Kissing the Blarney Stone

When I read a novel—and I’ve read a lot— I find myself looking for three things:

1)   An engaging, page-turner plot that makes me look forward to the next chapter. 

2)   Memorable characters who are intriguing, inspiring and generally fun and interesting to hang out with.

3)   Eloquent writing that uplifts with its poetic expression.

4)   Insight into the human condition and affirmation of our higher natures.

 

Sometimes just one of the above is enough to keep my attention. Like the Dan Brown/ John Grisham plots. Two is even better, as authors like Wilkie Collins and Tana French combine plot with remarkable characters. Three is what I’m experiencing now in the book This Is Happiness by Niall Williams. Good characters, good commentary on people and culture and absolutely exquisite prose (as shown below), but not much happening in the plot. More like a portrait than a film.  Four is a grand slam and rare and what I’ve found in authors like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Barbara Kingsolver. 

 

This writing by Niall Williams takes my breath away sometimes as he cobbles words together like an inspired stonemason making combinations that no one has ever quite put together in that way. I’m listening to it on Audible, but some sentences are so dazzling, I brought the print book to savor them more slowly.

I’m only six chapters in but am already marking some of the high points. 

 

Take these descriptions of rain and note the use of alliteration, rhyme and rhythm:

 

•It came as drizzle, as mizzile, as mist…as a damp day, a drop, a dreeping and an out-and-out downpour.

 

•…the smell of rain, of recent rain, of long-ago rain, the insipid smell of drizzle, the sweet one of downpour, the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of matter and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.

 

• Your clothes were rain, your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. 

 

Such sensual writing, aware of the nuances of taste and touch and smell and sight and making leaping associations that surprise—Jesus and mackeral, a house as “rain with a fireplace.”

 

Then such humor in describing human relations, again always coming from a surprising angle so much more interesting than “Kathleen and Tom, Maureen and Mick, didn’t get along well.”

 

• Kathleen Connor would not depart for Heaven until she knew her husband Tom was in the other place. 

 

• Mick Boylan suffered from an incurable affliction called Maureen.

 

• Then there were the Murrihys, who all took the road to ruin and made few stops along the way. 

 

•Doady and Ganga lived by dispute, and as there were often several running concurrently you had to be alert to keep up…This was the theatre of their marriage, which in their village of Faha was also a spectator sport and many evenings Bat or Martin or Jimmy might lift the latch and come calling, sitting hunkered over impenetrably strong mugs of tea to watch it play, flicking their ash in the general direction of the fire when the intermission was called. 

 

 Marriage quarrels as a spectator sport. Brilliant!

 

As for the human condition, how many of us can relate to this state of being so marvelously expressed:

 

•  I was seventeen and had come down from Dublin on the train, not exactly in disgrace, but certainly distant from grace, if grace was the condition of living your time at ease on the earth. …I lived in a profound loneliness at the time. I am not sure why or how it happens that person finds themselves on the margins of life, but there I was. I was the opposite of sure-footed. I couldn’t get any purchase on the ground and was unable to see how to belong anywhere.

 

How can someone write like this? Well, it helps if you're Irish. And I suspect he kissed the Blarney Stone. As did I. To a much lesser effect!