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.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
The novel opens in the fictional town of Faha, Ireland. Located on the coast, Faha is a rural village with a few local businesses. The villagers are used to nothing of consequence happening there. On the first day of Advent in 1962, the Faha doctor, Jack Troy, attends Mass with his local congregation. The village outside is empty and quiet, as it often is. Jack sits in his pew with his eldest daughter, Ronnie Troy. Since Jack’s wife, Regina, died from cancer, he hasn’t been invested in his faith. However, he continues to attend church. The rest of the week, he tends to his patients. Nearly 60 years old, Jack feels tired from his work at Avalon House, where he sometimes conducts visits with his patients. He attended the Royal College but learned much of his trade from his father, who was also a doctor.
As the Mass starts, Jack thinks about Annie Mooney, an amateur chemist he fell in love with before her death four years prior. He still isn’t sure what Annie felt for him but has lingering feelings for her. Since her death, he has “lost his love of the world” (7). Sitting by Ronnie, he wonders how his lovesickness has affected her. Ronnie’s sisters, Sophie and Charlotte Troy, moved away from Faha, leaving Ronnie alone with Jack. He sometimes worries that she’s lonely since she spends all her time helping him at Avalon House or writing in her notebook.
Father Tom leads the Mass but falters amid his address. The congregation looks around at each other, worried that something is wrong. Ronnie looks to Jack, suggesting that he do something for the priest. Jack wonders if Tom is having a stroke but makes no move to go to him despite Ronnie’s suggestion to help. He puts his hand on the pew and waits for Tom to recover himself. Twelve-year-old Jude Quinlan sits nearby with a worried expression, too. Like Jack, Jude has no idea how their lives will change in a few nights when he attends the Christmas Fair and finds an abandoned child.
The congregation studies Father Tom in anticipation. They all wait for Jack to do something. Finally, Tom breaks his silence. Just as Jack stands to help him, Tom announces that they’re celebrating Jack’s birth but quickly corrects himself, and the Mass finishes without issue.
Jack and Ronnie hurry out of church. However, the congregants stop Jack, asking about their various ailments. Then, Ronnie sits in the car while Jack visits the Prendergasts to collect his paper. They hold an after-Mass summit that Jack no longer participates in. However, while grabbing his paper, he observes Father Tom chatting with the other members. Sheila Prendergast’s television plays over the conversation, inciting new topics of discussion.
Jack returns to the car. He and Ronnie drive in silence through the gray, quiet countryside. Finally, Jack announces that he has to stop and see the Crowes. Aine Crowe has had several strokes and is dying. Jack feels bad about making Ronnie wait again, but she insists that she doesn’t mind. He often worries about connecting with his daughter since he never knows what to say. He silently compares her life to her sisters’ lives, remembering the time the local solicitor, O’Sullivan, showed an interest in her and tried hiring her as his secretary. Jack worried that he’d lose Ronnie at home and at Avalon House, but she refused O’Sullivan.
At the Crowes’ house, Jack greets Aine’s husband, Mossie, before sitting by Aine’s bedside. Her condition is unchanged. He holds her hand and reflects on the intricacy of the human hand. Downstairs afterward, he finds Ronnie sitting at the table with Mossie. He notices that she’s written the Crowes’ grandson Noel Crowe’s name on Mossie’s blackboard. Noel moved to America some years before. Jack remembers Ronnie and Noel spending time together. He didn’t like Noel and sent him away when he brought a book over for Ronnie one day. He now wonders if he ruined Ronnie’s one chance at true love.
Jack and Ronnie say goodbye and return to the car. At the last minute, Jack remembers his feelings for Annie and turns back to retrieve Noel’s address from Mossie. He hides the slip of paper in his pocket.
Jack and Ronnie have dinner at the Old Ground Hotel. They remark on the Christmas decorations, reminding Jack that he wants to build “a fence around [their] holly this year” (43). Back at home afterward, Jack rests while Ronnie plays the piano. Afterward, Jack makes some house calls. His visit with Nora Haugh uplifts his spirit. However, Jack becomes worried when he drives past the river and sees Father Tom wandering through the dark rain alone. He ushers Tom into the car and drives him home, realizing that he’s disoriented. At the rectory, Jack runs into Tom’s curate, Father Coffey, who’s been out searching for Tom. Back at home, Jack makes calls to call off the remaining search party for Tom.
