" 'Noe,' he said, and took a theatrical breath, 'this is happiness.'
I gave him back the look you give those a few shillings short of a pound [...] but 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.
I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.
'This is happiness,' he affirmed once more, pushing off and gasp-pedalling the uphill away from further enquiry.' "
Niall Williams' History of the Rain was my novel of the year in 2014, so I greeted the news of his next book anticipating fresh delights. That faith was well-founded.
This is Happiness takes us back to the Irish village of Faha, County Clare - with a nod in passing to the Swains of History of the Rain - and tells a bittersweet tale of love and loss, of hope and expectation, of growing up, and looking back. "Once standing," we are told, "any decent story has a life of its own," so settle in with this one and let it take you where it will, for such is the author's mastery of his medium that his narrative is like free-wheeling down a country lane - who knows where that gateway goes or that track on the left leads, but come along for the ride and explore anyway and it's a grand time you'll have, the road taking you round and back eventually, advancing as it digresses or diverges, and all the while there's magic in the moment and the movement, rhythm carrying the reader, joy in the lilt, the poetry, the sheer 'rightness' of the words.
That's the manner of the telling; its matter is Noe (Noel) Crowe looking back over sixty years to the time when as a young man and a lapsed seminarian he came to live with his grandparents in Faha. With electricity not yet in the village, the Fahaens were "not only behind the times [...] but outside the times altogether," and so the eventual arrival of power would be transformative in many ways. But ahead of cabling and connectivity comes Christy McMahon, to lodge with Noe and his grandparents, bringing an agenda of his own far beyond the practical matter of establishing electrical infrastructure, and it's in the hoped-for resolution of a story from Christy's past that the impressionable Noe, while seeking his own path, becomes involved with Christy's destiny.
As the older, wiser Noe reflects, "[Christy] was a chronic optimist and a pathologic romantic. That he added to this an old man's affliction of sentiment, I can't blame him. We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I'm guarding no more," and it's in this open-hearted fashion that Noe (and Niall) - tells his tale. Nostalgic, philosophical, generous of spirit, This is Happiness speaks to our own stories and how we tell them, reminding us in its gentle way that "you can turn a corner and find your life waiting there for you, and if you walked past it, it would come after and keep tapping you on the shoulder."
Warm and wise, winding and wistful, this book - like its predecessor - will win your heart.
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