{"id":644600,"date":"2026-10-04T15:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T15:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/644600\/"},"modified":"2026-10-04T15:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T15:20:08","slug":"author-niall-williams-i-will-always-be-an-outsider-even-here-after-41-years-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/644600\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Niall Williams: \u2018I will always be an outsider, even here after 41 years\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The elegant first paragraph of Niall Williams<\/a>\u2019s latest book, O Now!, reminds me why my first child is called Isobel, named (with a vowel shift) after a character in his tender debut novel, Four Letters of Love, from 1997, which he adapted for the 2024 film starring Pierce Brosnan<\/a>, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne<\/a>.<\/p>\n

O Now! begins with elderly neighbours Bat and Ganga, sitting in companionable silence in the latter\u2019s thatched cottage, which \u201chad not taken the electricity when it was passing\u201d, waiting to see who will die first, \u201cthe ashes of evening fallen through the grate\u201d. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s the end of October, \u201ca month so needled with rain it seemed the heavens wanted to stitch themselves onto the earth and make life and afterlife all the one\u201d.<\/p>\n

Originally commissioned for BBC<\/a> Radio, it is a warm, wise and witty short story, set in Faha, the imaginary west Co Clare<\/a> village that has inspired his writing since the 2014 Booker Prize<\/a>-longlisted History of the Rain, followed by This Is Happiness, from 2019, shortlisted for An Post Novel of the Year, and Time of the Child, from 2024, winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an enlightening afterword, the author explains how Faha was invented on Easter Sunday in 2011 after dinner with his old friend and neighbour Martin Keane, to whom the book is dedicated, when a large Ordnance Survey map of southwest Clare and the Shannon Estuary was produced. <\/p>\n

His previous book, John, about the Evangelist\u2019s resurrection of the fading story of Christ, had spiritually exhausted him. He withdrew from writing into reading. <\/p>\n

Then his father died. In his handwritten will, his father had written: \u201cTo Niall, my books.\u201d \u201cIt remains one of the most moving sentences I have ever read,\u201d Williams writes \u2013 four words of love, to play on the title of his debut novel. <\/p>\n

Connecting with his late father through his books, \u201cthe idea of books as reliquaries of spirit, not just of those of their writers but those of their readers too, I began to imagine a girl whose father had died and left her his books\u201d. This would become History of the Rain, whose protagonist, Ruth, is confined by illness to bed so learns of Faha through stories. She is entranced, as is her creator. <\/p>\n

Williams had moved to west Clare in 1985; it and its people had got under his skin and filled his imagination. He wanted to celebrate their generosity, largeness of spirit, community, endurance, dignity and humour. To write, in short, out of love and about love. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0A Bigger Life by Louise O\u2019Neill: A willingness and openness to surprise at its bestOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew the risks of this, the pitfalls of sentimentality, nostalgia and all the rest, as well as the courage that would be needed during these fraught times to write this way.\u201d <\/p>\n

As a method, he had two examples to follow, the winding local roads that followed the contours of the land and traditional Irish music with its sinuous digressions and ornamentations. <\/p>\n

\u201cMusic has been really important to me, when I was younger especially, in feeling less alone in the world and less peculiar. Writing the Faha novels, I listen to the music of Martin Hayes and The Gloaming. I feel fortunate to be living in a time when Martin Hayes exists.\u201d <\/p>\n

And he had the wisdom of an early inspiration to follow. \u201cIt is a great blessing,\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor wrote, \u201cperhaps the greatest a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking.\u201d <\/p>\n

When I am planning my trip to visit him, Williams recommends a slight detour along the broad, majestic Shannon Estuary to Labasheeda, which means Bed of Silk in Irish, before turning inland to Kilmihil, the nearest village to the home in Kiltumper that he has shared with his wife, Chris Breen, since they moved from New York, in 1985.<\/p>\n

Theirs is a beautiful home, the original four-roomed cottage that once belonged to Breen\u2019s grandfather tastefully extended and modernised but with a reverence for tradition. There is the conservatory where Williams writes for a couple of hours each morning, and the old sittingroom with its huge hearth and wood-burning stove, where he used to run his creative-writing workshops. They are now held in the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, with alumni such as author Helen Cullen.<\/p>\n

\"NiallNiall Williams and his wife, the artist Christine Breen, in their garden at Kiltumper, Kilmihil, Co Clare. Photograph: John Kelly <\/p>\n

By the stairs is a framed poster of his play The Murphy Initiative, from 1991, a comedy about Americans looking up their roots. Talent-spotted by Garry Hynes, he was the first Irish playwright since O\u2019Casey whose debut premiered on the Abbey\u2019s main stage. <\/p>\n