Alone in his office, Jack writes a letter to Noel, telling him to come home because Aine is sick. He adds that Ronnie has been asking about him. As he writes, he thinks about his relationship with Annie. He doesn’t know if Noel and Ronnie were actually in love but is worried that no one has loved Ronnie. He seals the envelope and says a prayer before bed.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 introduces the narrative world and its primary characters, conflicts, stakes, formal techniques, and themes. Written from the third-person point of view, the narration is primarily limited to the primary character Jack Troy’s perspective. The majority of Chapter 1 takes place within the confines of the Faha church, where the village residents are celebrating the first Sunday of Advent. This physical and temporal setting offers an organic gateway into both Jack’s internal world and the larger Faha community, as most of the townspeople are gathered in the church. As Jack sits through the formally protracted Mass, Jack’s mind wanders. The church service is a narrative device used to set the narrative stage, describe who Jack is in the Faha community, and introduce his central emotional conflicts. His private musings in turn launch the novel’s thematic explorations.
Jack’s emotional meditations during church provide insight into his relationship with his daughter Ronnie and introduce The Redemptive Power of Love. Ever since Jack’s wife, Regina, died from cancer, he has attempted to “retain a semblance of order” to “meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day” (3). Furthermore, Jack’s unrequited love for the late Annie Mooney has submerged him in “the macabre virus of being lovesick” (7). These facets of Jack’s emotional past influence how he relates to Ronnie. Because Ronnie lives at home with him, Jack’s melancholic tendencies dictate the Troys’s home atmosphere. Jack leads a purposeful life as a doctor, but his familial relationships are strained because of his unresolved grief. The way he thinks about Ronnie during Mass illustrates his simultaneous loneliness, self-awareness, and immobilization. Jack is indeed capable of love, but he struggles to engage with his life and his daughter because of his heartbreak and loss. These facets of Jack’s storyline foreshadow emotional conflict in Ronnie’s life in the subsequent chapters.
Jack’s experience with The Interplay Between Statis and Change also emerges here. Much of his immobilization is inspired by his surroundings in Faha. At the start of the chapter, the narrator’s descriptions of Faha establish the village as a place where nothing happens. The predictable village life in turn impacts how its inhabitants interact with each other and understand themselves:
To those who lived there, Faha was perhaps the last place on earth to expect a miracle. It had neither the history nor the geography for it. The history was remarkable for the one fact upon which all commentators agreed: nothing happened here. The geography was without notable feature but for being on the furthermost edge of a fabled country, where Faha had not so much sprung up as seeped out when the ice retreated, and the Atlantic met the western coast of an island with a native weakness for the heroic (1).
In this passage, the narrator depicts Faha from an omniscient, impartial vantage point. The narrator is not yet situated in Jack’s consciousness and is thus rendering the narrative world in broader strokes. The way the narrator describes the unremarkable landscape and predictability of Faha life conveys how this geographical setting impacts the primary characters’ outlooks. Indeed, when the narrator inhabits Jack’s consciousness on his drive through town after church, his surroundings are listed in a deadpan tone. Jack is driving “with the same imperturbable quiet and compose the world employs when it pretends its plot is not turning” (25). Therefore, because Jack lives in Faha—a place where nothing ever happens—he does not expect anything in his life to change. The novel thus shows how the place where one lives can dictate one’s outlook and quash one’s hopes of newness. However, the narrative allusions to the upcoming Christmas Fair and the night that Jude will find the baby outside the church foreshadow that unexpected events will occur, changing the primary characters’ outlooks.
Jack’s decision to write the letter to Noel Crowe conveys both the interplay of stasis and change and The Strength of Familial Bonds. Jack writes the letter because he’s worried that he has unconsciously ruined Ronnie’s chances for romance. Because the novel is set in 1962 in a rural Irish Catholic village, Jack’s perspective on Ronnie’s relationship status is borne of his cultural and temporal context. At the same time, Jack’s love for Ronnie inspires him to take action for the first time in years and pursue change despite his often-defeatist outlook on life and his constant submission to his town’s traditions. The painstaking mood and protracted presentation of the letter-writing scene depict Jack’s determination to change his usual behavior despite his discomfort:
By a learned blindness, suffering in another can be bone; in your daughter not, and his pen was back on the paper before he had put down the glass. He did not write I wronged you, nor I myself missed a last chance at love, nor If I stood in your way, I regret that now. He was not a schoolboy, he was not certain that Noel Crowe was his eldest daughter’s true love, but the exemplar of others who may have wished to come calling, against which he had been a bulwark, and the only one he had an address for (60).
This excerpted passage captures Jack’s internal distress as he tries to show his love for his daughter by righting his alleged mistakes. He is unaccustomed to taking action in this way, but because he feels disempowered by life in Faha, he wants to assert himself on Ronnie’s behalf. The contemplative and elliptical nature of the passage highlights Jack’s internal experience while writing and his commitment to facilitating his daughter’s happiness.
