Welcome to read this arguably Australia's pre eminent podcast for interviewing Irish authors seriously. At some point I look back over our archive and amongst our brilliant cavalcade of guests, there is very healthy representation from the country of my grandparents, Kilan Hughes, Kolm Toybin, the two Pauls, Mariy and Lynch and Enwright, and our dream guest list for future episodes
probably has another half dozen Irish writers. At least Kevin Barry or Claire Keegan would be a dream just for starters, and that's not even to mention Sally Rooney. The list
is lengthy. There's something to be said for the breadth and depth and general robustness of contemporary Irish literature, smart government policies to support the arts and writers in particular, and a strong literary tradition that's well read and well understood, and maybe something mysterious about the way that country tells stories. A joy and a sense of play and play, a willingness to meander and digress, but to hone in with precision and clarity when required. Our guest this week is
another Irishman who is indisputably part of that conversation. Niall Williams was studying in a university in New York when he and Christine Breen fell in love and made the decision to leave the Manhattan rat race and move into a two hundred year old cottage on the west coast of Ireland in a place called kil Tumpa in West Claire. As they put it, they wanted to find out if they had the creative talent to make their lives there. That was forty years ago this month, and spoiler alert,
they had the creative talent. They co authored books together, they wrote books separately. They made art and gardened and raised a family and built four decades of life. And amongst those books, Nile's novels started to build this reputation for a skillfully deployed mix of warmth and joy. His first novel, Four Letters of Love, was celebrated as a modern Irish classic, and after years of development and speculation, later this year, will be made into a film starring
Pierce Brosnan and Helena Bottom Carter. But his three most recent novels have seen his acclaim rise and rise further. In A History of the Rain, which was long listed for the twenty fourteen Booker. He introduced a fictional town as its backdrop. It was called Faha, and his subsequent book, This Is Happiness puts far Harf front and center. In that book, he tells the story of the nineteen fifty eight introduction of electricity to the town. The book attracted
rapturous reviews. The word enchanting gets thrown around a lot, and upon finishing it, Niall Williams realized he wasn't done with the people of Faha, or perhaps more accurately, they weren't done with him. He visited Australia last month and as lucky enough to interview him at the State Library of Victoria. Before we started our conversation, he and christ And got a tour from staff through the building and the archives. His love of books and of the community
of people that had devoted to them was palpable. We sat down in front of a devoted Melbourne audience to discuss his latest book, the latest Faha book, Time of the Child. It's now the early sixties and the focus has shifted to the town doctor Jack Troy and his oldest daughter Ronnie, and what happens when an abandoned baby girl is brought into their home. I'm Michael Williams and this is read. This a show about the books we love and the stories behind me.
Thank you all.
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 about it?
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 transitory noess 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 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 in 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 walked 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 Clare, 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 routed his 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 then?
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 of 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 have every fourteen year old in the country reading Great Expectations, not abridged Great Explanations, to full Expectations. So the significant thing I've told it 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 was allowed 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 watching it so carefully. So when Pip fell in love with Di Stella, 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, then.
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 the 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 cur 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, unerstand 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 that'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 that you do 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 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 far out the window of Ruth Swain's house, where she doesn't go.
So Fao would be embarrassed that we're actually talking about it, and they talk about somewhere else, and the more beautiful places. There are more notable places, and you shouldn't if you're stopping in Fa, 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 and go in here, and this is an interesting So it 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 to tell division comms and so on and so forth as things change in a community over that period of time.
When we return, Nialla and I discuss why a doctor makes sense for the main character of Kind 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 howiness where 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 that came about, again only in hindsight.
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 it was 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 microcos 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, because 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 selling gra victations. I don't know to any Mooney. Yes, is the doctor was in love with any Mooney, but it was 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 at the start of 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 Jirdre 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 joyous Wordsworth. I was surprised by love pulls through me. And it seemed to me that when writing the novel, you know, maybe because in our life, and for Christ and I life, we have the chosen family. As such, we chose to adopt the children and that and there was 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 or doctor Troy, but it's 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.
Liked. 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 call
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 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 may not 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 doubt. 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've 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 rader, that the first rader is above all else. You're right 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 Christmas, 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. That's how it's beIN 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 and 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 gardened together, we worked together, cooked 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 I 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
not Williams or bad not 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 for ma.
Niall.
Williams's latest novel, Time of the Child is available at all good bookstores now, and if you're in Melbourne, get along to the State Library Victoria. They have a new exhibition that kicks off on the sixteenth of April. It's called Make Believe Encounters with Misinformation. It's free to the public and it's all about the many ways in which misinformation has shaped our lives and our culture. It's playful,
curious and terribly terribly timely. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and former read this guest, Kate Grenville has a new book of nonfiction out. It's a terrific book and well worth reading, and dives into the story behind the writing of her classic The Secret River. It's called Unsettled, a journey through time and place, and she grabbed with both her ancestry and the complicated, forgotten, denied history of this country. It's a terrific greed.
You can find it and all the others.
We mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It does genuinely help. Next week, I'm read this and another Irish writer, but this one calls Australia home. It's Chris Flynn.
That opening scene of the book is exactly what happened in my dream. I live in a small regional time and I was there on the footy ground watching it all happen. And when I got up the next morning, I brought it down and it's the opening scene of the book. Almost forbid him as like as it happened in my dream. And then over the next hour the
rest of it all just appeared. So the whole book was there right to the ending, right from the beginning, and I thought, oh, bloody hell, now I'm going to have to write the friggin thing.
Read.
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support of the our group.
The show is.
Produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing this week from Zalton Fetcher, who also provides our original compositions. See you next week.