`This is Happiness’ is a breathtaking tale

“This is Happiness,” Bloomsbury Publishing, by Niall Williams

“This Is Happiness” is a breathtaking tale told through the eyes of Noel, or Noe, Crowe. After a crisis of faith, the 17-year-old Noe is shipped off to stay with his grandparents in western Ireland, to “the drowning edge of the furthermost that was Faha.”

Faha in the 1970s, when this story takes place, was a place “where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.”

But while Faha appears to be left behind by the modern world, two remarkable events are about to happen in this village, where “the gap between not-raining and raining again was usually so short you only had time to shake the drops off your cap before it started once more.” First, the rain is about to stop. And this unexpected course happens to coincide with the arrival of electricity.

Williams, a Man Booker Prize-longlisted author for his “History of the Rain,” is a master of Irish storytelling, crafting sentences that tempt the reader to double back and read again - and characters that get under your skin. Among the most endearing is Ganga, Noe’s grandfather, who “lived outside of the jurisdiction of all judgment and thought everyone was always doing their best.” Ganga is the kind of man who breaks his bicycle in an attempt to befriend his friendless neighbor. The kind of man who would leave a copper penny on the ground so that the man, woman or child who found it would think that it’s his or her lucky day.

For those lulled into the rhythm of Williams’ storytelling there is understated and undeclared love on every page of this book.