Category: Books

It’s always¹ advisable, when you’re not feeling one book, to stop it at a quarter in and then go to the author’s previous title. Time of the Child, one of the picks for Christmas 2024, seemed difficult to get into; the chapters were very long, the breaks were few, and the narrative kept referring to earlier events in the village. Picking up This Is Happiness, to see what Niall Williams had previously written about the Irish village of Faha, is an instantly rewarding experience.²

Of course, eventually you will figure out that this is the second Faha novel. The first is called History of the Rain, and the entirety of the first chapter of This Is Happiness is “The rain had stopped.” But you don’t feel like you’ve lost any important information by starting here.

In 1958, the town of Faha sees sunshine for the first time in years. Seventeen year old seminary drop out Noe Crowe is visiting with his grandparents, Ganga and Doady, when the coming of the electricity is announced. Enlisted into helping lodger Christy collect signatures to allow the power poles to be constructed, Noe goes through the warm season feeling the old world inching towards the new — all from the vantage point of someone who has lived with electricity in Dublin all his life.

Told exclusively from Noe’s first person point of view at a sixty year remove, This is Happiness boasts the omniscience of age rather than of someone who knows and perceives everything. This is a folk tale told by someone who lived through part of it and gathered the rest. Noe’s surmise is the engine that powers the telling, and he is a charming host. 

This means that the parts of the novel that are explicitly “seventeen”, like his dalliances with the Troy sisters, are ill-considered and awkward. They ring true enough, but there is a largely baffling chunk about visiting the cinema in town and what ensues in the dark. Perhaps because you already know that it’s a fruitless endeavour, that Noe is merely embarrassing himself, you want to elide it; the juxtaposition of Noe’s amateur hour longing with the endurance of Christy’s throws their relative significance into relief.

What it really shows is that, in This is Happiness, Noe is primarily an observer and reporter. We feel for him and the reason for his loss of faith, but we’re more interested in him in relation to his family and to Christy than to his openly admitted hopeless romances. A Spring season spent attempting to mend a love gone for half a century, and chasing after an elusive master musician, is always going to be more interesting than a fumble in the dark — and you can tell, ultimately, which had more impact on the boy and the man.

Through Noe, Williams captures a moment in Irish history with charm and wit. With the rain gone, Faha can breathe and so too can the reader. This Is Happiness is generous and expansive, amusing and quietly touching. There is event, but it is largely defined by character; it is rare to see a novel with such exquisitely defined start and end points.

This is Happiness is such a satisfying piece that it gives strength for one to reconsider tackling Time of the Child, which was instantly denser, less inviting in its composition. Not once does it feel like homework, but rather something that might have been nice to read years ago. Still, there’s no time like the present, or like Ireland in 1958, when the crackle of electricity was in the air and young love was as foolish as it ever was.

1. Rarely. ↩︎
2. But also, and this is truly objective: maybe the lead up to Christmas and wind down of the working year isn’t the best headspace for reading. ↩︎

I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.

But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.

In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.

Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.

There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.

The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.

In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.

The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.

Dervla McTiernan’s Australian-set story is much better than her American tales, but it does smack of the grift that a series of Australian authors seem to have with Audible at the moment (more power to them) and isn’t as fleshed out as a full novel – even if it’s only 25% shorter than the execrable Nina.

Two separate narrators tell the stories of Flynn and Noah, who basically have a parade of misfortunes thrown at them in their respective youths, the sort of tribulations that would have seemed gratuitous to Job. When their stories dovetail, very, very late in the piece (seriously, by the time you get to anything in the blurb, it’s almost over), McTiernan goes into overdrive and puts in one detail too many about the web our heroes found themselves entangled in.

Sterling work from Ben Chapple and Harriet Gordon-Anderson grounds the story somewhat, but you do have to wonder how bloodthirsty and sensational the modern McTiernan is. There are some absolute clunker sentences that would never make it on a page, but The Fireground is keen and some of the characters eventually make somewhat sensible decisions. Really, how long can the silliness last?

It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)

Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.

What they don’t tell you about ageing is that you get tired of cynical corporate synergy movie tie-in exercises. In a brighter, more innocent world, someone might see Argylle, the novel released one month ahead of a movie of the same name that is not based on the novel but is instead based on a “fictionalised” version of the author of the novel, who probably doesn’t exist, and say “Wow! The thin gruel of this spy novel is great grist for the mill of a metanarrative from one of the more irritating auteurs of the 21st century!”
The wide-eyed ingenue who might have thought that died years ago, and in his place is someone just shy of forty who can almost see through the thin veneer – and yet is still not smart enough to opt out entirely.

From the mid-noughts to the mid-tens, Jennette McCurdy played the breakout character in a Nickelodeon sitcom, which got her a degree of fame and fortune (allegedly garnished due to a bureaucratic failure). Then she kind of faded away. Her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, has generated a lot of buzz, which seems unusual to an outsider to the Nickelodeon ecosystem. iCarly was watched by millions, but as McCurdy herself says, it was the dead-end fame of child acting, an ecosystem that can be near impossible to escape.

Internationally, at least, it could be said that McCurdy is now more famous for this book than she ever was for iCarly or Sam & Cat. The 65 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best seller list certainly isn’t hurting her, but it’s also proof that her success isn’t entirely down to her notoriety: a combination of good publicity and a compelling story have allowed her to escape the walled garden of childhood fame for literary stardom and a potential new career.

Workplace romance, enemies to lovers, locked in overnight … it seems that the romance novels that litter the pop fiction landscape these days are designed to hit certain keywords for maximum SEO. With Love, From Cold World is a refreshingly uncynical entry in the genre, with a warning at the beginning that it features “Christmas content”. It lines up its targets and knocks them down, but one wonders if one of the enemies has to be so unthinkingly cruel for so much of the lead up. Nothing inside can quite match up to the cover and title, both of which are inviting, but this is a fine enough example of a genre that grows ever more inclusive.