Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and as always I'm back to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast. It's hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael Williams and features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. This episode features a live conversation between Michael and Irish writer Nile Williams, which was recorded back in March at the State Library
of Victoria. As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones.
So, Michael, on this week's episode of Read This, you're in conversation with yet another Irish author, Noah Williams, and looking back at the show's archive, I think it is fair to say that there is a very healthy representation of Irish writers in general. Would you agree?
Yes. Look, I don't want to say that it's because I have Irish an's history or anything, but at this point it does feel a little bit like Read This is the country's pre eminent podcast for Irish authors being interviewed. If you look at our archives, some of the great contemporary Irish writers are there. Kilan Hughes, Colintoy Bin, the
Two Pauls, Paul Maray and Paul Lynch, and Enright. I mean, it's pretty bonkers, and frankly, any dream list I have for future guests has another half dozen writers in the mix, Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Kevin, Barry Bliss. There is something to be said for the breadth and depth and general robustness of contemporary Irish literature. Part of it, I think, is smart government policies that support the arts well and
writers in particular. But also it's to do with the strength of the literary tradition that's well read and well understood. And I don't want to suggest these things are racially predetermined, but culturally there is something about the way the Irish tells stories, a joy and a sense of place and play, and a willingness to meander and digress. All of it comes together to make for wonderful literature, and Nile Williams is definitely part of that conversation.
So Nil has written more than twenty books at this point, both novels on his own and works of nonfiction with his wife, Christine Breen, but in this episode you are focusing on his latest book Time of the Child, tell Me a little Bit about It.
Yeah. Time of the Child is the latest in what is shaping up to be a series from Nile Williams. He was longlisted for the twenty fourteen Booker for his book History of the Rain, which was an account of a woman kind of lying in bed contemplating her life. But outside the windows of her room was the town of Faha, a fictional town that he had created that is in that book only sketchily drawn, but intriguingly so.
So perhaps it was unsurprising when his follow up book, This Is Happiness, put far half front and sent her. In that book he tells the story of the nineteen fifty eight introduction of electricity to the town, and the book attracted rapturous reviews. The word enchanting gets thrown around a lot. Upon finishing it, Niall Williams realized he wasn't done with the people of Faha, or maybe, to put it more accurately, they weren't done with him. And so
his latest book is another far hard book. It's called Time of the Child. It's said in the early sixties, and the focus has shifted to the town Doctor Jack Troy and his oldest daughter, Ronnie, and it follows what happens when an abandoned baby girl is brought into their home. It's really lovely.
Coming up in just a moment the imaginary village of Niall Williams.
Thank you now. I did apologize when we're doing the sound check because it feels somehow disrespectful that Melbourne, of all cities, couldn't turn on the rain for the poet laureate of rain. This man can write a description of rain that rivals no other. Is that your natural weather mode? Are you most comfortable writing above that?
Hello everybody. Chris and I have lived in County Claire for forty years. In that time, we've had to come to an accommodation with the rain, and because it rains a lot, I have to come to a place where I could see the rain not as the enemy, not
as something against me in some way. I finally came to grips with it when I wrote History of the Rain, where I began to understand the idea that the rain comes from the sky, goes into the river, which goes to the sea, which goes back into the sky, and that circular motion that happens that traffic of rain and transitoriness seemed to me to become sort of some kind
of metaphor for our own existence. And because that novel deals with Ruth Swain trying to find out where her dead father has gone, and so the rain became part of that circularity as she searched for him.
I'm very glad you brought up History of the Rain because it seems it's an appropriate book maybe for us to start out a conversation tonight. It's our first glimpse of Faha in your work. Even if it's through a window barely scene, it's out there. But it is also a book very much concerned with the business of books, and given the building way in at the moment. Yes, I wonder if you could expand on Ruth's quest to find her father through books.
