Niall Williams - History of the Rain

And, impossibly, my father sees that it is. Aeney turns and sees too. He lays down the fishing rod. He runs the way he has always run, that way of running that seems a natural expression of human grace, and he comes to Dad who comes to him and wraps his arms around him and lowers his head into the golden hair and they hold to each other impossibly long, long, longer still, and in their embrace is all our story, past present and to come, in it is the knowledge that Mam will be all right and that though she will be lonely and sad she will take comfort in the candles where one day in Faha church she will sit up with the clear and absolute certainty her husband has found her son, in that embrace is the knowledge that I will at last go into Remission and begin to get better, that I will return home, that, impossibly, I, Ruth, will write this book, that Mrs Quinty will type my pages, that you will read them, that Vincent Cunningham will come calling, for conversation and slightly salty kisses, and that one day, impossibly, he will take me walking for my first time out the front door and I will go to the river with him and not fear water or sky, not fear failure or doom because I will know somehow we can come through, and our story is of enduring and aspiring and that it is enough to keep hoping and to keep telling stories, for each other and about each other, collaborating in the elaborate history of ourselves so that in stories we exist, knowing that in this world in this time enduring is all our victory, but victory nonetheless, and I Ruth Swain will know that love is real and forgiveness complete because, at last, unimaginably, implausibly, impossibly, the rain will have stopped.

My father believed in education, at a time when education meant books. Twice a month he took us to the library, and those visits remain among the most cherished memories of my growing up. Apart from the browsing and the borrowing, just to be for an hour in the physical company of so many books was inspiring and moving in a way that is perhaps hard to explain today, but for which I will always be grateful. When my father died, in his will he asked that his books be left to me. Among them was The Salmon Rivers of Ireland by Augustus Grimble.

One book inspires another. To any reader of this novel the debt I owe to so many writers will already be apparent. The debt to readers perhaps less so.

Over the five years I have been working on this book Caroline Michel achieved the impossible standard and kept believing in it, when it was still invisible. Her friendship and support has meant everything. My thanks too to Anna Jean Hughes and Rachel Mills and the whole team at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

Two years ago, Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury asked me to come in and tell him about the novel I was working on. At the time I was three years in and had lost faith in it. When I walked out into Bedford Square later I had refound it. My heartfelt thanks to Michael, to Anna Simpson, Oliver Holden-Rea and copyeditor Sarah-Jane Forder, to Kathy Belden in New York and all at Bloomsbury for their dedication and enthusiasm and generally being the kind of publisher Ruth dreamt of in Faha.

I am grateful to my brother Paul for his continued support and belief in my writing, to Deirdre Breen, Carlo Gebler, Donal Tinney, Allen Flynn, Lucy and Larry Blake, Pauline and Martin Hehir, and all the others who offered encouragement along the way; to the members of the Kiltumper Book Club, Marie O’Leary, Martin Keane, Marjorie Lynch, Dermot Mahony, Grainne Heneghan, Siobhan Phelan, Isobel O’Dea, Mary Cuffe, Jack Mannion, Carmel Mahony and Colette Keane, who have taught me so much about the pleasures of narrative and renewed my faith in stories.

Finally, to Deirdre and Joseph, and to Chris, as Virgil Swain says: ‘You are the meaning.’ For everything, thank you.

Niall Williams was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of eight novels including John and Four Letters of Love for which he has recently completed the screenplay for Element Pictures. He lives in Kiltumper in County Clare, with his wife, Christine.

niallwilliams.com