THE FALL OF LIGHT

A languid, quasi-epic account of one family’s fortunes in Ireland and around the globe.

Williams (As It Is In Heaven, 1999, etc.) lays on the blarney in his very first line (“In an autumn long ago, the Foleys crossed the country into the west like the wind that heralds winter”) and keeps it coming at a pretty steady pace in this family saga about the Foleys, who started out in Carlow and made their way, in the best Celtic style, to the four corners of the world. Francis Foley, the patriarch of the clan, marries the beautiful and headstrong Emer O’Suilleabhain, and becomes a tenant farmer on the estate of an absentee landowner. Fascinated by the stars, Francis steals a telescope from the manor house and has to flee with his four sons (for Emer refuses to leave). They wander west and settle in a remote wilderness near the Atlantic coast. Francis Foley’s wanderlust is inherited by his boys, all of whom run off themselves in some more or less dramatic fashion. Finbar marries the beautiful gypsy girl Caitlin and makes his home in her perpetually roving caravan, while his twin brother Finan travels to France and enters a monastery, eventually voyaging on to Africa as a missionary. Tomas emigrates to America, where he gets mixed up in Fenian politics in New York, flees west, joins the army, and winds up in Wyoming as a surveyor with the cavalry. There, he is finally reunited with his baby brother Teige, who, a horse farmer in Canada, wandered a bit far off his ranch one day. What goes around truly comes around in the end.

Utterly hokey, written in faux-shanachie prose (“His father had been hung for participating in plots treasonous and bloody”) and freighted with symbolism (a twin brother becomes the father of twin daughters—twice!) that’s heavier than soda bread.