Dave's Book Blog: "Four Letters of Love" by Niall Williams

“When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn't say much.” This is the opening of a debut novel of extraordinary lyrical beauty about the war between one's dreams and the reality of life.

The west coast of Ireland is the setting for magic. A young boy gifted with a talent for making music has a fit and is struck dumb and helpless. He lives in little better than a vegetative state while his sister goes to convent school, breaks all the rules, and has an affair and marries a wool and tweed salesman. Meanwhile, the father of a young boy in Dublin is called by God to paint and abandons his family to poverty while he creates abstract masterpieces. There are ghosts and visions. Underpinning the supernatural events is a hard core of reality: the purchase of a single can of soup for supper, years working as a clerk in the Civil Service, shooing donkeys, inarticulate appreciation (Galway, we are told, is "great. Just great. Is there another egg, Mam?") This juxtaposition with everyday nitty-gritty renders the mystical believable, the plain prose passages enable the lyrical flights.

The plot is that of a classic comedy: two lovers who must come together in the end despite all the obstructions placed in their way. It is at once both complex in the evolutions (only a modern comedy could include the obstacle that one of the lovers makes a half-hearted marriage to someone else) and immensely simple. For all that, it is perfectly paced.

The narration switches between the first person PoV of Nicholas, the Dublin lad, and an omniscient PoV; in the final section Nicholas is seen in the third person. It is told in the past tense.

The characters are strong, from the poetry-writing schoolmaster drowning his sorrows in whiskey to the mad artist, from the wayward Isabel to the hapless Seann and the bewildered Nicholas. I absolutely believed in these people and their behaviours. Isabel, guilt-ridden and hormonal, would have proved a wayward teenager and made foolish choices about prospective partners. Shiftless Seann, ruled by his mother, could be a romantic hero but a hopeless life partner. And I do love a villain who has the best of motives.

The descriptions are wonderful. Sometimes they are short and concise:

“The embedded dagger of one-way love.” (1.10)
“The air was puffy with fumes.” (4.14)
“Panic pricked in his lower stomach like a bag of needles.” (5.9)
“He walks his high frailty into the water, his ribcage and shoulders like a twisted jumble of coat hangers in an empty suit bag.” (1.1)

Sometimes they are extended like epic metaphors:

“The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen different weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of the white waves. Clouds, thumping base notes or brilliant wild arpeggios, were never long in coming.” (3.8)

Much of the joy of this book is based on the transcending beauty of the language so it is perhaps not a surprise that when it was made into a film in 2024 it received poor reviews.

Perhaps the thing that I admired most about this book was the control shown by the writer. He could have gone over the top with the language, the magic, and the madness, but every time he showed a hint of straying, he returned to mundane reality, leaving this book like a piece of granite, as solid as can be but with sparkles of crystal.

And it was hugely enjoyable. A real page-turner.

Selected quotes:

“The grass grew three feet tall, and sometimes in the evenings I went out and lay down hidden inside it, feeling the soft waving motion of its sea around me and above me and watching the blue of the sky deepen to let out the stars. I kept my eyes open and thought of my father, out there, painting the hood of night over me.” (1.3)
“‘Dad,’ I said and, turning, felt burst in tears the watery balloon of emotion.” (1.4)
“Wives create their husbands. They begin with that rough raw material, that blundering, well-meaning and handsome youthfulness that they have fallen in love with, and then commence the forty years of unstinting labour it takes to make a man with whom they can live.” (1.14)
“Back on the island they were prisoners of the weather now. ... The mainland was lost to them, and the freedom there was on a summer's day in seeing the limitless expanse of a blue sky over a blue sea was inversed now, and the stone walls of the houses and the little fields were the still jails of winter.” (2.2)
“The sky was a steamed glass that cracked daily, letting slant through the falling air the shards of that long winter’s stay.” (2.4)
“It was five o’clock in the morning, my feet were wet, my eyes stung and I had just learned the first lesson of that week's education in art: once you begin, nothing else matters, not love, not grief, not anything.” (3.6)
“For him, in his paintings, sea and sky ... were the constant and yet ever-changing monologue of God himself, the swirling language of creation, the closest thing to the beginning of life itself.” (3.6)
“My father saw God's changing humour in the afternoons and early evenings, the sky in the sea like a face ageing.” (3.6)
“Time only exists if you have a clock. In our house the batteries in the clock on the kitchen windowsill had long since leaked the acid of Time.” (4.3)
“He was a man who had found his place, and had ironed everything of the jumbled and frenzied chaos that life had thrown at him into the one, perfect crease of his work.” (4.3)
“He couldn't easily tolerate the circle of sympathizers and the little hopeless audience of tea-drinkers and prayers, and he stood instead outside in the drizzle letting his despair fragment into the first words and phrases of a new poem.” (4.5)
“She could have done anything, she seems so. So. Hurt.” (4.7)
“Angels, my father once said, must pass us in the street every day. They must be as ordinary as birds, he said, and recognisable only in the brief moment of their connection to our lives.” (4.12)
“Dreams, my father was certain, are the other you talking back.” (4.14)
“How do you know what to do? how do you ever know?’ ‘You don't.... You ask for prompts, I suppose, don't get any and then just pick one thing or the other.” (5.4)
“Her guilt swirled in the air like a fine dust; it caught in his throat and he began a coughing fit that lasted minutes.” (5.5)
“Loss, loss, loss. The word passed across his chest like a knife opening his flesh and spilling his organs. How much easier it would have been to have been wounded, to have lost a limb, to stumble through the day one-legged, flap one-armed and show: this much of me is loss, this much hacked away by grief and despair.” (5.5)
“Nothing in the natural world is random, was the principle tenet in William Coughlin's philosophy.” (5.6)
“Muiris was walking a few inches above the surface of the island, carefully placing his feet and taking each step across the air with the concentration of a tightrope walker." (5.8)
“A curled figure still in his trousers and vest, a hand dangling over the edge of the bed as if to pick up dreams.” (7.1)
“She looked at him as if he had seven eyes and she could not figure out on which to focus.” (7.7)
“The world wrinkles dreams quicker than skin” (7.7)
“She ... put aside her fears that the spots appearing on the back of her hands were the rising to the surface of her sins.” (7.10)

The Latin quote in 3.7: "Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?" is from Virgil's Aeneid (9, 184–185), which means: "Do the gods put this fire into our minds, Euryale, or does each man's passion become his own desire?"

February 2026; 342 pages

First published by Picador in 1997

My paperback edition issued in 2025