When we first meet the Foley family - four boys and their father Francis - it is sometime in the mid-19th century and they are fleeing westward across Ireland, heading for the sea and for a space they might call their own. Francis has stolen a telescope from the estate on which he worked as a gardener and then set both his own house and the big house alight. Emer Foley, tired of her husband's pipe-dreams and unfulfilled promises - not to mention the backhand he delivered on that fateful night - has herself fled elsewhere. While attempting to cross the Shannon, the boys see their father drown, or so they believe. Francis soon pops up again, as the Foleys are wont to do. They're forever ending up in the Shannon only to be fished out by monks and gypsies and boatmen. Anyway, it's not a particularly promising start to the journey and things go from bad to worse, and worse again. These Foleys were born under a bad sign; these Foleys make the Kennedys look lucky.
From here, Niall Williams (the author of Four Letters of Love and As it is in Heaven) leads us through their misfortunes for over 400 pages as they beg, borrow, and are stolen from, as they commit arson and murder (accidentally or through misguided gallantry), as they land themselves in jail, join the gypsies, contract leprosy, and just generally schlep their way around Ireland, Europe, America and Africa in a series of mishaps that would try even Dr Pangloss's optimism. Their women don't fare much better, dying of typhoid or going blind; one has the back of her heels severed by a drunken doctor and must "drag herself on the ground". Throughout it all, they scatter, lose and find one another again in a series of somewhat implausible coincidences. And, throughout it all, they rather irritatingly persist.
At one point, Williams describes Tomβs Foley as an "absurd servant of forgotten chivalry". Indeed. But Williams never plays this absurdity for its blackly comic potential, or allows us to view his ill-fated characters with anything like ironic distance. The earnestness with which they meet the world's evils, their common inability to harden in the face of circumstances, to learn from or jest with their incessant bad luck renders them unintentionally comic and leads the novel into the realm of bathos. At one point, one of the brothers suggests: "Maybe it's true . . . Maybe we are all cursed." And the other answers: "You know it's not." Williams, it seems, doesn't see them that way either. " . . . it is as if the teller understands that the island is an image for all Foleys thereafter, that there was something passionate and impetuous in the character of the family that made each of its men islands in turn . . . It was their nature."
But the Foley men are not so much islands of passion and recklessness as an archipelago of ne'er-do-wells, addressing one another in a stage Irish that, with its hyper-sincerity and baseless optimism, again and again jars with the bleakness of their circumstances:
" 'Teige son,' said Francis . . . 'Teige son, tisn't all over. We'll find them, we will.' "
Or: " 'I am grateful to ye,' he said . . . 'Tis a thing of nothing,' Francis said. 'Your potatoes'll be in the ground tomorrow.' "
Even the fortune-tellers speak with a kind of stiltedness that seems lifted straight out of fairy tales:
". . . 'I can read the future like script on paper. It is there,' she said, and waved a heavy hand toward his face and stirred the soup so its scents swirled.
" 'Well?'
" 'Men come for only two reasons. Love or death.' She paused . . . 'You are not a man in love.'
" 'Is it true then?' he asked her.
" 'Yes,' she said.
" 'He is dead?'
" 'He is.' "
There are mitigating moments - the section in which Francis awakes, unsure if he is dead or alive and seeing God everywhere; descriptions, such as of the fish that "eddied in quick schools of no direction". And then there is Elizabeth, an uppity, married woman, cunning and not particularly nice but ultimately real. But she's too little, too late in this cast of lost souls who cling to one another in a bewilderment so determined it's difficult to sympathise with.
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic