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Set in mythic villages and along Ireland's craggy, unforgiving coast, As It Is In Heaven traces the evolution of three people who have been broken by loss; it would seem irreparably so. Their days are contoured by foreboding. No longer active participants in life, they are the heartsore, docile legatees of parsimonious Fate.
Mourning shrouds the life of Philip Griffin, a retired tailor, who asks God why his wife and 10-year-old daughter were allowed to die in a tragic auto accident some 20 years earlier. When there is no answer from God, Philip believes, "The fault was his own, the judgment had fallen not on them but upon him. For it was the survivor who suffered."
This suffering is mirrored in his son, Stephen, now 28, and a schoolteacher in western Ireland. The shared question of why they have survived has forged a bond between father and son, "They did not speak of it but took the puzzle of their days everywhere with them, growing an identical jagged wrinkle across the middle of their foreheads and talking fitfully in the brief periods of their night sleep."
Philip's solace is found in the knowledge that he will be reunited with his wife and daughter after he has done whatever he can for his son.
Not daring to imagine that love is real for it would make life too hard, Stephen finds a modicum of peace by accepting his solitude, and turning ever more inward. "Life had imbued him with a deep humility and then nourished it with a Catholic sense of his own unworthiness."
Nonetheless, love does find an incredulous Stephen. When an Italian String Quartet comes for a performance in County Clare, he sees Gabriella Castoldi, a lovely master violinist, and his days are forever altered. Gifted, enigmatic, and alone, she has never forgotten her father's description of love - it's like a cheap perfume that soon wears off.
When Philip, who is ill, learns that Stephen is in love, he fears for his son, believing such passion will be unrequited and only bring further pain. "Desperate for a stay of death to help his son," Philip makes a pact with God - "If you let me live.....I will try and do some act of goodness each day." To this end he withdraws a major portion of his savings to give away.
The naive, introverted Stephen, to his utter surprise, boundless joy, and sometimes dismay, recognizes that he is in love. Forgetting all else, including his teaching position, he begins an ardent pursuit of Gabriella. Puzzlement is her first response, followed by disbelief that a man capable of such selfless devotion could exist. Her reaction is appropriate, as there is common ground between them: "the expectation of failure and the familiarity of despair."
For Stephen. Gabriella's acquiescence is hard won, and even more difficult to keep. They are together only briefly when Gabriella announces that she is returning to Venice, and even as she speaks "wondering why she felt the brutal necessity of testing love, of bending its back towards breaking, and trying to bring on before time the grief she imagined was inevitable."
There's mysticism in this story - mysticism in the beliefs of the unforgettably fey Nelly Grant, the greengrocer who nourishes the couple. There is also magic - magic in the pen of Niall Williams who stunningly extrapolates the essence of love. Read As It Is In Heaven and rejoice.
Full of details, it describes places good as a picture. Sometimes better...
It is hard as a stone. Read more
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