William Trevor (1928–2016)

These ten poignant stories are exquisite and instantly atmospheric, giving vivid glimpses of varied lives, often involving widows, widowers, or other solitary souls, who seem broadly content, but are contemplating what to do now. Many of the stories have two main threads that seem unrelated but come together.

The understated style reflects the importance of what is not, or cannot, be said in the stories themselves.

Secrets, whether deliberately kept or unconsciously buried, abound. show more Sometimes the past is revealed, but in other cases, the fear is enough. And some remain happy in their denial or ignorance.

Secrecy often implies victims, but several of these stories are deliciously ambiguous about whether there is a victim, and if so, which of the characters it is.

Reviews of individual stories (no spoilers)

1. The Piano Teacher’s Pupil, 4*
By the second page, I felt I’d known the piano teacher all my life: the arch of her story, and her quotidian regime. She’s the sort of single middle-aged woman who used to be called a spinster and for whom people feel sorry. But she’s sure she’s not unhappy, and is cheered by memories of happiness. And then a new joy: a brilliant new pupil, though there’s something a little odd.
“Each time after the boy left there was a mockery in the music that faintly lingered.”
She figures out the facts, but she doesn’t need to understand or hear any excuse. She’s the grateful recipient of genius.

Image: Porcelain swan - totemic in the story (Source.)

2. The Crippled Man, 3*
The title set me on edge from the start, and word recurs throughout, but that fits the unsettling tone of the story. Itinerant brothers knock at the crippled man’s door, offering to paint the house, while his cousin-cum-carer is out.
“Wherever they were, they circumvented what they did not call the system, since it was not a word they knew.... Survival was their immediate purpose, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.”
Nothing is clear: not (initially) to the reader, not to the painters whose English and maybe intelligence is limited, nor to the carer or the crippled man whose communication is also vague and sometimes veiled. Is the apparent ending the actual one? Read it and decide for yourself.

3. At the Caffè Daria, 4*
“What happens, Anita wonders, to people who walk away.”
The café has an origin story that could be a story in this collection in its own right: after WW2, a wealthy Italian, heartbroken by his wife’s leaving him for another man, ended up in London, and founded a stylish café in her memory. But that’s just the first two of twenty pages.
“He was seized, in desperation, with eccentricity: to do something to confirm his existence.”
The real story concerns a former dancer who’s been a regular customer since childhood, and her best friend from dance days. All three stories are linked by betrayal and women walking away.
“Childless women as they are, they might turn to one another now. But pretence’s truth is shoddy, without a heart. And the past is too far off, its laughter does not echo, its flimsy shadows fall away.”

4. Taking Mr Ravenswood, 4*
The opening sentence, a long, hanging-modifier garden-path one, demonstrates a great writer flouting the “rules”:
“Belonging to her time on the counters - before they removed her upstairs to Customer Care - Mr Ravenswood’s easy smile stirred in Rosanne’s memory, the paisley handkerchief tidily protruding from the top pocket of a softly checked jacket, the tweed hat on the counter for the duration of whatever transaction there was.”
What at first seems the chance of escapist respite from a life of second-best and failure, develops into a darker plan - or two. Who is preying on who?
“Guilt tells you about yourself.”

5. Mrs Crasthorpe, 4*
It opens with Mrs Crasthorpe’s “profound humiliation” as the sole mourner at her husband’s bleak funeral, in a village he requested, though she does not know why. But she’s a woman of secrets herself: buried so she can rise in the world.
Her journey through grief and attempting to forge a new life is contrasted with that of Etheridge, a man whose path occasionally crosses hers, though he wishes it didn’t. Nevertheless, he’s a gentle man and a gentleman. He can keep other people’s secrets.

6. The Unknown Girl, 3*
A young woman steps into traffic and is killed. Who is she? There is an answer of sorts, but it tells us almost nothing. She is indeed unknown, and was perhaps unknowable.

7. Making Conversation, 4*
This one is almost humorous, as two women discuss how they perceive their relationship with a man who is largely off-stage. One unreliable narrator (if so, which?), or two?

8. Giotto’s Angels, 4*

Image: Giotto’s Angels in The Lamentation (Source.)