It was a calamitous production, however, the details of which must remain off the record, he says, but I am left cringing with second-hand embarrassment. The Irish Times review was headlined<\/a>: \u201cTotal waste of a bad idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI now look on it as thank God, because otherwise I\u2019d still be trying to make it as a playwright, and I know how hard it is. It\u2019s a miracle if you see a good play. Everything has to align.\u201d <\/p>\n

More happily, the downstairs bathroom is decorated with two framed short stories from The Irish Press: Apples in October, by Williams, and Queens\u2019 Irish, by Breen. He was 19 or 20 when his first story, Love, was published by David Marcus in The Irish Press, resulting in a cheque for \u00a325 before he had a bank account but, more importantly, gifting him self-belief. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou saw your name in the paper. It almost didn\u2019t seem like it was you, but you recognised something of your spirit had gotten outside you and is there.\u201d <\/p>\n

His style was not yet formed, but he identifies his preoccupations, \u201colder people, and ruralness or nature, and somehow not of the place and time that I was living in\u201d.<\/p>\n

Breen shows me a framed news story from the National Enquirer, headlined \u201cCouple Give up $70,000 a Year to Become Dirt-Poor Farmers\u201d, with a photograph of their younger selves walking the land in their wellies as a cow looks on sceptically.<\/p>\n

\"HowHow the National Enquirer reported on Niall Williams’s move from New York to west Clare with his wife Chris Breen <\/p>\n

Over a lunch of butternut squash Thai curry, followed by home-made wheaten bread and blue cheese, it becomes clear that Williams and Breen are not just husband and wife but a close creative partnership. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe ideas that we both had from the start is that we are creating a life, and that that is a joint creation, which includes everything from the garden to the family, the books, Chris\u2019s paintings.\u201d <\/p>\n

The flowers on the table are from the beautiful garden that wraps around their home. He points out Breen\u2019s drawings on the wall behind me, which illustrated In Kiltumper, from 2021, their book marking a fifth decade in this place.<\/p>\n

The couple met in the cafeteria in University College Dublin, where Williams was writing a master\u2019s on William Faulkner and Breen, a New Yorker of Irish heritage, was doing one on John Banville. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Mary and Padraic Colum – Lives and the Dream: Bringing a singular literary duo back to lifeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThose were our chat-up lines, basically,\u201d Williams says. \u201cI had never heard of John Banville,\u201d he adds. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s my headline,\u201d I joke, but of course he was 21, and Breen says that Declan Kiberd, her mentor, hadn\u2019t heard of Banville then either.<\/p>\n

University meant the luxury of four years\u2019 reading. He went to very few lectures. He loved Faulkner\u2019s passionate intensity, his raw emotional power married to extraordinarily powerful, at times biblical language.<\/p>\n

Williams found UCD ugly where he wanted beauty, and wished he had gone to Trinity College Dublin, but he recalls the fierce intelligence of his lecturer Denis Donoghue and the brilliance of Frank McGuinness acting in Richard II. <\/p>\n

He felt he was \u201ca person of no parish, just a floating intelligence and sensitivity\u201d, not just because he was from suburban Kilmacud rather than idyllic Kiltumper, but also because of \u201cmy sensibility, shy, socially awkward and a bit removed\u201d. <\/p>\n

He had found a home in literature but was looking for the source. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo here\u2019s the thing. This will sound grandiose, but when I\u2019m in college and I\u2019m reading Yeats, I\u2019m getting an imagined idea of the west of Ireland, with no lived experience whatsoever. And as I read more, I eventually came to think about Synge as a model.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Joyce said the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead. Williams and his future wife spent five years commuting to Manhattan from upstate New York before they resigned from the rat race to try out the good life in her grandfather\u2019s old cottage in Clare. <\/p>\n

The early years were a struggle, but they wrote a successful series of nonfiction books \u2013 sample title O Come Ye Back to Ireland, which appeared in 1987 \u2013 about their new life, which sold well in the US. \u201cI view them now as a kind of apprenticeship,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

It would take almost 30 years for Williams to know the place well enough to fictionalise it. A stellar review in The New York Times led to a 20-minute segment on Good Morning America and St Patrick\u2019s Day appearances alongside Pierce Brosnan and The Chieftains. Then readers started tracking them down. They stopped taking names after the 300th visitor. <\/p>\n

\"HelenaHelena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne in Four Letters of Love <\/p>\n

