Miss Gomez and the Brethren

Not my favorite of Trevor's novel, but, as always, his writing is soft and subtle with deeply developed characters enduring pain in their ordinary, everyday lives. Miss Gomez is a Jamaican black women who ran away from an orphanage. As a child, she lacked emotion and had with no bonds with other children. She manages to emigrate to England where after a series of unskilled jobs becomes a stripper and then a prostitute, both activities taking her deeper in a gulf of depersonalized human contact. Miss Gomez spots an advertisement in a London paper for a church in Jamaica called "Brethren of the Way". The Brethren claim that happiness comes to those who pray for criminals and others who follow evil ways. The church asks its adherents to show more write to them of people who needs its prayer ministry and to send money to support the church's mission. She falls for this sect in a big way and zealously seeks to gain converts to it. She at last finds the way to emotional connections with others, but, importantly, she never actually meets the church "reverends"; her only ties are through their replies to her letters.

Miss Gomez makes her way to Crow Street, finding employment to clean a pet store operated by the widow Mrs. Bassett and an adjacent pub run by Mr. and Mrs. Tuke. Crow Street is an eerie devastation zone nearly entirely demolished to make way for new housing development. The only two premises remaining amidst the rubble are the pet store which Mrs. Bassett refuses to sell and the pub whose brewery leaseholder wants to stay open until the laborers on the project are finished.

In rooms above the pub reside Alban Roche who works in the pet store, Mr. Batt, a pensioner who is deaf and contemplating taking his own life, and Prudence, the Tuke's lonely hippy-like daughter. Alban has recently been released from gaol where he served a short sentence having been caught peeping on women who were undressing. He is fixated on the memory of his late devoted mother who he has come to realize he detested. He has taken a great interest in the pets and will inherit the store upon Mrs. Bassett's passing. Mr. Tuke is a milk-toast husband whose sole emotional attachment is to his Alsatian dog. He formerly was very close to his daughter, but they have become distant after he found out that Pru is from a liaison of Mrs. Tuke and other man. Mrs. Tuke is garrulous in her demeanor and garish in her dress. She is an alcoholic and is addicted to romance novels over which she floridly fantasizes. She is haughtily dismissive of an Irish labor from the project who is pursuing her, but without self-awareness that she is willingly doing so she sleeps with him.

Mrs. Bassett dies in her sleep and Alban inherits the pet store. His plan is to take the developer's offer of compensation and move the store to another location. Pru secretly loves Alban and finally makes him aware of it. Miss Gomez believes that they all are in need of, and will find solace, as she has, in her religion and she ceaselessly proselytizes them to join her church. She has a premonition that Alban will immanently commit a sex crime and she warns everyone of this. When Pru turns up missing everyone is convinced that she has been murdered and the police stage an investigation and search that receives national media attention. It turns out that Pru and Alban have located a premise for the store and she has spent hours out of sight working on readying it for the move. The hysteria spurred by Miss Gomez has turned the incident into a farce.

Pru and Alban start a new life together, but there are hints that it may not be permanent. Before the pub is relocated Mr. Tuke's beloved dog is killed by a pack of feral cats living in the ruins of Crow Street. He becomes more withdrawn and he begins to think that the Brethren might be what he needs in his life to offset his estrangement from his wife and daughter. Mr. Batt moves to new lodging and purchases aspirin that he contemplates using to end his life. His chance encounter with Miss Gomez turns around his thinking on this. She believes that she is an exemplar of fulfilling the Brethren's doctrines and writes to them of this. When after weeks she receives no reply she books a flight to Jamaica to meet the church's leaders in person. Her pilgrimage to the temple of her church ends up with discovery that the church was a scam that defrauded its distant faithful followers of their "tithes". There's a note of hope when she sees a notice for the "Assembly of God" offering services in Kingston.

Some of the scenes in the novel are quite comical, especially when Miss Gomez is firing the characters up about the crime she has foretold, but the comedy only serves to underscore the all-pervasive bathos about their lives. Miss Gomez and the others do not perceive the small tragedies of their circumstances are beyond their ability to control. She holds her religion to be the means of personal fulfillment; we are certain she will be betrayed by it. The Tuke's think that through the relocation of the pub their status will improve; we know there nothing about their inner lives that this will change. The metaphor of their ruined neighborhood parallels the desolation of their lives. The deep sadness Trevor conveys to the reader derives from the hopelessness that the characters can control the circumstances of their lives that bar their happiness, a sadness more profound because they are unaware of it. Think of the dog's fate for a moment. This powerful animal began to show fear about the feral cats and in the end he was killed by them. Are not these characters equally unable to master the forces beset them in their lives? Are any humans? show less

Willam Trevor details the triviality of everyday life. In fact, he bases entire books on it. In this story, Miss Gomez makes her way from an orphanage in Jamaica to London. After a series of jobs, including those of ill repute, she finds religion. Proselytizing in the street comes next, with little result, as these things often do.

She then finds herself in Crow Street, an area that is soon to be demolished in the interest of urban renewal. There Miss Gomez either causes, or plays a central part in a bit of havoc involving the proprietors, family, boarders and customers of The Thistle Arms, a pub and boarding house in its final days.

There’s desire there, among the people in this soon to be gone street. And humor – as there is in all show more of life, for those who can see it. Interspersed with the desire and humor is the seriousness of life, and how we each choose to live it. show less