“When privately he considered his life - as much of it as he knew - it seemed to be a thing of unrelated shred and blurs, something like the damaged canvases that were brought to him for attention.”
A picture restorer with severe but intermittent amnesia makes for a different sort of unreliable narrator (not that he actually narrates the story). He has various tricks and routines to navigate life, but it’s not easy, and he’s therefore vulnerable. I was reminded a little of Ogawa’s The Housekeeper + The Professor (see my review HERE).
“A memory came to him in the way it sometimes did, emerging from nowhere but very clear… [but] he couldn’t hold it. Slippery like some old snake it was.”
I loved and believed the portrayal of Constantine Naylor, but I didn’t quite believe in the other person in the story (how they justify their actions, and what they (nearly) do at the end).

9. An Idyll in Winter, 4*
“Often their thoughts touched before words expressed them.”
A 12-year old girl has a 22-year old male tutor living with the family over the summer in a fairly remote northern farm. Inevitably, the Brontes come to mind (even before he says the moors are “Very Heathcliffian”), and inevitably Mary Bella develops a crush on Anthony, but the story itself develops in unexpected ways.

10. The Women, 5*
Cecilia is 14, has always known her mother is “not here”, but despite a good relationship with her father, is not sure if that means she left or died, but “she lived with her uncertainty”.
On the advice of friends, Cecilia’s father sends her to boarding school, “to be a girl among other girls”. She hates it at first, settles in, and the story progresses in a somewhat simplistic boarding-school story style, reflecting Cecilia’s youth. The women of the title are fully formed but initially mysterious figures, and Cecilia’s reactions are in character. It’s hard to explain why I thought this story was the best of the set, but perhaps the closing paragraph gives an idea:
“The flimsy exercise in assumption and surmise crept, unsummoned, into Cecilia’s thoughts and did not go away. Shakily challenging the apparent, the almost certain, its suppositions were vague, inchoate. Yet they were there, and Cecilia reached out for their whisper of consoling doubt.”

Quotes

“She read the novels that time’s esteem kept alive, and judged contemporary fiction for herself.”

“There was excitement in the shadowlands of what might have been.”

“Suppositions were vague, inchoate. Yet they were there, and Cecilia reached out for their whisper of consoling doubt.”

“Television was something for an audience of more than one.”

“His continuing anger at the careless greed of death.”

“Obedient to her vanity, the grey in her hair was softened in an artificial way, her skin was daily cared for, its small ravages patiently repaired.”

“His eyes… had a most look, suggesting a residue of tears, and yet were not quite sad. It was more sentiment than sorrow.”

Why this, why now?

I first read William Trevor four years ago: a haunting novel, The Story of Lucy Gault (see my HERE). I intended to read another, but during coronavirus pandemic, I’m drawn more to short pieces, so when Laysee wrote a sublime review of these stories (HERE), I knew now was the time.

A little background

Julian Barnes shared this insight from his late wife, Pat Kavanagh, who was Trevor’s long-term literary agent:
“He liked to sit on park benches and eavesdrop on conversations; but that he never wanted to listen to a whole story, so would get up and move on as soon as he had heard the small amount he needed to trigger his further imaginings.”

These “last stories” were apparently written as a collection and found by his son as a completed manuscript after his death, aged 88, in 2016. However, many of them had been published in The New Yorker, some as much as ten years earlier. show less

Three, phwit, four, five

The components are simple and plain, but Trevor is a master storyteller, skilled at pacing. For 124 pages (58%), I thought this would be a good but unremarkable 3*. I was immersed in the ordinary, waiting for the promised plot to start.

When the tension was almost too much, phwit: Trevor let slip Cupid’s arrow, and the book became a firm 4*. I was captivated by what was tantalisingly understated and opaque, feeling like Miss Connulty, peering through net curtains: show more will they, won’t they… did they?!

The fickle Irish breeze meant I was never sure exactly where the arrow would land nor what the consequences would be. When I closed the book, the arrow was still in flight. A a clear 5*.

Image: Silhouette of a man firing an arrow, at sunset/sunrise (Source)

The quotidian sucks you in

“Farmers brought in livestock on the first Monday of every month, and borrowed money from one of Rathmoye’s two banks. They had their teeth drawn by the dentist who practiced in the Square.”

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, for a while, nothing happened. Then, after a little longer, nothing continued to happen. I came to know the town and its inhabitants with intimate detachment: ordinary people doing ordinary things, in great detail.

There is also a vagueness that lends a mythical air. It’s set:
“Some years after the middle of the last century.”
The town mythologises itself:
“It was an exaggeration when people said that the Connultys owned half of Rathmoye.”
People even mythologise how little happens there:
“Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said, but most of them went on living there. It was the young who left – for Dublin or Cork or Limerick, for England, sometimes for America. A lot came back. That nothing happened was an exaggeration too.”