Fiction was always the goal. Unlike his debut play, his debut novel was a triumph. To what extent was Four Letters of Love his own love story? <\/p>\n

\u201cNothing in my fiction is autobiographical, in the sense of taking incidents from my life, returning them into fiction. It\u2019s against the idea that fiction is the art of other people. However, obviously all of it comes through you. Looking back at it all these years later, I can say, okay, William\u2019s [note the name] decision to quit the Civil Service and follow a vocation which may not be real to become an artist is certainly our decision to leave paid jobs in New York, move to the west of Ireland, in the hope that you have some talent.\u201d <\/p>\n

His father had risen to be head of the ESB but was from a modest background in Ringsend, Dublin. Class, though, is not a preoccupation of the writer. Or any agenda. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I\u2019m writing fiction, he says, \u201cI\u2019m trying to be inside the person, and inside the other person, and inside the place. I\u2019m not writing from the point of view of an idea or ideology. I have no plot. I\u2019m making it up, one sentence at a time, each time trying to be the person. Iris Murdoch said fiction is the art of other persons, and I believe that to be true. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, all writing begins in reading. The reason I became a writer was that I wanted to repeat the intensity of the pleasure of my experiences as a reader. Living in another world. When Mr Mason, our English teacher in Oakland CBS, read Great Expectations aloud, and Pip fell in love with Estella, I fell in love with Estella. I try to achieve that closeness in my writing. And for the reader to feel it, you have to feel it first.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Exposed \u2013 The Scandals that Shook the Irish State: Drawing a line from the past to today\u2019s hot issuesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

This also informs Williams\u2019s teaching. \u201cI read fiction, largely, to meet people. The goal of fiction writers is to put a person on the page, to do the highest possible justice to a human being in all their complexity and richness. <\/p>\n

\u201cI get students to notice where a physical detail becomes dynamic and takes you below the surface of a person and suggests a depth. Like when Pip sees Mr Jaggers with the black dots where his beard keeps trying to come through.\u201d <\/p>\n

The goal is also to find one\u2019s own voice. Just as Williams learned to speak by imitating his mother, he learned to write by imitating Faulkner until he developed his own voice.<\/p>\n

Ann Patchett, a famous fan of Williams, interviewed him and Breen<\/a> for her bookstore\u2019s podcast. He recounted how Chris, his first reader, read the first draft of Time of the Child before pronouncing it \u201cpure Niall Williams\u201d. He responded: \u201cYou mean, Niall Williams with all his redundancies, excesses and sentimentality?\u201d <\/p>\n

It is part of Breen\u2019s job as editor to prune. But he now recognises that her verdict is his mission. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is actually \u2018Kilroy was here\u2019, to be true to yourself, your own signature. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhere I go \u2018wrong\u2019 is where I fall in love too much with the same rhythm. And that\u2019s where Chris has a really clear eye and a great ear. She\u2019s always right.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0AK Blakemore: \u2018The best historical fiction is comfortable living with the sheer weirdness of the past\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

I ask Breen to define the essence of Williams. <\/p>\n

\u201cBesides the relationships, which are so important, this compassion, empathy that he has for all sorts of people. His humour, and his language. Sometimes I say cut that back a little bit, change the pace here. Sometimes when I read it I\u2019m just amazed how great the sentences are, so lyrical, beautiful,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe people think it\u2019s too\u202fpurply or flourishing. I don\u2019t. I think Niall has a kind of direct line from\u202fIrish writers starting even before Oscar Wilde, like Jonathan Swift. I love that he wants to stay now in this little village of Faha. I can\u2019t wait to see what\u2019s next.\u201d<\/p>\n

History of the Rain, although set in Faha, takes place in the attic room of the Williams home, transported to somewhere like Labasheeda on the Shannon Estuary, and close to the present day. <\/p>\n

\u201cI felt something released in me writing it,\u201d the author says. \u201cBy the time I finished it, I thought, do I dare walk out into Faha itself?\u201d<\/p>\n

