How touched by fate's benevolent hand you feel when you chance across
a novel so achingly beautiful as Niall Williams' Four Letters of
Love. Williams has authored with his wife, Christine Breen, four
previous books about their life in County Clare, Ireland, and his intimate
knowledge and love of that country sings out from the pages of his first
novel. With prose that ultimately fills the reader with a blinding light
of pure joy, Four Letters of Love tells the seemingly
disparate stories of two Irish families whose lives have been touched
and forever altered by significant moments of grief. The two tales seem
to occur in parallel, but are in fact angled almost imperceptibly toward
each other.
When they finally but inevitably converge, the once-quiet
power of the novel pours forth with a force that convinces you
that your heart truly is the seat of emotion.
William Coughlan, a lanky, balding civil servant, comes home from work
one day to shatter his family's quiet, harmonious life with the news
that God wants him to paint. Abandoning his career and selling off
most of the household goods, William goes off into Ireland's west for
the summer to put the Atlantic light to canvas. When he returns, his
wife and twelve-year-old son, Nicholas, find no solace in the slashes
of color on the unfinished canvasses. A cycle of absence and return is
begun. Nicholas' mother takes to bed, her humble vision of domesticity
shattered, coming out of her room only when her husband and son
are out walking to comfort herself in a whirlwind of cleaning and tidying
their nearly empty home. Nicholas finds himself wanting to hate his
father but unable to resist the flood of love he feels at the smallest
gesture from that gawky man whose being touched by God has irrevocably
altered Nicholas' childhood.
Muiris Gore is Master at the one-room school on the Irish island
where he raises his family. Abandoned long ago by the poetic muse, he tries to
instill pride and passion in his young charges and hitches his hopes to
his children. His daughter, Isabel, is a bright young girl, good at her
studies and bound one day for university. His son, Sean, is a musical
prodigy, able to pick up any instrument and play it as if he always had.
One day when Isabel dances on the rocks of the island's shore to Sean's
accompaniment, Sean has an unheralded fit that leaves him mute and lame,
the music inside him stilled. Isabel feels crushing guilt that Sean's
"accident" is somehow her fault. With her parents' dreams now fully
on her shoulders, Isabel leaves for the mainland to continue her
studies.
Tragedy strikes the Coughlan house not once but twice more in the
following years. As a young man following in his father's civil
servant footsteps, Nicholas is left suddenly bereft of family and momentum.
A vision of his father moves Nicholas, now without a job and directionless,
to find and buy back his father's one true work of art. Isabel's life
turns down a path of disappointment and flawed love, breaking her father's
heart and spirit and leaving bitter dregs of resignation in the cup of
her mother's life. When the legacies of the Coughlan and Gore families
finally come together, miracles of healing, hope and love will become
possible, proof that there is a design, an unfathomable reason, to the
workings of the world.
Four Letters of Love has received heartfelt praise from
all sides in the literary world. To read it is to be moved by a sense
of destiny and optimism. In a world where grief, loss and pain seem
to be the rule, Four Letters of Love lets us believe that
love has the power to make everything better.