Niall Williams

From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Four Letters of Love, a sparkling, perfectly formed new novel

History of the Rain

Elizabeth Moore

History of the Rain is so very worth the investment that it requires. It will stay with me forever!

It is a story about Ireland, the Irish, the power of stories, the power of the land, family, sublimation, myths and folklore, magical salmon, a whole crap load of rain, and the strange and beautiful way that faith and pain are intertwined. To try and define this book in any tighter of terms would shrink the scope of its beauty and magic in a way that could not do it justice. Ruth Swain, Niall Williams' brilliant narrative voice, is a young girl who is grappling with deep love, loss, a never-ending storm, more than 1,000 books left behind by her father to get through and to understand, and of course the age-old problem of the lovesick boy down the street. Oh, and she is bedridden as she writes to us and will probably die any day. The language is first-person, long-winded, colloquial, and just exquisite. I felt as though I were reading a 355-page poem, which, once I got to the end of the book, I realized may have been the whole point.

The "investment" portion of this book is quite real; I consider myself a disciplined reader and it took several big pushes especially in the first half of the book to continue to propel myself through. Our narrator Ruth Swain's "superabundance of style" is present on every single page, and if your mind isn't fully committed, it's likely that you'll more than a few times lose your place within the many, many words that spill out of her mind as she puts her universe and seemingly endless time continuum of thoughts onto the page. This book isn't best read in spurts, and perhaps respectfully so, as you're reading the story of a young girl who chooses to fight her limitations in the physical world by pouring every once of her being into the written word.

This being said, when I came to the end of the book I also came to the realization that perhaps another writer hasn't better matched the reading experience he creates for his audience with the wavelength of his own characters' struggles, crises of faith, and ultimately moments of redemption. Niall Williams and his larger-than-life narrator beautifully define the Irish Way of Life as a hard-nosed and yet somehow tender battle between Faith and Impossibility, and speaking of Impossibility I think that it may be quite so to read this book and not stop to question your own understanding of Why things happen and What people are made of.

There was a small passage in the book where Ruth asks her kind (and a wonderful character!) teacher Ms. Quinty if she's ever heard a story about someone who loses his shadow and spends the rest of his life trying to catch back up. You never hear Ms. Quinty's answer, but the memory of Peter Pan that this passage conjured up stayed with me for the remainder of the book and shaded much of the rest of the story's events for me. This book touched me deeply because yes, it is a story about losses of innocence, but also because something deeper runs through each page that wonders if through all of life's challenges and mysterious betrayals if it is possible, if you fight or wish or try or remember hard enough, to keep it. This book made me believe that it is at least possible to reclaim it, and the best way for all of us to do so may be through capturing the stories that are all around us each day and only just waiting for us to tell.

Please do yourself a favor and buckle down to reads this gem - it has the power to change your perspective on the beauty in life!

History of the Rain

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