And so This Is Happiness, set in 1958 as electricity comes to Faha, begins with a stranger, Christy [again, note the name], walking into town. \u201cIn the writing of it, something happened to me that had never happened before, and that is that I didn\u2019t want to finish it. I really loved being there. The 40 years that I\u2019ve spent living in west Clare was coming through. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy main experience of living here is of people\u2019s goodness. People are extraordinarily decent. If I broke down anywhere in the parish, I would be certain that people would help me. People have been helpful to us when Chris had cancer, when we were adopting our children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI fell in love with the characters, their world, and before finishing it I realised that I would not again leave that parish, that I was home. I was fictionally home. For better or for worse, fearing how it might be received in Ireland, you\u2019re thinking nostalgia and sentimentality and you\u2019re aware of all of that. But yet this is what I have to offer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams quotes the Latin construction \u201cnon solum sed etiam\u201d \u2013 not only but also. \u201cThat\u2019s my experience of life: there\u2019s this, but there\u2019s also that.\u201d His gift is to focus on the good stuff. \u201cThe force of darkness is understood to be there, but I write with a sense of \u2018despite\u2019 \u2013 despite all the terrible things, there yet endures goodness.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has spoken of feeling bereft as a lover of language after the Catholic Church replaced Latin with the vernacular, a translation devoid of exaltation. It makes me think of the heightened language of his fiction as a kind of Latin, a transcendent tongue for talking of things spiritual and metaphysical. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s centrally important to me, absolutely,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

Time of the Child takes place in 1962, a Christmas story where the local doctor and his daughter Ronnie take in an abandoned baby. The author and his wife have two adopted children, Deirdre and Joseph. One works in fashion in New York, the other for a homeless charity in Dublin. \u201cThe adoption in Time of the Child is definitely inspired by that.\u201d <\/p>\n

And the relationship between Ronnie and the baby is inspired by Williams first holding his grandchild in his arms and feeling his heart expand. \u201cIt is also one of the planks of Christianity to love a stranger.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to do justice to these people,\u201d Williams says. \u201cWe know people like Ganga and Bat and how they are. You\u2019re trying to make it as physical as possible, the body, the smoke and the fire. At the same time you\u2019re trying to reach for something spiritual out of that physical groundedness.\u201d<\/p>\n

He plans to stay in Faha, moving forward four or five years with each novel, for as long as he is able. He turns 70 in 2028, and his next novel is set in 1968. It follows Jude, who finds the baby in Time of the Child and is now 18.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not trying to write realistic fiction about what it\u2019s like to live in west Clare<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Niall Williams<\/p>\n

Williams agrees that he has a mythic imagination, like his heroes Faulkner, Melville and M\u00e1rquez, focusing on a place and connecting it to something universal and timeless, the larger picture, as in Patrick Kavanagh\u2019s poem Epic: \u201cI made the Iliad from such \/ A local row.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also has a strong affinity to Synge. \u201cThe people that he writes are imagined, a marriage between the imagined and the actuality of being with the people. And I feel the same thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not trying to do exact verisimilitude; that\u2019s not at all interesting to me. In the same way nobody ever spoke like Synge\u2019s characters spoke. It\u2019s imagined, poeticised. I\u2019m not trying to write realistic fiction about what it\u2019s like to live in west Clare.\u201d <\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s novels began with a strong shade of magic realism that over time has become a granular realism. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first started writing fiction,\u201d he says, \u201cliterature was my biggest experience, so I was writing fiction that\u2019s born of fiction. The influence of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Faulkner, all the South and Latin American writers was more important to me than where I was. <\/p>\n

\u201cI will always be an outsider no matter where I am, even here after 41 years, And that\u2019s okay. I understand that is my nature and my role and who I am. I feel a novelist should be on the margins and not in the centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I\u2019ve lived longer, and put more roots into a place, met more people, become a little less shy, experienced more humanity, I\u2019m therefore writing from a different place. I\u2019ve lived here a long time, and I\u2019ve had the courage to try to do justice to the rich, extraordinary time we\u2019ve had living here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day we meet is the anniversary of 9\/11, and the back roads of Clare are unusually busy with garda\u00ed providing security for Donald Trump\u2019s imminent visit to Doonbeg. How does he keep the outside world at bay? These things too shall pass, he says. <\/p>\n

Earlier he had quoted Wendell Berry: \u201cA person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.\u201d\u202fHe aligns that with his friend Martin Keane, who talked about inhabiting the place you live in. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe realised that we couldn\u2019t fix the world but we could improve this space here. We\u2019ve been trying to do that for 40 years, combining to make it beautiful but also more productive.\u201d<\/p>\n

O Now! is published by Bloomsbury on Thursday, October 8th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The elegant first paragraph of Niall Williams\u2019s latest book, O Now!, reminds me why my first child is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1578,15469,93,80097,61,60,27195,6229,6107,273671,26628,15342,5762,102923],"class_list":["post-644600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-bbc","tag-clare","tag-entertainment","tag-gabriel-byrne","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-james-joyce","tag-john-banville","tag-new-york-city","tag-niall-williams","tag-pierce-brosnan","tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd","tag-ucd","tag-wb-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}