Dave's Book Blog: "This is Happiness" by Niall Williams

Monday, 29 December 2025

"This is Happiness" by Niall Williams

“I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.” (Ch 33)

The narrator, Noe, is seventeen and has just dropped out of training to be a priest. He goes to stay with his grandparents in Faha, a remote corner of rural Ireland where there has been more or less constant rain for years. But when Christy [is that a significant name?], one of the men who will bring electricity to the parish,arrives to lodge in the house the rain stops.

It is told by the narrator as an old man - “Bear with me a while; grandfathers have few privileges and the knowledge of your own redundancy has a keen tooth.” (Ch 2) in the first person and the past tense.

This story is peopled with eccentrics who nevertheless seem flesh and blood; even the non-speaking walk-on parts are built into reality:

“Sam Cregg, whose clock ran slow, in fact and metaphor.” (Ch 2)

“Father Coffey, the curate, was ... pale and thin as a Communion wafer, he was addicted to the Wilkinson Sword and shaved to the blood vessels.” (Ch 2)

“Father Walsh ... had the pink, unmade lips of a baby, but the ice-blood of the county coroner.” (Ch 3)

“My father ... had ... short dense eyebrows like dashes of Morse that lent him a look indecipherable. Your father is a mystery it takes your whole life to unravel.” (Ch 3)

“Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation.” (Ch 3)

“There was nothing of the lamb in Mother Acquin. She could have been second choice to command the Allied Forces.” (Ch 4)

“He was deep-wrinkled, like a chamois.” (Ch 6)

“Salty was an intelligent customer; by Aristotelian and Jesuitical reasoning he had ascertained that though Lent was prescribed as forty days and nights, the true measure between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday was forty-six, which showed Our Lord wanted human beings to have wriggle room.” (Ch 10)

The story is told in prose of stunning beauty and intelligence. There's lots of humour too, and some moments to make you think. A remarkable book from a magnificent writer.

Selected quotes:

“Rain there on the western sea board was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a draping, and an out-and-out downpour.” (Ch 2)
“The known world was not so circumscribed then nor knowledge equated with facts. The story was a kind of human binding. I can't explain it any better than that.” (Ch 2)
“Saint Anthony has often found my glasses, wallet and keys. Why he keeps taking them in the first place, harder to say.” (Ch 3)
“My principles have a small p. That way I can keep on loving my fellow man.” (Ch 3)
“When the spun cotton of cobwebs began to enshroud the upper rafters, there was a sense that all the fiveish rooms were longing for the river just a field away.” (Ch 4
“Along the hem of both trouser legs were brown exclamations of dirt thrown up from traveling a puddled road.” (Ch 6)
“Swimming was achieved by a sort of head-up back-and-over tossing accompanied by wild arm and leg thrashing in the belief that you could outrun drowning if you thrashed fast enough.” (Ch 7)
“I noticed that he was a citog, and there were few enough of them then, left-handedness having been almost entirely purged by Sisters, Brothers and Masters who were all of one conviction: the world spun right-handed off the fingers of God.” (Ch 9)
“Cravens had glasses ... but customers preferred bottles, and sat along the wall silently sucking, at bladder-intervals staggering out the back door where, licensed by nature, they urinated loose loops in the general direction of the river.” (Ch 10)
“We played ... in the slur of the river-sounds until night fell. We played after that too, shadow-bats like fragments of dark dipping and swooping, and all but the company become insubstantial.” (Ch 12)
“The phrase on her way out hung there and the image of a doorway through which Mrs O Dea was to pass was carpentered into reality.” (Ch 12)
“I sat in the kitchen. The front door open, a ladder of sunlight footed on the threshold, a hectic of birdsong.” (Ch 13)
“He was a boy with heart blown open in the amaze of the world and the largeness of his own feelings.” (Ch 14)
“He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.” (Ch 15)
“Thank God for small mercies, large mercies being unknown in Faha.” (Ch 18)
“She would put her hands to her mouth to hold in what couldn't be said.” (Ch 23)
“I let that statement stand there, bald and barrel-chested, its feet planted and thumbs tucked in the lining of its waistcoat” (Ch 24)
“We were near the top of the hill, one of the Kilkenny girls sailing a white sheet up and over the line, a grace note not lost to me in its simplicity and beauty.” (Ch 24)
“Once he got going, my grandfather's way of telling the story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle's unity of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth.” (Ch 26)
“He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark.” (Ch 26)
“She didn't oil for reasons too deep to be fished.” (Ch 26)
“The parentheses occurred at the corners of her lips again.” (Ch 31)
“When I looked at Christy I saw the sorrow in his happiness had made shine his eyes.” (Ch 33)
“Cycling home from Looney’s you’d have a hundred tunes and not a small bath of liquid in you, with consequent chaos of feeling and thought. The code we had evolved was to concentrate on the cycling part, avoid discourse, and that way stay between the margins of the ditches.” (Ch 36)
“That playing tonight, it was as pure as a bishop's rectum.” (Ch 36)
“Sin has no opening or closing hours, was Father Coffey’s chilling dictum. To have any chance of a fair fight, neither should the mother church.” (Ch 38)
“I was frightened ... when the pain outmanoeuvred the roadblocks of pills and it was two hours before she was due the reinforcements.” (Ch 40)
“The more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.” (Ch 43)
“If he had the robe he could have played the Messiah.” (Ch 44)