In origin, “glee” is related to both light (gleam) and music.
This Is Happiness is spiced with both such elements of glee: light and reels of music. A soggy Irish village suddenly experiences days of sunlight (“It’s roasting!”), and a sound-starved, saddened 17-year-old suddenly hears the bellow of concertina and screech of fiddle at the center of lively pubs. Second, the word “glee” appears only once in the novel, in a description of a character named Ganga: “Staying true to form and the Fahean way, my grandparents had made no comment, but I knew, inside, Ganga was all bubbles of glee—he slipped me a ten-shilling note,