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Summer
Books Humor, melancholy lurk in Irish writer's stories
AFTER RAIN By
William Trevor Viking, 222 pages, $22.95 hardback
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By STEPHEN BINNS
When The Collected Stories of William Trevor came out five
years ago, it seemed definitive -- the summing up of a long, masterly career in
what we have long been told is a dying form. It had the heft of a monument:
nearly 1,300 pages of prose that was itself sort of heavy, dense in its
concision.
As a kind of bonus, then, comes After Rain, a collection of
12 new stories that revisit familiar Trevor territory: the suburbs of London,
where people tend to create all kinds of emotional trouble by their
sophisticated suppression of emotion; the holiday spots of Italy, which are not
far enough away for travelers to escape the complications of home, so that the
interiors of the stories are still suburban London; the author's native
Ireland, where life may seem more simply lived but is no day at the beach
either.
Trevor is still in his 60s, so I suppose there was no good reason
to think he wouldn't be productive for a long time to come. What is truly
noteworthy -- and the real bonus -- is that some of these stories can be
counted among his most imaginatively crafted and most satisfying in their very
craftsmanship.
To borrow Virginia Woolf's line on Jane Austen, Trevor is a writer
difficult to catch in the act of being great. It is difficult though not
impossible to find passages of self-contained beauty; the beauty of his work is
usually revealed when we see the completion of his designs. Trevor is a
sometime sculptor and has spoken of the importance of shape in his writing.
Shape can be translated into a more blocky architectural term, structure, and
yet this is the element of fiction that can move us most delicately.
The collection itself is revealed to us as a carefully constructed
whole. The Annunciation scene on the dust jacket, we discover, illustrates the
title story, in which a similar picture in an Italian church inspires a sort of
self-annunciation. This story sets a theme of annunciation for the book or
rather lends the word annunciation to any unbidden arrival of insight in
the other stories.
"There is a soundlessness about the picture, the silence of a
mystery," thinks the English tourist, Harriet, in "After Rain." She has come
into the church during a storm, and leaves when it ends. The clear, fresh look
of the streets seems familiar to her, and then she realizes that the same
atmosphere was captured by the artist, in the wilderness behind the Virgin and
the angel. Walking through the transitory coolness, she begins to find answers
to a question that has long been perplexing her. As she moves farther from the
church, she begins to wonder about the source of this new clarity. It becomes a
new mystery to her; the story makes a very graceful arch, and we get a little
aesthetic thrill from this alone.
Trevor's annunciations function like James Joyce's famous
epiphanies in Dubliners, but here there seems less room between the
human and the idea of the divine for interpretations of irony, even though we
have in the book what appears to be an actual miracle to contrast with
everything earthly.
In "Lost Ground," a Protestant boy in rural Northern Ireland is
visited in his father's apple orchard by a ghostly woman who calls herself St.
Rosa. She tells him, "There is too much fear," and kisses him just as
cryptically. His father is a leading Orangeman in the village, his brother is a
"volunteer" in Belfast, and his uncle and brother-in-law are low-church
ministers. He takes up the family tradition of preaching, but preaches his
papist St. Rosa's message, which he has taken to be one of forgiveness.
At this point, our attention is pulled away from this quite
compelling mystery. The boy's family must silence him, and we follow the heart
mysteries of how they will go about pretending the whole thing never
happened.
We find this sort of thing often in Trevor. We wait for the twist
in the plot, and the twist comes when characters turn inward, away from the
plot. We can't blame them, of course. What is meat to a storyteller -- conflict
and crisis -- is what most of us scatter from like any defenseless animals.
But story triumphs over characters, in fiction as in truth.
Struggle though they will, Trevor's people get caught in situations that force
them to see "damage done to something as fragile as a dream."
In the story where that line occurs, "The Piano Tuner's Wives,"
the dashed dream is just an old man's comfort in the provisions of love left by
his departed first wife. In "Widows," it is just an old woman's petty wish that
her sister be as lonely as she. In "Timothy's Birthday," it is an old couple's
humble assumption that their son likes them. Throughout the book, the homeliest
human desires are elevated, one might say, by disproportionate
disappointment.
The melancholy of this is leavened by a humor that contains the
best of both worlds, English dryness and Irish sweetness. But the humor must
also pull against an inherent melancholy here. One of Trevor's specialties is
the story that attempts to digest a whole life, without the novel's space for
the unimportant stretches of time where much of happiness lies. Reading Trevor
can be somewhat like skimming a biography to see how it ends, and biographies
do not end happily.
Stephen Binns is a freelance writer who lives in Kansas City
and whose work has appeared, among other places, in The Atlantic
Monthly.
National Catholic Reporter, May 23,
1997
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