It reminds me of Kent Haruf’s novels (see my reviews HERE), set in the small fictitious town of Holt, Colorado: simple prose for people with apparently simple lives.

“They sat not speaking, and time seemed not to pass.”
In Rathmoye and Holt, what really matters is rarely spoken of: the things people don’t admit, even to themselves. Sometimes it’s trivial, and other times it’s profound, but either way, there’s a bewitching elusiveness.

Ingredients

Characters that could be caricatures, or at least clichéd, are instead utterly credible. Most are integral to the novel (with the possible exception of Bernadette and John Paul), but knowing how they will affect the plot is like guessing which raindrops on a windowpane will merge, which will not, and which will reach the windowsill first: fascinating but unknowable.

• A young farmer’s wife, raised by nuns in a home for foundlings.
• A good man, haunted by tragedy.
• A directionless young man, alone in the world, casting aside what little he has left.
• A nosey and embittered spinster who runs a guest house.
• A wise fool.
• A small town, a farm, a big house, and bicycles.
• A few summer months.
• Not much religion (and the nuns at the foundling home were kind).

Image: Raindrops falling down a windowpane (Source)

Love from death

“The day advanced in Rathmoye. Disturbed by death, the town settled again into its many routines.”

This is described as being about “forbidden love and the possibility of starting over”. And it is. But it’s just as much about the aftermath of death: it opens with a funeral, key characters meet because of it, and all the main figures are in their current situation (geographical, relationship-wise, and mental/emotional) as a direct consequence of death. When Florian dabbles in photography, it’s unpeopled abandonment (the charred remnants of a cinema) and dilapidation (his family home) that draw his focus. He has a black dog.

“Mrs Connulty’s daughter fondled the jewellery that now was hers…
Delicious death had been a richer compensation than she had ever dreamed of. She was in charge, and today she wore the pearls.”

The past steals happiness and sometimes pain; it stores secrets and loss, and sometimes it gives opportunity. All the main characters are tentatively feeling its boundaries, wondering if they can be free. All, apart from Orpen Wren, who contentedly lives more in the past than the present.

The end may be a beginning

• What happens next?
• Who deserves happiness?
• Who will be happy and how?
• Which secrets can and should remain secret, and at what cost?
• Is love at (nearly) first sight possible, and can it last?
• Is dull contentment a more reliable alternative?

Despite the big questions, the shadow of death, doubts about the integrity of some of the characters, and the lack of a happy ending, it’s told with the light touch of the titular season.

Image: Old bicycle outside old Irish cottage (Source)

Quotes

• “A child of exiles as he was - to become an exile himself.”

• “Their faded dazzle belittled the rows of photographs.” [old watercolour sketches]

• “He knew now he would exploit imagination’s ragged bits and pieces, tease order out of formless nothings, begin again, and then again.”

• “Content but for her childlessness.”

• “A fly crept about on the ceiling and idly he watched it… He continued his observation of the rambling fly as it went about whatever task it had set itself.”

• “He had made a hell for her… Pity now was nourished by his greater guilt.”

The rest are poignant and worth noting, but contain moderate spoilers:

• “She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband. Love hadn’t come into it… When she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no.”

• “She was anticipating too much, that what had begun as fantasy was every day acquiring a little more of reality.”

• “He had sought to prolong a friendship which summer had almost made an idyll of. . . . He had loved being loved, and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough.”

• “He hoped it would be difficult to forget Ellie Dillahan.”

• “In the silent kitchen it came coldly to her that the tragedy of the man who had taken her into his house was more awful by far than love’s denial. It came like clarity in confusion, there was a certainty: it was too late. And it came coldly too, that the truth she yet might tell to draw the sting of his agony would cause more suffering than she could inflict, more than any man who had done no wrong deserved.”
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So much prose writing style by today's authors --even the literary lights we admire -- is crass, hard edged, often blunt and profane. I'm ok with this since so much else in the works of our genius writers is praise worthy -- themes, structure, complex portrayals of the human condition. But, it's fitting in remembering the incomparable William Trevor to savor his marvelous prose, so rich, subtle and evocative. In describing a character in just two sentences Trevor can give us a deeply nuanced show more sense of the character's essence and relationship to time, place and others. His writing is amazing in how it distills so much depth of meaning in so economical a fashion. Perhaps it's his ability to so effortlessly convey such depth that made him the master of the short story genre.

