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The unrequited love of "A Friend in the Trade", the rejection of heroism in "The Mourning" or the renunciation of personal fulfilment, for familial or even national interests in "The Hill Bachelors" combine to establish pathos as the key tone of the collection. In the title story, 29-year-old Paulie returns to work the land of his fathers on a desolate hillside to the west of Ireland, full-knowing that this means he will never marry: "Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own." Many of the stories are set in Ireland, and these have a richness of imagery and lyrical intensity that at times brings them close to prose poems. "Low Sunday, 1950," recalls Yeats' "terrible beauty" in its imagery of a landscape haunted by history; while "The Virgin's Gift" combines descriptive simplicity with religious allegory in a moving tale of a man's return to his parents after 40 years of self-imposed exile. --Robert Mighall --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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On the steps of the Scheles' house, stained glass on either side of the brown front door, Sidney shakes the rain from his plastic mackintosh, taking it off to do so. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
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Acknowledged by many to be the master of his oeuvre, Trevor commands our attention with dignity and subtlety. Amazingly adept at shifting perspectives from male to female in varying locations and scenes, the author's championship form is again evident in The Hill Bachelors.
His initial offering, "Three People" is an incisive rendering of the toll of fabrication. A trio share a secret too dark for utterance which binds them together yet holds love at bay.
A lonely minister's life is compassionately observed in "Of The Cloth." The Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice oversees three small churches, "...one of them now unattended, each of them remote, as his rectory was, as his life was." He lives alone in the rectory where "Emptily, all sound came twice because an echo added a pretence of more activity than there was, as if in mercy offering companionship."
Bea, a nine-year-old with long dark hair, in "Good News" hopes that a movie part will heal the rupture in her family, while Clione in "A Friend in the Trade" is a middle-aged woman with whom "Beauty has not finished." She knows what is unspoken and feels only pity for an unrequited love.
Trevor's spare prose shimmers in the summary paragraph of "The Virgin's Gift," as he describes a son's return to his now frail, elderly parents: "No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendour, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobweb of this mercy, the gift of a son given again."
Another story takes place on the eve of a wedding when a game forces a young couple to confront the differences in one another. With "Against The Odds," Trevor displays his gift for knowing the female heart as an older woman rues her past while fearing she has jeopardized a chance for happiness.
Both eloquent and elegant, Trevor's work is meat compared to the broth of some of today's fiction. He continues to astound as he explores the complexities of human relationships with sympathetic candor. The Hill Bachelors is yet another triumph for the most accomplished storyteller of our day.
I say modern, for his stories here are as likely to be set in London, Wales or France, as the backwaters of neglected corners of Ireland which is his usual geographical milieu. They depict what is essential and eternal about good people and they often convey unease about people who may not be so good, while viewing their frailties or transgressions with an understanding eye. He exemplifies the opposite of what John Major so cynically advised, as his writing allows us to understand a little more and condemn a little less.
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