As It Is In Heaven. by Niall Williams. Picador, 310pp, £14.99 in UK.
God and magic were called upon in Niall Williams's first novel Four Letters of Love (1997) which set out to explore the various levels of feeling. The central narrative concerned fated lovers, Nicholas and Isabel. Their journey towards each other often suspended belief. But then, Williams has made the world of romance where everything is supposed to be possible his chosen territory. In that novel by using Nicholas as a part-time, frequently bewildered narrator, Williams succeeded in countering the often overly lush nature of his prose.
In his fussily-plotted new book, As It Is In Heaven, there is no such mediator. This time the reader is subjected to a story of overpowering sentimentality in which a cast of unhappy, unusually passive, flatly-drawn characters who all sound the same, battle predictably against the forces of life, apparently broken by the absence of love. The tone of Four Letters of Love set it apart from much new Irish writing. Irish writers of the young, to youngish generation - the latter to which Williams, at 41, belongs - have moved increasingly towards the city and the predominant voice is violent and aggressively comic. Seen against this, Williams with his generous description of the Ireland existing beyond Dublin seemed to be offering something different. That first novel, though not overly convincing, possessed a fey quality which could act as a welcome sanctuary from the brashness of the new Irish literary culture.
Make no mistake about it, Williams is a romantic writer. However, there is a point at which romantic yields to romance fiction. Williams certainly moved very close to this area with his first book. As It Is In Heaven, for all its forced, theatrical lyricism and quasi-philosophical explorations of guilt, desperate needs and desire, is the stuff of romance fiction. Instead of being particularly racy, it is slow-moving, ponderous and extremely laboured, littered with statements such as "messages are everywhere, if only we can read them." The writing is so leaden it distracts from the story. "There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. "God is the greatest puzzle of all."
As the novel opens, Philip Griffin is still grieving the deaths of his wife and daughter, some 20 years - or 15 should you read the blurb - after the road accident which ended their lives. "He wondered what crime his 10-year-old daughter could have committed, what grievous error she had made that had drawn the priest's car upon her that afternoon? What fault could his wife Anne have been guilty of as she drove into Ranelagh to collect rosin for her daughter's half-sized cello?" Tormented by all the times he brushed his children aside, Philip wears the mantle of guilt like a garment - which seems apt. He is a tailor.
Life for him has become an obstacle denying him the chance of being re-united with them. "I can't feel any joy," he tells his doctor three years after the accident. Life continued. Now dying, he must first help his son Stephen who is fading away for love. Philip makes an improbable deal with God and begins leaving parcels of money in Stephen's Green. Philip "loved Stephen like a wall loves a garden", we are told. Meanwhile the self-absorbed Stephen, an unhappy history teacher, accustomed to living with ghosts, is becoming a shadow person.
"Life is not simple, nor love inevitable" begins chapter 15. By this point it is clear that Stephen's only hope is romance. The fact that he has arrived at a concert having been helped from his crashed car in a gale by the woman who has organised the event becomes an irrelevance. Interestingly Moira, his rescuer, utters about the only line of spontaneous dialogue in the novel.
Considering the agony Stephen lives in - his history tutor at college, herself a victim of a life devoted to history, denied him the chance of post-graduate study - it is only to be expected that he would be drawn to a tragic Italian violinist who has settled in Ireland following the end of her affair with a poet who had been determined to save her. Gabriella, the main female protagonist "had an expectancy of grief and wore it in the soft pale circles beneath her eyes." Overseeing much of the pain is Nelly, a kindly fruit-seller who prescribes apples and oranges as doctors might medicine.
The lovers have their problems. "The icy grip of the Atlantic cracked Stephen like thin glass and his cries flew as shards into the air." At first Gabriella does not love him, she smiles at his "attendant heart" and passes through "another wave of her own disbelief that such a man existed" and kisses "the white and shaking wreckage of his body" while he "tasted the perfume that was herself and did not come in bottles . . . as if each of them had somehow forgotten their sex organs or foregone them as some hopelessly inadequate appartati of conjoinment, as if they wished not to be joined at all, but to be one another . . ." She flees, he tracks her and fails. She returns. "They slept like swimmers stilled in painted waters, one's arm around the other, leading toward the shore." Even career romantics might find this cloying melodrama an oppressively slushy experience.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times staff journalist
