Irish Tragedies

IN THE 20 YEARS since the publication of his first novel. The Old Boys, William Trevor has quietly produced a substantial body of fiction which has gathered a wide spectrum of admirers (especially in Britain) But Trevor's work has never received quite the same amount of literary attention that has been enjoyed by many lesser contemporary British writers. So it is a very good thing that Penguin has brought out an edition of his five collections of short stories to coincide with the publication of Trevor's ninth novel. Fools of Fortune.

The Stories of William Trevor will surely establish Trevor as one of the most masterful post-War practitioners of the genre. These 800 pages contain a formidable array of stories--stories which delve into the comic and tragic interiors of ordinary lives, revealing an extraordinary subtlety of observation and perception. No peripheral backwater of society no commonplace experience is too mundane to attract the sympathetic interest of this writer. Just as bleak, hollow cocoons of loneliness make up much of Philip Larkin's poetry, is unglamorous, unremarkable lives which are the raw materials of Trevor's prose. But far from being dull, these are absorbing, seamless evocations of character and life style, of curiously inept human beings muddling through life's complications. Infused with a gentle wit and narrated in an unobtrusively direct style. Trevor's stories are more palatable and accessible than Larkin's poems--not burdened by a heaviness of style or mood, but engaging with their attractive blend of wistful melancholy.

Beyond the Pale, the title story of a 1981 Trevor collection, immediately allays any tears that Trevor's subject matter might result in dry and repetitive models. A Georgian seaside lodge on the Irish coast provides the setting for an explosive tale of suburban English couples holidaying in June, playing bridge and going for cliff walks just as they have done for years. Swapping bed as often as bridge-partners, the bonds and tensions webbing these people together is wonderfully conveyed the prejudices and biases that the characters display in their attitudes both towards each other and towards Ireland are threaded subtly beneath the first-person narration of one of the wives. Theirs is an unambitious rural retreat in which "it was impossible to believe that somewhere else the unpleasantness was going on." The troubles of Ireland are at a safe distance until one of their own number. Cynthia (whose husband the narrator sleeps with) hitherto considered to be rather weak and characterless--stuns them all with a vicious, almost raving outburst of pent-up emotions. A superbly crafted, extended passage has Cynthia confront her companions with the facts about themselves and a manic account of the viciousness, violence and pervasive sickness of the Irish conflict.

In distinct contrast to this edgy placement of Englishmen on Irish soil (a juxtaposition which comes up repeatedly in Trevor, and specifically in his latest novel, Fools of Fortune); a trilogy of stories entitled Matilda's England is a sublime, melancholic pattern of a woman's reminiscences of a life, of the eras of a country house, of tennis parties and unfulfilled relationships. Here is the retreat into the past, the solace of remembering old pleasures, the ghostly hovering of the past over present dissatisfaction that colors so much of Trevor's work.

I could sense her thinking of the days when my father was alive, when... we were all together in the farm-house, not knowing we were happy.

But if Ralphie walked in now I would take his hand and say I was sorry for the cruelty that possessed me and would not go away... perhaps after all this time Ralphie would understand and believe, but Ralphie, I know, will never return.

The sadness in Trevor's lives of everything being unresolved, of botched relationships and of displaced circumstances is the reality of the human condition which remains after reading what is very often a highly entertaining and always straightforwardly narrated story.

IT WOULD BE UNFAIR to place any one of William Trevor's novels alongside his collected stories on the reviewer's rostrum; for there is a breadth of scope and achievement in this collection, a complex structure of "development," on compassing many near-perfect stories, that is bound to overshadow the specific range of a single novel. Fools of Fortune, while it is engrossing stuff like virtually everything Trevor writes, takes on too great a task in too little space. ranging over the years 1918 to 1983, including a story of doomed love between an Irishman and his English cousin, and rupturing the plot with a devising tragedy in which the young protagonist's father and sisters are massacred by the "Black and Tans," Fools of Fortuneencompasses the sort of tragedy and desolation that might have kept Thomas Hardy going for a few hundred pages. In many respects this is the skeleton of a novel, containing the outlines of an extended tragedy but lacking the body of narrative that usually fills out Trevor's fictions so convincingly, We have, instead, scenes from a tragedy, ghostly excerpts from the history of an Anglo-Irish family.

The first half of the novel is narrated by its protagonist, Willie Quinton, and begins with a setting of his early childhood at the idyllic country mansion called Kilnegh in County Cork; this is followed by an extended description of life at Willie's boarding school--a passage that is too long and distracting, and reads, with its contrived nicknames for masters (Mad Mack, Hopeless Gibbon) and standard schoolboy fare, too much like an inserted set-piece; finally there is the massacre which turns Willie's mother to alcohol and then suicide. This leads to an act of revenge that forces him to remain abroad for most of his life, and which drives his first inquisitive, then mute daughter into a saintly insanity.

Marianne, Willie's beloved cousin from England, takes up the narrative from the time of her pregnancy by him. She observes that "Destruction casts shadows that are always there," and she herself is "haunted by fragments of disjointed dreams in which [she] was endlessly pursued by [her] parents' weeping"; for Marianne has left her comfortable home in England to come on a hopeless search and then long vigil for Willie. And she proceeds wanted, like Hardy's Tess, from one to the other of Willie Quinton's old acquaintances, repeating the refrain "I am going to have Willie's baby," which resounds like a death knell across rural Ireland:

I walked over the frozen fields, watching the birds as they poked for grubs on the riverbank, not caring where I went or how I felt.

It was extraordinary that people did not guess at my misery, that the punishment I suffered did not show in my face."

And so the tragedy rolls on and is visited upon the daughter Imelda. Time accelerates, the narrative sections become more brief and informational, and there is only one resolution--a final tranquility--in the arrangement of Quinton bones at Kilneagh--"no matter how death came." And it is a sad picture in the end:

Truncated lives, creatures of the shadows. Fools of fortune, as his father would have said; ghosts we became.

But it is a sadness too much forced on us by the pilot's multifarious tragedies and not earned by the fleshing out of involving characters (a quality that distinguishes so many of Trevor's short stories). Feels of Fortune remains; nevertheless, a brave attempt to grapple with the Irish tragedy.