Yes. So I never know where a book comes from until after I've written it. I have no plan. When I'm writing a book. I'm literally following one sentence and seeing what that sentence implies with the next sentence. It's only after I've written a book that I look back and see what was happening in my life at the time that I can trace back some things in my or our lives that have influenced the shaping and making
of the book. When I look back at history of the Reign, I remember that my father had died, and, as is the common way I think among Irish fathers and sons, if there was emotional material happening in your life, you didn't really speak to your father about it. So my father knew that I had written a novel called Four Letters of Love, so we definitely weren't going to
talk about that. And so when I wrote the novels, I would bring them and give them to my father and he'd say sign that to me, and I would sign it to him, and he would take it and put on the shelf. And that was throughout the course of his life. Each book would go on a shelf and we would never ever speak about it. But when my father died, he left a handwritten will, and in that will, the only mention that I get in that will is for nihle my books, just that, and it
was like a acknowledgment back to my life choice. And in turn, it was also an acknowledgment of the fact that my writing life began with my reading life, and that was that every two weeks my father brought us to the library, so he would come home from work and in the evening, and on Wednesday evenings the library stayed open until nine, and so by six thirty half past six, we would get in the car and drive
to Ballsbridge in Dublin to the Pembroke Library. And when he let you in the doors of that library at night, he went to his section and you could go anywhere and you didn't have to gather back again until half past eight and sign out your books with him, and he would just look at your books, and I'd carry out my stack of books, he'd carry out his, and that was it. And then two weeks later we'd be
back again in that situation. And it was my first experience of the idea that you can choose your own books, and what a freeing idea that was, because in school they said this is the textbook, everyone read this. But when you walt in the doors library, go anywhere and the books that you were picking become part of your own definition as to who you are. And for me, at age twelve, that was a sort of extraordinary free thing.
You could pick anything. So when he died and I drove to Dublin from County Claire, so across the country to the nursing home where he had died to collect his books, and I brought them home, something extraordinarly powerful happened to me, and that was the sense that even though these were not the books that I would have chosen myself, they were the books that my father had read.
So his hands had held them, his hands had turned the pages, his eyes had been on each page, and so in some way that became the life spring of the book that became History of the Reign. Where Root's father, the poet, has died, and he has route is ill and doesn't leave the house, and she is in the room in the attic where all her father's books have been left, and she begins to read those books to find her father Nile.
With that in mind, I can't let you rush past Pembroke Library. As a twelve year old, in the books that you were choosing, what was defining you in what did you read?
Almost nothing that was Irish based, because you were using books as a sort of doorway to the world, and you were very aware as a twelve year old that Ireland was a small place out on the edge of the Atlantic and that the rest of the world will where all the adventures took place, even in England. That so, there was no Irish reading at that time. It wasn't until I was maybe thirteen and fourteen fifteen started reading short Irish short story writers Frank O'Connor and Daniel Corkory
and people like that transformative moment for me. In the moment I think that is the book that made me want to be a writer was Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, which we had to read at age fourteen. Everyone in the country had to read it for your intersert exam, which is extraordinary to think of nowadays, having every fourteen year old in the country reading Great Expectations, not abridged
Great Explanations, to full Great Expectations. So the significant thing I've told you before was that mister Mason, our English teacher, he sat at the desk at the top and you opened Great Expectations, and the four long windows were steamed up with condensation, so you're inside a closed space, and
he would say your name. He'd call out a name and that person would begin reading on the page, and everybody else in the classroom thirty two boys had to pay really close attention to what line, what the person reading aloud was on, because at any moment, even halfway through a sentence, mister Mason could call out your name, and then you would have to carry on from exactly
where the person had stopped. And if you failed to carry on, you got to write out the page of Great Expectations that night, which seemed a lot of writing out. It was a better idea than giving lines, but it was intense. So as a result of that, we read Great Expectations attached by the Finger, and so I was inside the book through that finger portal and through what it so carefully. So when Pip fell in love with Estella,
I fell in love with Di Stella. When she rejected him, she rejected me, and so that was the reason that I entered. I entered the book first fully, I think, Dan.
It's a moment you give to know from memory, and this is happiness where he's trying to conjure up a havishm figure in his mind, and that connection with that novel is a really important one to him there and we'll come to it in a moment. But in Time of the Child, you have a character who is clearly doomed to be a writer. You make it clear that that's her fate and her future. Is that a curs through a blessing you're giving Ronnie in that book.
Well, for me, it's a blessing. I make most sense to the world by being a writer. I'm a better person when I'm writing. I understand the world better when I'm writing, and I can live better as a person writing. So I think for Ronnie in Time of the Child, it will be a kind of salvation as a writer. In writing, same as in reading, I think, is a way to conquer loneliness, and it's also that extraordinary thing.
