An Irish Odyssey of Misfortune and Miracles

THE FALL OF LIGHT

A Novel

By Niall Williams

Warner Books

306 pages; $24.95

Following in the unruly footsteps of his father, grandfather and even his great-grandfathers, Francis Foley spent his youth as an outlaw and rebel in the rugged countryside of Ireland. Mistaking vengeance for justice, the Foleys were fiercely intent upon righting what was wrong in the history of their country, a pursuit that would condemn Francis and his own family to a lifetime of ragged poverty and flight.

It is, as Niall Williams tells us, the saga of his own forefathers, “not a history” but a story that “has been told and retold over for a hundred and fifty years.” Each teller adds his own hauntingly imagined details, and their culmination in “The Fall of Light” results in an epic tale radiating with the majesty of myth, written in prose as precise and lyrical as poetry.

The tale begins with Francis packing up his four sons and a stolen telescope, leaving their barely habitable cottage probably in County Wicklow, then crossing the fields of Tipperary until they reached the river, and then on to the sea. Exhausted by their repeated flights and ever-unchanging circumstances, Francis’ wife, Emer, had walked out on the family the day before, refusing to follow her husband yet another time on his dream-filled quest for a better life. But Francis is passionately determined and assures his four sons that once they find their new home, he will bring their mother back to them. When Teige, Francis’ youngest son, refuses to ride his pony across the river, Francis lashes out at the boy, and in their struggle Francis falls into the waters and is carried off in the torrent. The boys ride the riverbank, searching for their father:

“At last they came to where they could ride no more and where the last sighting of Francis Foley turned out to be a singular lonesome swan riding the low waves.

“‘He is gone,’ Tomas said.

“The breath of the horses misted and faded. They sat crouched forward like ones beneath a burden. The landscape thereabouts was a green and rumpled stillness. The silence grew heavy. Then Finbar said, ‘He is gone to America,’ and laughed a small laugh that faded away.

“Finan looked at Tomas to see what he would say, but he said nothing at all.

“They watched the waters.

“‘He is not,’ Teige said at last, ‘he is become a swan.’”

Tomas, Teige and twins Finan and Finbar stoically move on, feeling stunned and orphaned, yet no less determined to reach the sea that was their father’s destination. As they travel, circumstances separate the brothers, one by one, until each member of the family is alone, without word of one another for years to come.

Tomas is the first to become separated from his brothers when he leaves their camp for the town of Limerick and falls in love with a young prostitute named Blath. Williams’ depiction of Tomas’ innocence and his gradual understanding of Blath’s occupation is wrenching and convincing. Tomas’ untainted feelings of love cut straight through to the young woman’s own buried innocence, and this moment of grace between the two remains one of the novel’s most poignant. Determined to bring Blath back to his remaining family, Tomas rescues her from the brothel, though his efforts result in terrible violence.

While Tomas is in Limerick, his brothers join a group of gypsies who are grieving the death of their star horse racer, a young boy who had succumbed to a mysterious disease, and they come to believe that Teige, a fine rider himself, has arrived to replace their own lost child. Williams weaves into his tale a variety of ancient myths, ranging from those told by the gypsies to the ancient Greek stories of the stars that the brothers once learned about from their parents.

Stargazing figures large in the novel; it was this preoccupation that led their father to steal the telescope at their journey’s beginning. Looking to the stars keeps the Foley family believing in the possibility of passing beyond earthly difficulties, and in fact surprising and miraculous happenings do grace the family.

Writing with an almost unearthly sensuousness--such phrases as “the blown souls of the vanished” and descriptions such as the snow falling in “torn fragments of some broken treaty between heaven and earth” fill the narrative--Williams, who has been praised as a rising star in modern Irish literature, brings a loveliness to this story. “The Fall of Light” recounts a strange and wondrous odyssey, sparked by human desire and steeped in the tragedies of history.