History of the Rain

Ruth Swain, nineteen years old, lies bedbound in her attic room beneath a rain-streaked skylight in a farmhouse near the village of Faha, County Clare, Ireland. The daughter of a poet, Virgil Swain, she is writing to find him. Ruth attended Trinity College Dublin before collapsing and returning home with an undiagnosed illness; the doctors know only that something in her blood is wrong. Her father's library of nearly four thousand books fills her room, and she declares she will read them all because that is where she will find him. Her narrative moves between her present confinement and her family's multi-generational history, told in a digressive voice her former English teacher, Mrs Quinty, calls Superabundance of Style.

Ruth traces the Swains back to her great-grandfather, the Reverend Absalom Swain of Salisbury, Wiltshire, who bequeathed the Philosophy of Impossible Standard: the belief that no matter how hard one tries, one can never be good enough. His son Abraham goes to Oxford and enlists when World War I begins. Gravely wounded in France, he is saved when a German soldier bandages his wounds instead of killing him, and a young medic named Oliver Cissley removes three bullets from his body. Sent back to England with pneumonia, Abraham learns his mother has died in his absence. Ashamed of having failed the Impossible Standard, he lets his father believe he is dead.

Years later, Oliver's mother visits Abraham. Her husband made a fortune from wartime manufacturing and purchased lands in Ireland intended for Oliver, who died in the war. She offers them to Abraham. He settles at Ashcroft House in County Meath and works the land into perfection, hoping to impress his father. The Reverend burns the invitation and dies within a week. Abraham responds by abandoning God and devoting himself to salmon fishing, keeping meticulous journals while Ashcroft falls into ruin.

In September 1939, Abraham catches a great salmon and meets Margaret Kittering, a no-nonsense Anglo-Irish woman. They marry and have three daughters before a son, whom Abraham names Virgil. At the christening Abraham holds the baby aloft and declares the boy will never enter a church again. He takes over Virgil's education, firing tutors who declare the boy brilliant. One tutor, Mr MacGhiolla, leaves a lasting mark by teaching Virgil Irish mythology and inspiring his first thoughts of writing. On Virgil's fourteenth birthday, father and son walk to the river at dawn exchanging lines from the Aeneid and Hamlet. That evening Abraham begins writing The Salmon in Ireland. He later dies of a heart attack while fishing. Grandmother Margaret suffers two strokes and dies. Virgil, orphaned, takes Moby Dick and goes to sea.

Ruth's maternal grandmother, Bridget "Nonie" MacCarroll, known as Nan, connects the family to a different lineage. Nan's cousin Tommy Devlin traces the MacCarrolls to ancient Irish mythology, to Tuan MacCarrill, who survived a plague by becoming a salmon and was reborn carrying the history of Ireland. Ruth's maternal grandfather, Fiachra MacCarroll, marries Nan; they love passionately until his early death from a heart attack, after which Nan stops dancing and takes to wearing his tweed cap.

On an April day, Ruth's mother, Mary MacCarroll, walks the riverbank and encounters a stranger standing motionless at Fisher's Step, a spot by the Shannon. Virgil has returned to Ireland carrying Yeats's Mythologies and a profound disappointment in himself. Their first exchange is brief: Mary asks what he is doing, he says he will leave, and she tells him he can stay. Their courtship unfolds through walking and silence, through Mary's attempts to drive him off and Virgil's certainty that this is where he belongs.

They marry in Faha. Nan takes Virgil on a tour of their fourteen acres of muck, rushes, and four thin cows. He calls it beautiful. He throws himself into farming with fierce impractical devotion, enduring failed crops and broken bones. One night Virgil drives to the Shannon, strips naked, and dives in. Mary fears he has drowned until he surfaces downriver. She throws his clothes into the water. Nine months later, the twins are born.

Aeney arrives first; Ruth follows. Virgil goes to the riverbank, overwhelmed, and discovers the rhythm of poetry for the first time. He insists on baptizing the twins with river water from the Shannon. Aeney grows into a golden boy whose shining quality makes people feel better about living; after his first fishing trip with Virgil, he falls in love with the river. Ruth becomes the twin who reads and stands alone. When their school principal separates them into different classes, Aeney begins slipping away. Ruth also introduces Vincent Cunningham, a sweet-natured boy who first proposes to her at age eight and persists through years of refusal, later visiting her during her illness and washing her hair when she is too weak, a scene she describes as a kind of baptism.

On the last day of primary school, Mam sends Ruth to find Aeney. She walks to the river and sees Huck, their white dog, sitting erect on the bank, facing the water. Ruth understands instantly. Virgil dives in. The whole parish searches. Aeney's fishing rod is found in the rushes, his sneaker three days later. His body is never recovered.

After Aeney's death, Virgil stops writing. Mam decides the remedy is for the world to respond to his poetry. She arranges for Mrs Quinty to type the completed poems from Virgil's Aisling copybooks, the notebooks in which he composed. Mam wraps the manuscript, titles it History of the Rain, and she and Ruth mail it to a London publisher. News spreads, and Virgil becomes Faha's own poet without knowing it.

A local employment scheme prompts Virgil to teach classes on Yeats that become legendary, renewing his creative energy. He enters a period of white-hot intensity, writing day and night. Then a chimney fire fills the house with smoke, and Ruth nearly dies in her attic room. After the family moves temporarily to a neighbor's house, Ruth returns to find Virgil at the spot where Aeney drowned, watching the pages of his new poems float downriver. He tells her they were no good. The letter from London eventually arrives: The publisher has no record of receiving the original manuscript. It was lost in the post.

Father Tipp, the parish priest, brings Virgil a set of Yeats volumes that once bore stamps from the Salisbury Library in Wiltshire, the Reverend's territory. Virgil spends three days reading Yeats in Aeney's attic bedroom. On the third day, Ruth finds her father dead at his desk under the skylight. A medical report reveals a tumour in the parietal lobe of his brain, which the doctor implies explains his raptures. Ruth rejects this as the wrong story and resolves to write the truth.

In the present, Ruth is hospitalized in Dublin. Vincent takes a bus from Faha to visit. Ruth debates the existence of Heaven with him; he counters that even if it is just a story, she believes in stories. She asks him to kiss her, saying she should not die without having been kissed.

In his will, Virgil leaves Ruth his books. On his desk she finds The Salmon in Ireland with a page of handwritten fragments, the impossible poem he was trying to write for her, including the phrase "I will make things better." If she dies, her pages will be placed with her father's fragments inside the book and thrown into the Shannon. If she lives, this book is her father's afterlife. In a final visionary passage, Ruth imagines Virgil arriving at a sparkling river, finding Aeney fair-haired and fishing contentedly. Father and son embrace, and in their embrace is the knowledge that Mam will be all right, that Ruth will go into remission and write this book, and that one day she will walk to the river with Vincent without fear, because impossibly the rain will have stopped.