This is a fantastic collection of short stories that has kept me fascinated for much of the three years I spent dipping in and out of its 1200+ pages of varied and masterfully written tales. I am hard pressed to find a single dud story in this hefty volume, and what is more amazing is that this collection only contains Trevor’s extensive oeuvre up to the early 90s. It even includes his novella, “Matilda’s England”, which fully deserves a review of its own as an independent work. Trevor’s skill at unraveling the subtleties in relationships, like the malice and evil hiding behind fine manners and social niceties, and making something seemingly peripheral stand out and take centrestage, are all very much evident in these stories.
The Irish background and setting of the stories are evident in the little histories and traditions that surface now and then, though never overwhelming the narrative, which remain firmly fixed on the foibles of the human heart. Be it the schoolgirl infatuated with her Literature teacher with a sordid past, hoping that she could be part of the present narrative in “Mr Tennyson”, or the recently widowed Irish rector who welcomes home his estranged daughter but is increasingly concerned about the agenda of her Cockney-spewing male companion with a strangely militant knowledge of Irish history in “Autumn Sunshine”, they are at heart stories about the unwieldiness of relationships, especially the father-daughter relationship in the latter story.
In another father-daughter pairing, “On the Zattere”, a recently widowed man visits Venice with his adult daughter who had moved in to keep him company and they each experience their respective losses and articulate them differently. The daughter is a little resentful of his apparently debonair attitude, as if having forgotten his wife and the significance of the places they used to visit in Venice together, while she struggles with the end of a lengthy romance. They find that they are unable to communicate, each physically present but each not understanding the other.
At times, the macabre surfaces in the most unexpected places. In “The Teddy-bears’ Picnic”, a seemingly innocuous story about a pair of newlyweds’ quarrel that over a picnic that shows up the deep chasm between the couple, leads to a childhood memory of a dangerous stunt that the husband had pulled as a boy, all for the sake of getting vengeful attention back on himself, revealing his pathological side. That these baser instincts are surfacing again portend horrifying consequences.
Trevor’s sleight of hand in subtle scene changes is also very much apparent in “The Time of Year”, where a shy history student, Valerie, with a tragic backstory, relives the past even as she sits in the living room of her professor’s house at a pre-Christmas party she had been coerced to attend. The way the scene shifts is captured in the following passage: “… in the room the students and the Professor were shadows of a kind, the music a distant piping. The swish of wind was in the room, and the shingle, cold on her bare feet; so were the two flat stones they’d placed on their clothes to keep them from blowing away”, where the reader is transported from the living room party to a shore where the tragic incident had happened.
There are no promises of firm answers or fair endings in Trevor’s stories, and if anything, they reveal the helplessness of ordinary people trying their best to do what is right. In “Being Stolen From”, middle-aged Bridget finds the young mother of the girl she had adopted at her door, demanding for the return of her child. In the space of a mere fifteen pages, Trevor shows us Bridget’s intense loneliness, having been abandoned by her philandering husband of 20 years, as she struggles to hold on to her adopted child, and yet knowing she would ultimately be asked to “do the right thing”, through the hesitation in the people whom she trusts would help her.
Not one to shy away from sexually charged topics either, despite the conservative background of most of his characters, the revelation of such aspects of their lives is all the more shocking and yet reassuringly authentic. The tone is totally devoid of condemnation but only of understanding and empathy. It could be the coupling of a wealthy widow with her late husband’s employee in “Bodily Secrets”, that is more a mutually beneficial transaction than marital companionship, or hints of illicit relationships between boarding school boys in “A School Story”. Likewise, there is no judgment of the young woman on a adulterous farewell weekend at “The Paradise Lounge” in the dilapidated railway town, when she acknowledges a kindred spirit in a much older woman at the bar, both in circumstances vastly different and yet strangely similar.
Unconventional relationships and unexpected meetings are also seen in these stories. In “A Trinity”, a benign boss sponsors a young couple’s belated honeymoon but the strange undercurrents in their relationship with the old man rise to the surface when the couple ends up with a wrong tour group in an entirely different holiday destination. In “The Third Party”, two men meet at a bar to talk about one of their wives who is the other’s mistress, calmly and civilly discussing the next step as if it was an everyday occurrence.
Memories of lost opportunities or unspoken feelings are dealt with in “In Love with Adriadne” and “The Printmaker”, whether it is an impossible relationship between a young governess and her employer, or a young medical student with his landlady’s reticent daughter, they make indelible marks in the respective protagonists’ lives that they never quite recover from.
The family is not always the refuge it purports to be, even when tragedy strikes. In “A Husband’s Return”, Maura Brigid is doubly wronged by the abandonment by her husband with her flighty sister Bernadette, but as the story progresses, we find that it is so easy to resort to victim blaming when tragedy unfolds, especially when unbalanced family dynamics are involved. On the other hand, family reunions are never quite what they seem as well. More often than not, perfectly ordinary people are repulsed by their family, with or without good reason. In “Coffee With Oliver”, a divorcee thinks his daughter has finally come to seek him out and is disappointed when he realizes it was all a coincidence and that she does not welcome any contact with him. The reader’s initial sympathies for the estranged father are thwarted when they get to the heart of his smallish flaws and realize they are indicative of a larger problem, without even his full cognizance of his culpability in the failure of his marriage and his rejection by his daughter.
Trevor’s beautiful prose shines through in all of these stories, and his preternatural ability to inhabit any of his characters, regardless of their age, gender or background, makes this a timeless literary gem.
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