I think James Wood, the critic, spoke about it in his book The Nearest Thing to Life, and he talks about this idea that when you're reading a novel, there's a kind of communion that happens. Your own loneliness is banished, and you move towards the other, the person that is inside the pages, and that in turn comes back to deepen your own humanity. It's kind of circular gift. It's given out and comes back to you through the experience of reading. So I think for Ronnie, especially as a
woman writer, in nineteen sixties Ireland. Difficult, difficult, difficult. That will be her salvation and how she comes to accept who she is and how she is.
That strength and that community given by the experience of rating, I think is a really important thing and evident in your work. But you know, as you say you have the line about Ronnie, that added to this reserve was not only the screened lives of all the women in the parish at the time, but the marginal nature of all writers, that idea that a writer is inevitably outside the community that they're writing about. Do you feel that.
I do, absolutely. I think probably I was a marginal person before I was a writer, but then found that that was a good place for a writer to be. So the writer should be in the margins and not in the center. And so I believe that profoundly that I'm trying to put another person on the page. It's not about me, it's other people, and other people are sort of endlessly fascinating because of this bizarre thing that
everybody thinks they're normal. And how bizarre that is when you think about it, that actually there's not two people on the planet who are the same, but each one thinks that they are normal, and that's just fantastic for a fiction writer, because people keep revealing their oddity and their quirks in which they think is this is a normal thing to do.
I think that's true in a sense, in an individual and human sense. It's also true of a place. You're right early in this is happiness. Farha was no more nor less than any other like place. If you could find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else. The country is filled with places of more blatant beauty. Good luck to them. Farha doesn't care. It has long since accepted the by dint of personality and geography, its destiny was to be a place passed over and gently wholly forgotten.
Tell me about that place called Farha out the window of Ruth Swain's house where she doesn't go so far.
How would be embarrassed that we're actually talking about it? And say, talk about somewhere else, and the more beautiful places. There are more noticable places, and you shouldn't if you're
stopping in fail you're asking the way somewhere else. Part of the attraction for me in the place, for how I think in the making of it was ordinariness, because the longer I've lived, the more I've come to appreciate the extraordinary thing about ordinariness, and the same thing that I just said about people feeling that they are normal
and they are actually quite extraordinary. So sometime during the writing of This Is Happiness, something happened to me that hadn't happened before when I was writing a novel, And that is maybe two thirds of the way through, I realized I didn't want the book to end, that I want to stay in this world and with these people, and I was actually had fallen in love. I'd fallen in love with Christy and Noel and those people and
the whole world of it. And I found that the more I wrote, more characters were appearing and that was an interesting character. And at this person pause a minute on the street, going here, and this is an interesting So I was becoming larger the more I was in it. And so before I finished This Is Happiness, I knew that I was going to write another fan novel. I wanted to stay there, and the hard thing would be that it wasn't going to be a first person novel.
I wanted to make each novel stand alone and not be not be a sequel as such, but still to create a series of novels that would be a continuum. And I think before even before I started Time of the Child, I realized that my aim would be to try to write a series of novels in the time between the coming of electricity and the coming of the Internet.
I'll plot the second half of the twentieth century in one community, and what happens to church and community, and what happens to people, families, and all the change that occurs as the television comes and so on and so forth, as things change in a community over that period of time.
When they were ten, Nihall and I discuss why a doctor makes sense for the main character of Time of the Child, and he also shares why there's only one reader of his work that really matters. We'll be right back. So now you've undertaken or you've been taken over by this project of her, there must have been a certain satisfaction in seeing the paths that you'd opened up to yourselves.
And in particular, I'm thinking about doctor Troy as the central character of Time of the Child, because, as you make very clear, a doctor and a place like Faha is privy to everything.
Yes, when I was writing this is Happiness for the doctor first appears, I didn't think he would be the next major character of Time of the Child. But I think there were a few things that informed that decision as to how they came about, again only in kindsight.
So first of all, there was an extraordinary moment, and this was a moment that we all lived through when COVID first began, And there came a moment when everybody was asked at a certain time to go outside and applaud healthcare workers bang pots and pans if you were in cities, and applaud them a specific moment in time,
like six o'clock, and everybody did it. And so that sense of what it was to be in healthcare and going out and dealing with ill people all the time made me think in my MicroC fictional world of the doctor in a village where every single person is his patient.
