In the tiny town of Faha, immense change is coming. The rain that has fallen on the town for years has stopped, electricity is entering the buildings, and 17-year-old Noe finds himself sharing a bedroom with a charismatic newcomer named Christy. Niall Williams’s beautiful Irish novel captures the uniqueness of rural living, the enduring power of storytelling, and the pain of reuniting with a long-lost love.
Life Lived Backwards
The narrator of the novel, Noe, recounts the pivotal events that took place in Faha as his much older self. He is extraordinarily self reflective, always aware of the gaps between what his younger self believed about the world and what he now knows about the world in his old age. In describing the social dynamics of the town, the narrator thinks to himself:
“It is not my intention to paint the parish in an overly rosy light. It had its full share of villains…cruelty, meanness and ignorance all had a place then, but as I’ve grown older the instances and stories of them seem less compelling, as if God has inbuilt in me a spirit of clemency I wasn’t aware of when younger. It may be, of course, that I’m just grateful to be above ground and what seems more significant to note is human goodness. I’m at an age now when in the early mornings I’m often revisited by my own mistakes, stupidities and unintended cruelties. They sit around the edge of the bed and look at me and say nothing. But I see them well enough.”
pp. 45-46
I was quite taken by the passage above, and many others, in which Noe comments upon the changes that have taken place in his perspective over time. He is gentle with his 17-year-old self, who harbored unreasonable expectations about love and struggled to comprehend the realities of losing someone you care about. Of his infatuation with the beautiful Sophie Troy, Noe writes,
“I am aware it may seem far-fetched that any emotion, never mind love, could be built on so slight an acquaintance…but I am trying to be true to who I was an what I felt, to see that grave and angular youth who had some from the seminary with no map for living, allow him his own blunders, and forgive him for them, which may be the point of old age.”
p. 247
With the temporal gap between his teenage and older self so prominent throughout the novel, the character of Noe becomes vivid and multidimensional.
Faha in Stories
Another unique characteristic of this novel is that it is not told in a linear narrative. It moves back and forth between the events of 1958 and the many stories that form the basis of the town’s robust oral tradition. As they progress through the novel, readers hear local legends such as the Irishman who negotiated for low-price electricity poles in Finland, the rise of Ireland’s most famous musicians, and the history of the ramshackle hotel that has since been converted to the town doctor’s home.
I loved the concept of a Faha-based story having its own “legs,” picking up new details as it jumps from person to person. This type of “living story” emerges after the heartsick Christy attempts to reconnect with his former love, Annie Mooney, by singing outside her window. Noe’s grandmother, known as “Doady,” comes home with a slightly exaggerated version of what happened.
“Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants. So the details that Doady came home with, Christy’s calling out Annie’s name, his beating the chemist’s door with his fist and crying against the glass, like a child with a runny nose it may have picked up anywhere.”
p. 163
The detailed stories woven into the town’s fabric show that residents of Faha prize the past over the future, tradition over modernity. This is what makes the arrival of electricity so “anti-climactic” in many ways; the residents of a town unchanged for centuries see this technological advancement as equal parts opportunity and threat.
I must also note that the novel’s focus on storytelling means that many paragraphs are written in a stream-of-consciousness format, in the same way a story would be told by a nostalgic person. These paragraphs may be difficult to digest at times and require the reader to read them twice to process them fully.
An Unexpected Brotherhood
There were many things I loved about This Is Happiness, but what spoke to me most was the close friendship that developed between Noe and Christy over the course of the novel. Both of them are outsiders — Christy returning after many years abroad to reunite with his long-lost love, Noe settling there after leaving the seminary where he was studying to become a priest — and both of them experience the hope, pain and disappointment that comes with being deeply in love with an unattainable person. The scenes in which they ride their bikes drunkenly among the rolling hills of rural Ireland, seeking authentic music and relishing each other’s companionship, are highly memorable. Both Christy and Noe are doomed to fade from the memory of the town, but I finished the novel with the sense that the memories of them will endure forever.
Final Thoughts
This Is Happiness includes everything I look for in a historical fiction novel: complex characters, rich stories, a close-knit community, and a clash between tradition and modernity. Reading this novel is certainly a commitment, but it’s important to pick your way carefully through each line and legend. You will find yourself immersed in the story of Noe, the story of Christy and the story of Faha, just as I did.
