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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

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Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

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Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

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Jim Gaffigan talks his new special and opening for the Popemobile : Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!

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Jim Gaffigan talks his new special and opening for the Popemobile : Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!
Jim Gaffigan appears on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me

Jim Gaffigan is one of the most successful comedians in the country, and has been for more than two decades. His latest special called The Skinny and its out on Hulu now. To celebrate the holidays, we challenge him to choose three real products from the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me Gift Guide.

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MrBeast Tom Brady Throwing Contest Winner Reveals Plan For $100K Winnings

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MrBeast Tom Brady Throwing Contest Winner Reveals Plan For 0K Winnings

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The spies on TV this fall are juggling work and family – just like the rest of us

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The spies on TV this fall are juggling work and family – just like the rest of us

On the new Netflix series Black Doves, Keira Knightley plays the wife of a politician and a mom to cute kids. She’s also an undercover spy, secretly feeding a covert intelligence agency information about her husband’s job.

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Robert Ludovic/Netflix

In Netflix’s new spy series Black Doves, Keira Knightley’s character Helen Webb seems to be the perfect wife and partner for an up-and-coming official in the British government.

Beautiful and intelligent, she’s a warm mother to two cute kids, capable of hosting a holiday party for her husband’s staff in one moment and coercing the children to stop playing underneath a table in the next.

But Mrs. Webb is also a spy for a mysterious intelligence organization, feeding them information about her husband’s work all while managing the family’s affairs – and having an affair with another man. And when that affair is discovered by a “handler” from the organization – played with a matronly ruthlessness by Sarah Lancashire – she mostly has one question for Mrs. Webb:

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Why was she sleeping with this man?

Mrs. Webb’s answer was a surprise, coming from an experienced spy. “I wasn’t working an angle,” she says through tears. “It was real. It wasn’t a job. It was…love.”

That’s right. After 10 years of marriage and two kids, Mrs. Webb fell in love with someone else while trying to decide if she still cares for her husband.

It’s a deliciously dramatic situation far different than the stories of detached, mostly loner spies like James Bond and Mission Impossible‘s Ethan Hunt.

Spies with families fill fall TV

Sure, there have been spy characters with families in films and TV before, from Harrison Ford’s turn as Jack Ryan in 1992’s Patriot Games to FX’s The Americans, which concluded in 2018.

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But this fall has seen a veritable flood of stories about spies with spouses and children, trying to hold onto their families while balancing the demands of brutal, often dehumanizing jobs.

In The Agency, Michael Fassbender plays Martian, a spy who returns home after a lengthy assignment.

In The Agency, Michael Fassbender plays Martian, a spy who returns home after a lengthy assignment.

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Luke Varley/Paramount+ and Showtime

There’s Michael Fassbender’s CIA case officer Martian — I know, that name seems a little odd — in Showtime’s new series The Agency. He’s trying to reconnect with a teen daughter named Poppy (India Fowler) who wants to know why he was gone so much during his last assignment.

She asks if he got information from people by making friends with them.

“Friends are people you like,” Martian replies, wryly. “[These are more like] acquaintances.”

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Poppy’s reply: “So you left us for six years to make…acquaintances?”

Ouch. Even bad guys have these issues. Like Eddie Redmayne’s character, an expert assassin in Peacock’s new series The Day of The Jackal. He’s married to a woman named Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) who suspects he’s having an affair because he’s so secretive. She has no idea her charming husband, who she knows as Charles, is actually a world-famous hitman.

By the time she’s discovered the secret room he built in their home for his disguises, multiple passports and assorted weapons, you’re left wondering why she doesn’t just run for the hills.

In The Day of the Jackal, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) suspects her husband, who she knows as Charles (Eddie Redmayne), is having an affair. He's actually a world-famous hitman. In this photo still, he tries to reassure her.

In The Day of the Jackal, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) suspects her husband, who she knows as Charles (Eddie Redmayne), is having an affair. He’s actually a world-famous hitman.

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Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited

Spies with families are popping up in lots of series: Paramount+’s Lioness. Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. And the trend makes sense; for TV series looking to stretch compelling ideas across eight or ten episodes, the plotlines generated by family conflict can add a wealth of new storylines.

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Each of these shows deftly uses spouses, children and loved ones to present a kind of spy thriller that feels different, with characters drawn so viewers can perhaps see a bit of themselves inside.

Everyday problems writ large

Their struggles can sometimes feel like ordinary challenges blown up into world-shaking espionage tales: spouses and children who don’t understand their demanding jobs, devotion to a vocation that damages them and their relationships, a growing sense of shame as their work keeps them from being present for the family.

These characters, even the villains, aren’t necessarily cold blooded killers. Nothing humanizes a character like seeing them care for someone they love. Indeed, that’s often the difference between anti-heroes and villains in such stories – the villains don’t really love anybody but themselves, while anti-heroes are driven by their connections to other people.

Even as you watch Redmayne’s The Jackal kill a gun maker to keep him from talking to the authorities, part of you is rooting for him to get back to Nuria and their son Carlito.

Particularly in the case of Black Doves, the romantic and family relationships add a significant layer to almost every major character’s arc – including Ben Whishaw, who plays a hitman acting as muscle for Knightley’s character Mrs. Webb. He also struggles with feelings about the family he could have shared with his own ex-boyfriend, who had a child.

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Sure, there are times when these setups seem preposterous or overwrought. But spies with families are also passionate and oh-so-human. Which, in the end, makes for the very best kind of spy story.

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