So I thought it was an extraordinary thing that first of all about doctors, and then this idea in a community where he knows all the secrets of everybody, the corporal secrets of everybody, and what would it be like if he had a secret he can't tell any of those people, and that has created that dynamic of that character.
One of the crucial things you reveal about him, though, is that he has been thwarted in He has lost, as he says it, the opportunity for love a second time in his life, and for the second far hard book in a row. You have a man who's in love with any Money.
Yes, we're all. We're all in love with any Mooney.
So I'm curious about this. Is any Mooney going to be the kind of stob that goes across decades in this town.
Yeah, maybe go back to us stelling graspectations. I don't know to any Mooney. Yes, is the Doctor was in love with any Mooney, but it was an undeclared love and just as he was about to declare it, we find out in this novel, was when Christian this his
happiness had arrived back who was her first love. So the thing about the doctor is, to start the novel his love didn't happen, and he has fallen out of love with the human race, and he has a profound melancholy and he doesn't believe anything in this life is
going to shift it. So we have to over the course of the novel move the doctor back into humanity, and it comes in a most shocking way to him, which is that he witnesses his daughter fall in love with a baby, and that was not something he could have expected, but that in turn becomes the bridge to get him back into humanity.
Could you have written Time of the Child without having become a grandfather yourself?
No, certainly not so. Our daughter Deirdre gave birth to Esme Willow during the time when I was writing this, and it was an extraordinary thing. When I first held Esme in my arms. Nothing had quite prepared me for that. It was a shock to feel how much feeling I felt rushed through me in that moment, and for my daughter, and seeing my daughter in a completely different light as a mother. Suddenly, in an instant she was a mother, and that was just so profoundly moving, and I was
sort of, I think, surprised by joy. As Wordsworth, I was surprised by love pulsed through me. And it seemed to me that when writing the novel, you know, maybe because in our life, in christ and ized life, we
have the chosen family. As such, we chose to adopt the children and that, and there's a burden of responsibility that comes with that, but also the thing of loving a stranger, you know, that is one of the central tenements of Christianity, I think, but actually of humanity to love the other person who is not connected to you
in any way, who's put into your arms. And the measure of what it would be to have a child to put in your arms that was not connected to you, That the child in this novel is not connected to Ronnie or doctor Troy, but is put into their arms, and how you respond to that at that moment.
I understand you write one sentence at a time, which seems like a stupid phrase now I say it out loud, but you let it pull you along like read.
Yes, I write one sentence out of time. So no so because I don't plan out anything and I just get a first sentence. I can only start a book when I have a first sentence. I get a first sentence, and I then try to figure out what is the next sentence. I have no idea where it's going, but I have a maybe foolish belief, but a belief nonetheless that has stood me is that the book exists out there and it's coming towards me if I calle towards it,
and I mustn't force it. So I've described it as my sense is that when I get a first sentence, it's like the tip of an invisible thread of which only the tip is visible. And that's that first sentence. And if I tease it out a little more all the time, it'll keep coming. Don't yank it, don't force it, don't look at it too carefully. Just follow the sentence. Follow the sentence, and at the end over here is a coat, in this case, a book that has been
always there, implied by that first sentence. So it's coming towards me. I'm just trying to pay attention to what's happening on the page. So that's how I write. I write each sentence out loud, and I say it out to myself because I'm sorry to tell you, but I'm just writing the book for myself. You're an added bonus, But really I would be doing it for myself because it's the writing is gives me the greatest pleasure and
profound joy. Beauty of language, rhythm, cadence, music, these things, and I feel in some again maybe invented way, that I'm connected in some way to artist traditions of oral storytelling. And so when Chris and I first moved to County Claire in nineteen eighty five, all our neighbors were older people, and the entertainment was we went to their houses in the evening. You'd go in the back door. You didn't need to be invited. You would just go in and sit down and have tea and they would ask you
about your day and so on. And we were there in entertainment because we were trying to manage four cows and we didn't know anything about cows and finding out how to live in a place, and so story was a way to pass the evening and no television was on. There might be a radio on the background of some music, but basically story was a way to pass the evening, past the time. And therefore the point of a story was not to get to the end of a story.
The point was not to get to the point. The point is to pass the time.
How long did it take you to have the faith in that process in your books? You know, between you, you and Chris have written twenty books in the forty years since you moved to Ireland. How long did it take you to have the faith in your skills as a writer to say I'm going to delicately pull this thread and enjoy the process.
