I am currently revelling in the writing of Niall Williams in his novel This is Happiness. His witty and perceptive portrayal of characters does more than simply describe them. In introducing characters he conveys a sense of the context, the backward village of Faha, in the south west of Ireland in the 1970s. One example is the formidable nun, Mother Acquin, who takes the young narrator by train to stay with his grandparents, when his mother is ill.
'I was accompanied by Mother Acquin, a large black-and-white albatross who smelled of bull’s eyes. Mother Acquin was a relation on my mothers’s side. On that side there were several priests, nuns and missionaries vanished into Africa who we were to pray for, because they were all praying for us, my mother said, and, with the softness of her eyes and the lamb in her voice, the boy I was did not doubt it.
There was nothing of the lamb in Mother Acquin. She could have been second choice to command the Allied Forces. She was on her way to take the sea air with the Sisters of Mercy. She’d take all they had, I’d say. As though a significant peril lay ahead, she set up a prayer-shield over us in the carriage, black rosary beads harnessing the horns of her fingers. The ticket collector looked in and backed immediately out.' (p.25)
Williams skilfully combines a range of techniques even in a short passage: sharp physical description, the indirect free speech of others’ comments, snippets of the character’s own words and reflections by a knowing old narrator on his youthful experience. All this and a sense of the period and social context is conveyed in the description of the piano tuner.
'Hartigan, the bug-eyed, whey-faced and toothy piano-tuner from Limerick, who had an untrustworthy air Doady said because he could not be fattened, who was stitched into the narrowest pinstriped suit and always came through Faha after, as he put it, tuning the nuns in town. Though pianos were something grand and mostly notional in Faha, Hartigan would stop at a few houses along his way in case he could spark an interest in a second-hand one or just some sheet music that would suit the accordion too, Missus, if there was one in the house at all. He smoked while he stood in the doorways, eyeing up the sale. ‘Virginia blend,’ he’d say, looking at the cigarette burning in his fingers. ‘Smooth as cream.’
Perhaps because of some primitive but profound allure attached to the tuning or because of the mysterious attractiveness of those even tangential to music, he had a long train of rumoured paramours and illicit relations, all of which were in defiance of his actual looks and testament to the unknown depths of females.' (p.40)
I'm full of admiration and more than a little envy at such a master of this style of writing.
