47 pages • 1 hour read
Niall WilliamsTime of the Child
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Niall Williams
Niall Williams is an Irish author. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1958, Williams attended University College, Dublin, where he studied English and French literature. In 1980, Williams moved to New York, where he met and married his wife Christine “Chris” Breen and began working at Fox & Sutherland’s Bookshop in Mount Kisco. In 1985, Williams and Chris moved back to Ireland to pursue careers as writers. They began their life together in Chris’s late grandfather’s cottage in West Clare. Between 1987 and 1995, Williams co-wrote his first four books with Chris; these titles “tell of [the couple’s] life together in Co Clare” and include O Come Ye Back to Ireland: Our First Year Back in County Clare, When Summer’s in the Meadow, The Pipes Are Calling: Our Jaunts Through Ireland, and The Luck of the Irish: Our Life in County Clare (“Biography.” Niall Williams).
Williams’s independent works of fiction include Four Letters Of Love (1997), As It Is In Heaven (1999), The Way You Look Tonight (2000), The Fall of Light (2001), Only Say the Word (2005), The Unrequited (2006), Boy in the World (2007), Boy and Man (2008), John (2008), History of the Rain (2015), This Is Happiness (2019), The Unrequited (2021), and Time of the Child (2024). History of the Rain was “long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2015, and has since been translated into several languages, including Russian” (“Biography”). This Is Happiness—a companion piece of Time of the Child—was nominated for the Irish Books Award and the Walter Scott Prize and was one of the Washington Post’s Books of the Year. Williams has also written for television and film and was involved in the screen adaptation of his novel Four Letters of Love.
All of Williams’s titles reflect his intimate knowledge of and personal history with Ireland. His works are in conversation with other Irish authors’ works, including Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island (2023), Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), and Paul Lynch’s Red Sky in Morning (2013).
Literary Context: This Is Happiness Companion Piece
Time of the Child is a companion novel to This Is Happiness (2019). This Is Happiness is written from Noel Crowe’s first-person point of view. Williams uses Noel’s vantage point to paint “a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland” (Graver, Elizabeth. “Once Upon a Time in Ireland.” The New York Times, 4 Dec. 2019). The novel details Noel’s experiences after he leaves Dublin to live with his grandparents Mossie and Aine Crowe in Faha. In the narrative present, Noel is 78 years old and reflecting on his past experiences. As Graver argues in her New York Times review of This Is Happiness, the novel’s “detours and backward glances” befit a novel “narrated by an old man” (“Once Upon a Time in Ireland”). As Noel reflects on his childhood in Faha after his mother’s death, Noel recalls his experiences falling in and out of love and waiting for his village to get electricity.
This Is Happiness introduces many of the secondary characters that appear in Time of the Child. In Time of the Child, Noel’s character appears in the margins of Jack Troy’s and Ronnie Troy’s storylines. Ronnie was friends with Noel when he was living in Faha with Mossie and Aine and connected with him over books. Jack tries to bring Noel back to Faha from the United States—convinced that he and Ronnie will rekindle their unrequited romance and start a family together with Noelle. Mossie’s and Aine’s characters—key figures in This Is Happiness—also resurface in Time of the Child. After several strokes, Aine is dying. Jack frequently visits her and Mossie, both hoping to support his friends and anxiously awaiting her funeral—an event that he hopes will bring Noel home. In these ways, Time of the Child immerses the reader in the same fictional world as This Is Happiness and develops narrative threads from the preceding novel.