Okay, So the truth is, I don't have any faith in my skills as a writer, and I'm still a person who is constantly asking the question is this any good? And what seemed good today it seem good tomorrow. So you're constantly working with doubt, and I think that's necessary. Actually, I've come not to resist it or worry about it. And if there are any writers listening anywhere, don't be afraid of doush. Don't be afraid of thinking it's terrible
today and it was good yesterday. I think that's a sort of necessary part of the creation.
I just wanted to briefly touch on how much for you your writing career, your creative, imaginative life is inseparable from your marriage, from the life that you live in, the life that you and Chris have made for yourselves. And I read an interview with you where you said to the interviewer, I feel like the word wife doesn't say enough. It doesn't get to what I'm trying to describe about Chris. I guess I'd say she's my first reader. That the first reader is above all else. You write together,
your garden together, You've built this life together. Yes, do you have a sense of that as an extraordinary creative collaboration rather than because that's not normal. Just to be clear, my partner loves me, but she's irritated when I come in the kitchen when she's there.
No, I never think of christ as my wife. I never think of that word. It seems very limiting. I think of Chris is the other half of my soul. And so we made that decision to be together from the moment we met each other, and the decision to get off the commuter train in Manhattan and go to this four room cottage in County Clare was a joint decision to see did we have any talent? And we make each other's talents. She makes me a better person, and I hope I make her a better person. And
that's how it's been. And when we adopted the two children, that was part of that same thing. So to say, Chris is my first reader, Chris is the only reader that counts. I'm sorry, everybody, She's the reader that counts. And the last thing I'll say, is just quickly. So when I finish, when I'm working on a novel, and she knows I'm working on a novel. In that time, there's no other income, so our savings are diminishing. And
for two years that's happening. And everything depends therefore on us being able to sell that novel at the end, and that gives us another two years to live and carry on like that. So it goes like this, So everything depends upon it. But at no time during that does Chris say, show me some pages. I want to know, is this any good? So for two years I'll write the novel and she'll know I'm writing the novel, and at the end I'll give it to her and I'll
get it printed out. It's a full manuscript, and it's there on the table, and I see then after about two or three days, this many pages have turned over and they're like that on the table. But she doesn't say anything. And then a few more pages go over each day, and so on so forth, and for maybe a week she's reading the novel, but she's not mentioning it, and I'm not asking her. And that's how it is.
But everything depends upon it, and we garden together, we work together, cook dinner or she cooks dinner, and whatever, and that's how it is. And now the last page is over and the manuscript is upside down, and that was the case with the Time of the Child. And she finished it, turned the last page over, and she said nothing at all, nothing nothing, not out of cruelty,
because she wants to be honest. She has a compulsion to be honest and true, and she wants to exactly think what it is that she wanted to say.
So I waited.
And normally the writer is waiting for the person that wants the person to say, oh, it's wonderful, and then the writer goes, yeah, but how wonderful, and they got really wonderful or really really wonderful and so on, and she's too honest to do any of that. And she didn't do any of that. And what she did in the end was she turned to me and said, well, it's pure Nile Williams. And at the time you go, oh, okay,
is it wonderful Nile Williams or bad Nile Williams. And in the end I realized that actually that was the best thing any writer can ever hear, because what all writers are trying to do is essentially just make their signature.
That's it.
It's that same moment that I began this discussion with when I said, you go and what are the books that you choose in the library? Because they are actually you, They're telling you who you are because they are the books you choose. So in the same way when she said it's pure Nile Williams, that actually is better than it's wonderful, because that's the goal, to create something that is actually your own spirit that has now come outside you and is now in the physical binding of a book.
Please join me in thanking the very Nile Wilderness.
Thank you, Thank you so much.
Noile Williams's latest novel, Time of the Child, is available at all Good bookstores now. This conversation was recorded in March at the State Library of Victoria. It was part of the Beyond the Page literary series. And if you're in Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria's exhibition Make Believe Encounters with Misinformation is open and free to visit until the sixteenth of April. It's a terrific exhibition. It's all about the ways in which misinformation has shaped life and culture.
It's playful and curious and well worth a visit.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. We'll have another episode to share with you next Sunday. As always, if you want to dive further into the show, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than eighty episodes in the Read This archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.