Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day.

here the people were, in a phrase she had read in a Russian novel, great-souled.

A central principle of his fathering was not to stand in the way; it was a policy that resulted in an excess of silence.

Was this only one Sunday? It seemed impossible, his thinking something along the lines of Martin Meagher, who, crinkled face to the sky, had said, ‘Don’t people put God in His place by calling this “ordinary life”?’

The infant was just another, not remarkable except for the countless ways each of us is.

By the time he was down the front steps and into the car, he had the conviction of a conspirator, and the singular focus of a father who would knock down the world to make the path for his child.

At every moment in the world a person dies, was something his father liked to say. He said it both to leaven the weight of death and to vivify those still in the now.

He came closer to examine the child’s eyes. They were a blue we make lesser by comparing it to other things.

‘Is she all right, the baby?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I told no one. But they know.’ ‘I know. It’s all right. She’ll be all right,’ the doctor said, but felt the ashes of empty language in his mouth.

Absence is its own presence; it occupies the same space.

Only through the birth of a child, he thought, is the lure of death conquered. It was a statement worthy of his father. And he recalled then the fantastical notion of the old man, who, in his last year, claimed that the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along.

He did not know if he believed in the Holy Spirit, but if asked he would have said that night was the closest he came, that there was an otherness, a largeness apparent and invisible there at the same time, something that did not exist in the textbooks but was the same thing that had been since the beginning, which was that there was something more than the perimeter of flesh, something else and beyond explanation, and which was felt in that part of us that, for lack of any better, was given the word soul.