I've had a feast of reading over Easter!! I finished Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams minutes before we all piled back into the car for the trek home this morning. It reminded me of South American magic realism but touched with Irish angels and rapt in the natural wild world of the emerald isle and its Antlantic islands. Last night I dreamt of wild seas, stormy skies and close knit Irish island communities presided over by angels and flights of birds.
Isabel, a beautiful island girl, walks out with a hopeless clod of a shopkeeper because she chances to meet him as she is looking for a way to escape her school and the island. He becomes a habit. She marries him to punish herself for her brother's disability and because she can see no other future for herself.
The stories of Isabel and Nicholas Coughlan, a city boy orphaned by his father's obsession with painting, run in parallel until they intersect near the end of the novel. Miracles and tragedies abound. The disappointments of youth and love are redeemed by the coming together of the two protagonists in the end - perhaps. In the final pages the author intervenes with a deliberate and postmodern dig at his sighing readers - did the lovers separated by a marriage, a pregnancy and Irish fidelity to one's spouse until life's end really end up together? "It was in the air at that moment ... the plots of God and Love came together."
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