Book review

Boy and Man by Niall Williams

This far-reaching story by the Irish writer, Niall Williams, is about the close, though torn-apart relationship between a boy and his grandfather. They love nothing better than to go up the hill and fly a kite, seeing the long string curving up into the air, live in the fingers. But a terrible car accident obliterates the grandfather’s awareness and the boy, shattered by mistaken information that the old man died in the crash, has gone to try to find his mysterious and long-absent father.

Williams takes as his territory the irrational sense of connection that can link people despite all evidence of its impossibility. Though thousands of miles apart, both of them bereft by the loss of the other, the grandfather and grandson are driven by larger forces than they understand. The pity of it all grips the reader, but this is a book about fundamental faith and a trusting to whatever comes. Though helpless to make any connection, the grandfather and grandson are intimately bound up, and the resolving of their need for each other is subtly worked out and, in the end, deeply satisfactory. This is a book with moments of intense human clarity, accepting that we have very little control over what happens and must in the long run trust to luck or to God, which may be the same thing. Boy and Man is extraordinary – intricately plotted and driven by its own poetry and powerful imagination.

Boy and Man by Niall Williams, Harper Collins £7.99 (though you can pick it up on Abe Books for 64p + postage).

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