Story flows with the power of a river in flood
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| History of the Rain by Niall Williams Bloomsbury, €17.90 [Imagine may be subject to copyright] |
There are many constants in this Man Booker-listed novel - among them water, grief, books and humour. But at its heart this is a story of love and loss for one family in the small, fondly described community they inhabit on an edge of a world that is Ireland, and maybe hope.
Ruth Swain passes her days in an attic bedroom of her Faha home in County Clare.
Across the road from her home, the River Shannon wades inexorably towards the ocean, itself a presence, by turn inspirational and ominous. Within this narrow hinterland, cut off by river and rain, is a universe of books, enumerated librarian fashion by Ruth, and characters that any storyteller would be proud to chronicle.
There's Nan, who stockpiles Clare Champion newspapers. With the arrival of each new weekly edition to her collection, she likes to go "straight to Deaths and Planning, which is basically a super condensed version of life's plot, 'Johnny Flanagan's building' and 'Johnny Flanagan's dead' only breaths apart".
And there is, of course, Virgil Swain, Ruth's father, himself one of a longish line of Swain men - from Wiltshire in England to the west coast of Clare.
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| Niall Williams [image may be subject to copyright] |
These Swain men have all inherited the Impossible Standard, which not surprisingly none manages to meet.
Virgil is a poet who, through a series of fortuitous or unfortunate events, washes up in the life of local Faha girl Mary MacCarroll.
And his poetry slowly and quietly makes its way into the blood stream of his family and his daughter.
The poetic also infiltrates the language and expression in this novel, which borrows its title from a collection of unpublished Virgil Swain poems.
Ruth is writing about her father and hoping, in this rendition of his life, to bring him to the public his poetry failed to reach.
Though the nature of her illness is not entirely clear, Ruth is very unwell.
More wisecracking than sage, she is also grieving, and we discover grief, too, is multi-layered and generational.
The sheer fondness of Ruth for her father, in particular, lends itself to some beautiful, and wry, observations, including one of herself as a baby, afraid to sleep, lying in her father's lap while he sat at his desk and wrote poetry; she "small as a sonnet, and just as difficult", and later awaking back in her cot and feeling "well, composed".The poetic also infiltrates the language and expression in this novel, which borrows its title from a collection of unpublished Virgil Swain poems.
Ruth is writing about her father and hoping, in this rendition of his life, to bring him to the public his poetry failed to reach.
Though the nature of her illness is not entirely clear, Ruth is very unwell.
More wisecracking than sage, she is also grieving, and we discover grief, too, is multi-layered and generational.
Williams' capacity to give life to what is between the pages of the thousands of books in Ruth's room, and to interweave the pronouncements of many great writers with the every day of west Clare is part of what makes this novel so enjoyable.
Sure, there are moments of sentimentality but these fail to staunch the great current on which History of the Rain carries the reader to the conclusion that finally, and only possibly, the incessant rainfall and all that came with it, might stop.
First published in the Sunday Independent on October 6, 2014 (www.independent.ie)
Barbara Clinton 2014
