Time of the Child
Time of the Child
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Niall Williams on Time of the Child
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Three spurs, one bookThe novel grew from three distinct pressures arriving at once. Williams names them in order: a global event, a family milestone, and an unfinished obligation to a character he had already put on the page.
I think there were a few things that probably came together… the importance of healthcare workers during the pandemic was certainly an influencing factor, and then the birth of our first grandchild, Esme Willow, to whom the book was dedicated. The doctor had featured in the previous novel, This Is Happiness, and now required his own stage.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Niall Williams”The pandemic gave Williams a precise imaginative angle on Doctor Quirke, the Faha GP at the centre of the novel. Thinking about frontline workers during COVID led him to picture what it costs a parish doctor to carry an entire community’s health at all times.
That made me think a lot about what it is to be a doctor in a parish where every single person is your patient. And where you carry all their illnesses with you all the time. And for your point of view, the whole world is sick, which was the thing in Covid times. [paraphrased from audio]
That parish scale, where the professional and the personal are the same thing, became the emotional logic of the whole novel.
Finishing This Is Happiness left Williams reluctant to close the door on Faha. Reader letters confirmed the feeling, and the shared reluctance gave shape to something larger than a single book.
When writing This Is Happiness I didn’t want to finish the novel and leave Faha. And I was greatly encouraged when readers started writing to me to say they didn’t want to finish reading and so leave Faha. So I began to conceive of a series of Faha novels that will cover the time between the coming of electricity and the arrival of the internet.
Time of the Child is set at Christmas 1962, four years after This Is Happiness, and is the second novel in that planned sequence.
How he wrote it
A sentence, then anotherWilliams works without an outline. Every novel begins the same way, and the method demands a daily act of faith: he does not know where the thread leads until he pulls it.
I never plan a novel. I just find a first sentence and then try and find the second.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Niall Williams”Placing the story in 1962 rather than 1958 required more than a calendar adjustment. Williams tracked the specific objects and habits that had shifted in four years of post-electricity village life, because those details are how the series marks time passing in Faha.
it’s the first time in some houses that the couch, the sofa is not aimed to the fireplace, but aimed towards television. [paraphrased from audio]
The confidence to write rural Clare at all came slowly. By the time he finished This Is Happiness, Irish literary culture had largely turned away from that world, and he knew the novels would be read against that current.
It took me a long time to have the confidence to write [about rural Clare] in fiction, after living it for years. Because Ireland has moved on and the intelligentsia in Ireland has really moved on. So, writing these stories, you were going to be viewed as sentimental, nostalgic… or people would think it’s not real.
A devastating 1991 critical reception for his Abbey Theatre debut, when the Irish Times ran the headline “Total waste of a bad idea,” pushed Williams to stop reading reviews entirely. The injury hardened into a principle that still shapes how he works.
It made me realise you are on your own; you can’t try to please people; you have to do your own thing. I have a vocational sense about writing… I am here to write the books I’m supposed to write, not the books a reviewer in The Irish Times would like.
Before any outside reader sees a manuscript, Christine Breen, his wife and the first audience for every novel, delivers her verdict. Her five words on Time of the Child were the most compressed statement of what he is actually trying to do.
It’s the best possible thing she could have said, because that’s my goal. To try to express my spirit on the page. And get it out there. Through these characters, my feelings, my emotions, which can’t be expressed by anybody else. So ‘pure Niall Williams’ is a kind of completion in a way.
The personal thread
Esme Willow and the closing circleThe novel’s dedication is not ceremonial. Williams became a grandfather for the first time while the book was in progress, and the experience of holding Esme arrived at the same moment he was writing a story whose whole arc turns on an infant found in a parish.
Our daughter gave birth to our first grandchild, Esme, to whom the book is dedicated. And that was one of the most profound moments of my life in holding her and experiencing that sort of completion of a circle in a way. [paraphrased from audio]
The title works on two levels at once, one theological and one purely local, and both levels were available to Williams because the book is set in the west Clare parish of Faha, the fictional version of Kiltumper where he has lived for decades.
The title refers first to Christmas, the time a child is born, and the story takes place over the weeks of Advent, ending at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But locally, in Faha in west Clare where the story is set, it came to refer to that time when a child was found at the end of the Christmas Fairday.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Niall Williams”On what the book is wrestling with
The local as gateway, the mythic as methodWilliams traces his imaginative kinship to writers who built entire fictional worlds out of a single, fiercely known geography. That lineage runs through his secondary-school reading as much as through his adult influences.
I do think I have a mythic imagination. I have always been drawn to other writers, like Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who have the same, and work out of a given geography. In Ireland, when in secondary school, we had to read the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, who made this idea of the local… as a gateway to the universal central to his work.
The Faha novels spread through American book clubs during the pandemic partly because they offered something that had become scarce. Williams noticed what readers were actually responding to, and it was not nostalgia.
I think people were missing a sense of community, and they found that in Faha. People weren’t able to travel, but they could travel to Faha in the book.
That appetite for Faha as a place rather than as a period piece is what the series is built to sustain across the decades between electrification and the internet.
What he wants us to sit with
Joy, and a belief about peopleAsked directly what he hopes readers take from the novel, Williams gave the shortest answer in any interview on record for this book. The brevity is the argument: nothing more complicated than this is being withheld.
Joy. The timeless pleasures of a story well told.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Niall Williams”Beneath the joy is a conviction Williams describes as unfashionable but intact. It is not a theme he engineers into the Faha novels; it is the ground they grow from.
My own experience of people has left intact my central belief that human beings are good. There are good people literally everywhere.