Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from Niall Williams…
The novel This is Happiness by Niall Williams sat at the top of my list of recommended books for 2020.
Now, I can just as highly recommend Williams’ next book, Time of the Child. Set in a small Irish town of Faha in December 1962, the book addresses the lives of a doctor and his adult daughter as they struggle when a baby is left in their care.
The book is filled with rich descriptive writing and a keen sense of humour. Here are my favourite examples:
- You sat and if you didn’t join the rosary or sideways survey the congregation, you went to that inner place where the pages of your life lay open.
- In Faha, the line between comedy and tragedy was drawn in pencil and often times rubbed out.
- The old doctor, stooped and broken, but with the beard of Bernard Shaw and wrinkles of a sage, had retained to the last a cross manner of Old Testament Victorian.
- Although invisible to Church and State, it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faja, on Sunday morning after Mass, you could see the needles.
- She retained a doll’s face with a miniature mouth, and hair so tight to her skull it seemed not to have grown but been placed and, like a puppy, commanded: Stay!
- Troy knew he was not always welcome. Houses were not prepared the way they were when it was known he was coming; sometimes he would be held at the door while an emergency tidy up went on inside. It didn’t matter. When he eventually entered it was always with a sense of finding the world in its underpants.
- The house was a long low farmhouse of the traditional kind. It was thatched but the thatch had the air of the earth’s overcoat, ancient and sombre, here and there patches like black flags of surrender to inevitable defeat by a lifetime’s pressing skies.
- The chords of Chopin rose through the floorboards and came to him, imbued with a melancholy that was not there yesterday, each like bruises on the air.
- Their mother was right, it was not yet dawn; the dark, at first, absolute as they left the yard, was layered like cloths, thinning here, thickening there.
- None of Regina’s things could be touched when she was alive, and when she died Time embalmed them.
- Prescriptions were the same as passports and if you had one in hand going up the village, chances were that for Christmas you’d be, in a phrase that must have been coined elsewhere, right as rain.
- The patient was as Dr. Troye had last seen her. She was lying in the tucked bed that had the neatness of an envelope ready for posting.
- In the hall, the pendulum of the clock pulled time obediently along.