In his works, including his novels, Trevor often first introduces us to people that are recognizable and situations that are comprehensible, but then inserts a character who will dramatically alter the predictable paths of the lives of these people. In "Other People's Worlds", Julia Ferndale is a 47 year-old widow living with her mother in comfortable circumstances. Julia views other people a bit too incautiously; she has a compassionate outlook that her hard-edged mother thinks could stand a bit more skepticism. Julia has fallen in love with a much younger man, Francis Tyte, and they are set to be married in a few weeks. Francis is a journeyman actor, a handsome, charming man who is principally known for his appearance in a television commercial. Francis has a smooth and ingratiating personality and he's captured the affection of Julia's entire family.

Francis is an utter fraud, a sociopath who has manipulated and defrauded women and couples across the country. Everything he has told Julia about his past is false, including the story that his parents were killed in a railway accident; they are alive in a retirement home. Francis is married to a much older women who he has abandoned. In London he had taken up with Doris, a shop girl, with whom he's had Joy, a hapless girl now twelve years-old. Doris is obsessed with her "Frankie" who stops by from time-to-time but keeps from making their relationship permanent with lies about his "dying" wife who he cannot abandon. It is suggested that Francis was sexually abused as a child, but this could be a lie. We do learn that on late night jaunts into London's seamier district he performs sexual acts with men for money.

Julia and Francis are married and depart on their honeymoon to Italy where on the first day Francis announces that he has no intention to remain with Julia and gets her in her shock to sign over some valuable jewelry he has had his eye on. Julia returns to England shattered, but doesn't wish to make this fraud public. Julia was a deeply religious Catholic, but in a counseling session with her priest we see that this event has shattered her belief that God is merciful and just.

There is a newspaper account of Francis's cruel act (the hotel manager had notified the Italian police) and thus learning about Julia Doris seeks her out. Doris is becoming increasingly unbalanced and has developed a delusion that an actress seen with Francis has stolen him from her. Doris's drinking is out of control and she is making threatening statements toward the actress. Julia tries to intervene by going to London to stop Doris who is on a drinking binge and can't be found. Julia becomes aware of Joy's plight and there's a growing indication that she must do something to save this child. Doris's threats to the actress are not fulfilled, but it is learned from the newspaper that a woman matching Francis's wife has been murdered. Doris is shown to be locked away somewhere, either prison or an asylum.

Another wonderful aspect of Trevor's plots is that he never takes the cheap path to resolving the conflicts created for the characters. What could for some authors be a revenge ending where Francis gets what he deserves turns out quite differently for Julia. She has been deeply hurt by Francis but she knows that her own weakness is part of the cause of this. She once loved Francis but now sees him as a pitiful person whose sickness stirs some degree of compassion, a trait that has remained despite the wounds she has suffered. A letter from Germany arrives in which Francis absolves himself from any blame and asks for money. Julia does so (and it seems will continue to do so), not out of love or any desire to entice him back, but because her core value of empathizing with "Other People's Worlds" remains within her, even though this has brought darkness to her. show less

Felicia is a young and naïve Irish woman. When she becomes pregnant, her father spurns her, and she travels to England to find the man responsible, feeling sure he will “do the right thing.” In England, during her search, she meets Mr. Hilditch, who is portrayed as enigmatic and ominously obsessive. The reader will soon realize he is a master manipulator. Felicia is trusting and easily misled. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of Felicia and Mr. Hilditch, providing insight show more into their inner worlds.

Themes include isolation, loss of innocence, and the lingering impact of trauma. Felicia is a stranger in a foreign land, grappling with language barriers and cultural differences. Mr. Hilditch is emotionally isolated due to his disturbing past and his inability to form genuine connections. Readers will quickly realize that he is taking advantage of Felicia’s trusting nature. The author builds suspense by inducing a dread that Felicia will fall victim to his machinations. It unfolds in the manner of a psychological thriller; however, I am pretty sure thriller lovers will be disappointed, as it is almost entirely character driven and there is little “action.”

The writing style is subtle. Trevor expects readers to infer much about the characters’ actions. Eventually, past experiences will be revealed, and the reader will understand more about the motivations of the two main characters. It is more of an exploration of the damage caused by trauma, and how it negatively impacts social interactions. I ended up with mixed feelings. I liked the character development and the writing style but found it a bit slow and repetitive. show less