Author interview: Connecting with readers on the page remains important to Niall Williams

Williams declares himself to be ‘generally allergic to personal attention’, and he isn’t interested in chasing the more egotistical rewards of fame and success saying he pays ‘no attention whatsoever’ to the literary ecosystem

Niall Williams acknowledges that a certain amount of courage is needed to write ‘out of love and about love’ during these ‘fraught’ times. He is also wary of falling into the trap of sentimentality or nostalgia. File picture: Domnick Walsh/Eye Focus Ltd

• O Now!
• Niall Williams
• Bloomsbury, €9.99

It’s clear Niall Williams would prefer his work to speak for itself; in an enlightening essay accompanying his latest book, O Now!, the writer declares himself “generally allergic to personal attention”. 

However, in conversation, as in his writing, his words are thoughtful and well-considered, underpinned with a quiet emotional power.

“When I was 13 and 14, going to the library, reading Dickens and so on, I didn’t really want to know anything about the life of the writer,” he says.

“I met David Copperfield — he was more important than Charles Dickens and had more life for me. For me, the writer is a temporary thing and will be buried and gone but the book won’t.

“Therefore my hope is that you know more about the book than you know about the writer.” 

One could say his wish has been granted to a certain extent. 

Williams has kept a low profile in terms of public attention but hasn’t wanted for critical acclaim or admiration from readers, who have devoured everything from his 1997 debut novel Four Letters of Love, later adapted for the screen, to the more recent Time of the Child, which last year won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. 

O Now! is both a departure and return for the Dublin-born writer, who has lived in Kiltumper, Co Clare, with his wife, the American writer Christine Breen, for more than 40 years.

The book began life as a short fiction serial for BBC radio which aired last autumn. Williams was wary of taking on the project but Christine urged him to seize the opportunity. 

It was the first time Williams had written to commission but he found inspiration in a familiar setting and characters — the townland of Faha, home to Mossie Crowe, known as Ganga, and his neighbour Bat Considine who previously featured in his book This is Happiness.

“It was a very different experience, because it had a short format that had to be met with exact timing for the BBC.

“When I am working on a novel, I have no idea what the story is and I am just writing one sentence after another and trying to figure out my way.

“But in this case, I knew it was going to be aired over Halloween and the first week of November and I decided I was going to set the story then.

“I had wanted to get back to the character of Ganga, to give him a good send-off as it were.”

Tender portrait of a male friendship

Four nights a week, the widowed Ganga is visited at his farmhouse by his bachelor neighbour Bat, who reads the newspaper aloud as they sit in front of the fire drinking tea. 

There is not much chat but when they do broach a big question — what happens when we die — matters take an otherworldly, existential turn. 

The book is also a tender portrait of a male friendship, not something seen too often in literature. The love between Bat and Ganga is unspoken but real.

“It is understood between them without saying — they have passed beyond the need for language, or wouldn’t have the language for that emotional register,” says Williams.

“But they have understood that their co-existence in this landscape is a kind of love and that love first comes through companionship, jut being there.” 

Set in the 1960s, the book depicts a very different Ireland. 

However, the spirit of community and connection it conveys is something that Williams and Breen have experienced in their time in Clare, much of it spent writing and cultivating an impressive garden, a topic beautifully chronicled in their 2021 memoir In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden.

Community with a small ‘c’

“It is that kind of community with a small ‘c’, nothing dramatic or organised but it is there. If you had a problem and you went down to the village somebody would be there to help you,” he says.

“That still endures. To some extent, the relationship between Bat and Ganga is a reflection of that.”

Williams acknowledges that a certain amount of courage is needed to write “out of love and about love” during these “fraught” times. He is also wary of falling into the trap of sentimentality or nostalgia.

“I am always trying to navigate that, primarily by concentrating on the minute and physical. These lives are hard. They are poor and the poverty is not to be ignored, it is real.

“They are lonely, there is melancholy, grief, suffering, hardship. All of those things are present.

“At the same time there is this other thing, this love between the two men, which is coming from that companionship.”

O Now! is short, but Williams’s writing is masterful in its economy, while packing a huge emotional punch. 

It is also filled with the kind of sentences that make you pause mid-reading; “they knew that Bat was peculiar but in Faha, this carried no liability” or “inside, the rosary had started and was an engine humming”.

Lyricism from reading work aloud

Williams credits such lyricism to the fact that he reads his work aloud.

“I am telling the story, principally and most importantly to myself — the music and rhythm of the language, the cadences, length of sentence, all of those things are really important to me. That puts a different kind of emphasis on the language itself,” he says. 

“I’ve been doing it for so long now, I can’t not do it. The danger is that sometimes Christine will say ‘you’re falling in love with the sound of your own voice’.”

It’s unlikely that there’s any danger of Williams falling in love with anything except the process of writing itself. 

He certainly isn’t interested in chasing the more egotistical rewards of fame and success. He says he pays “no attention whatsoever” to the literary ecosystem.

“It is not helpful. The writer is only in competition with themselves. It doesn’t matter to me what anyone else is doing really or what the current taste is.

“You realise that you should be able to write something better because you’ve lived longer, you’ve loved more, you’ve suffered more, you’ve experienced more of the world, therefore you should be able to produce better writing than you did ten years ago because your experience of life has deepened.”

Connecting with readers on the page is something that remains important to him. 

That he has done so with great success is reflected in the not inconsiderable number of readers who come to Clare seeking out the fictional Faha, something that Williams finds bemusing but also moving.

“It is a testament to the novel, that people know that it is fiction and they still feel these people are alive, this place is alive, so much so that they want to go there.

“That is wonderful proof that fiction is not dead and that people still want to give some portion of their inner self to a story when they are reading it.

“To some extent there is a universal truth in all small places where people are together, because people are people.”