Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

He raised his head and looked up beyond the horizon of his hat. It was the character of all life that the more you looked the more you saw, and with night skies of absolute stillness and clarity the stars behind the stars were a theatre of revelation and had the placed-ness of that supreme geometry that gave the Greeks their stories. For some years, Jack Troy had not been able to say aloud the first Latin line of the Apostles’ Creed, could not bring himself to pray what he did not know to be fact. He could not say he believed in God, but neither could he say that he did not. In his reasoning, he was of a mind too peculiar to adhere to any doctrine, and he could not allow himself the comfort of a divine mercy, for he was too suspicious of anything that pardoned humanity. But still. Beyond that reasoning, there was this something that had no name, that in six decades of living was both occasional and familiar, a prompted moment of clouded complexity he could not parse except to say that when he felt it, he felt less alone.