compositions of violent color. Nicholas is secretly dismayed, fearing the paintings signal his father's madness. Bette enters the studio, sweeps her eyes over the paintings, and leaves without a word.

The narrative shifts to Isabel Gore, born on a small island off the west coast of Ireland. Isabel and her younger brother Sean, a musical prodigy, play imaginary games on the sea cliffs. One afternoon, during a session of increasingly fast jig-playing, Sean collapses in a seizure and is left mute, immobile, and confined to bed. Isabel is consumed by guilt, believing her dancing caused his illness, a burden that shapes the rest of her life. Her father, Muiris Gore, the island's schoolmaster and a poet, sends Isabel to a boarding convent school in Galway. When she returns for Christmas, she begins whispering secrets to the bedridden Sean and places a tin whistle in his mouth. After many failed attempts, he manages a single wavering note, which Isabel takes as proof that God exists.

Back in Dublin, Nicholas endures winters of deprivation as William cycles through periods of frozen self-doubt while Bette retreats further into isolation, talking to the radio as her only companion. On weekends, William takes Nicholas on long, wordless walks into the hills. The backstory of his parents' courtship emerges in fragments: Bette once refused William's proposal, and he wrote her a love letter so passionate it won her heart.

William returns from another summer absence and sends Nicholas to buy a cake, planning to reconcile with Bette. While Nicholas is gone, William breaks down the locked bedroom door and discovers that Bette has died from an overdose of sleeping tablets. Father and son live in thick silence for six months. One morning, both are awakened by dishes clinking downstairs; they recognize Bette's ghost, returned to prompt them into action. They spend the day cleaning the house together, weeping as they work. William paints over his failed canvases to begin again.

William tells Nicholas he must travel to Clare to paint. Nicholas secretly follows him. At the coast, Nicholas mistakes his father's swim for a suicide attempt and runs into the sea, nearly drowning before William rescues him. They spend a transformative week camping on the shore. William paints the sea obsessively while Nicholas recites Latin poetry by the campfire each evening, sounds that William takes as confirmation of God's presence. On the journey home, cattle break through a fence and destroy all but two paintings.

Meanwhile, Isabel, now 18, meets Peader O'Luing, a 25-year-old Galway shopkeeper who runs his late father's wool and tweed business, when he offers her a ride during a winter storm. A conspiracy of Sunday outings begins, with Peader posing as her cousin to extract her from the convent. When the nuns discover the deceptions and order Isabel home, she finds Peader in a pub, sits beside him, takes his hand, and realizes she is in love. Their relationship proves volatile: Peader is drawn to Isabel when she is distant but repelled when she loves him back, driven by a deep conviction that he is worthless. He strikes her once. Isabel briefly leaves but returns, warning him never to hit her again. She believes Peader's coldness is her deserved punishment for having caused Sean's illness.

John Flannery, William's old civil service colleague, visits the Coughlan house to buy a painting. William gives him one of the two surviving canvases, and Flannery arranges for it to be awarded as a prize in a poetry competition. Margaret Gore, Isabel's mother, secretly submits one of Muiris's old poems. Muiris wins, and his prize is William's painting of the sea. He hangs it in his island schoolhouse and begins writing poetry again for the first time in 13 years.

Nicholas joins the civil service and spends three years at a government desk. Peader proposes to Isabel. Torn, she returns to the island and takes Sean to the sea cliffs each day, waiting for a sign from God. No sign comes. She returns to Galway and, finding Peader waiting at the dock with flowers, interprets his presence as the sign and accepts.

God speaks to William a second time. In Nicholas's visionary telling, God arrives in a fiery chariot. The reality, as the Guards (the Irish police) report it, is that William fed his canvases into a heater until the house burned down, killing him. Nicholas rejects the official account and returns to the burnt shell to recite Latin until dawn. Flannery takes Nicholas in. One snowy night, skating through empty Dublin streets, Nicholas falls and sees a vision of his father beside him on the ice. The next morning, he knows what he must do: He must recover the painting, the last fragment of his father's work.

Nicholas arrives on the island the morning after Isabel's wedding to Peader. He introduces himself to the hungover Muiris and explains he has come about a painting. In the kitchen with Sean, something remarkable happens: Sean begins humming a reel for the first time in years. At the cliff edge, Sean asks Nicholas to help him stand and walks for the first time since his childhood seizure. The islanders treat the event as a miracle. Sean and Nicholas travel by boat to Galway so Sean can surprise Isabel on her return from her honeymoon. There, Nicholas sees Isabel for the first time; they kiss on a Galway street, and she drives them to the nearby town of Oughterard. The novel's shortest section, Part Six, is a single lyrical chapter in which Nicholas asks the reader to imagine music, light, and the scent of the island.

Back on the island, Margaret immediately detects that Nicholas has fallen hopelessly in love with Isabel. She resolves to prevent the love from reaching her already-married daughter. Nicholas writes a passionate love letter to Isabel. He takes it to the post office, but Margaret follows, tricks the postmistress into returning it, and burns it. Nicholas falls gravely ill with lovesickness while waiting for a reply that never comes. He writes a second letter, which Margaret intercepts and burns. His third contains only the single word love. Margaret weeps but burns this too.

Before writing his fourth letter, Nicholas receives a visitation from his father's ghost, a shining figure in a room draped with white satin and filled with doves. He then writes a long manuscript recounting the story of his father's life, constituting the novel the reader has been reading up to Part Six. When Margaret moves to intercept it, Nicholas snatches the envelope from the post office counter and wades into the sea to hand it to a fisherman sailing to the mainland. He lies on the beach, laughing, certain Isabel will come.

The novel closes with Margaret's prophetic foreknowledge. A storm will take the fisherman's boat and toss the fourth letter into the Atlantic. Isabel will never receive it, just as she never received the other three. Yet Isabel will nonetheless return to the island, pregnant with Peader's child, to tell Nicholas she has fallen in love with him. Margaret sees that the plots of God and love are the same thing, and that loving Isabel is what Nicholas was born to do. Muiris looks at the painting on his schoolhouse wall and sees for the first time the image of a very old man within it. He laughs, and the island fills with the scent of eucalyptus and golden light.