An indisputable masterpiece

Of how many novelists can it be said that they have never written a bad sentence? Well, it can be said of William Trevor, as it could of his fellow countryman John McGahern, and of many another Irish novelist. What was it that so formed them, to write such elegant, flexible, lucid, beautiful but serviceable prose? Instead of spending time doing MA courses in Creative Writing, all aspirants should be locked in a castle with only the novels of Trevor and McGahern to read and re-read. That would teach them how it should be done.

It was Edna O’Brien, another Irish novelist, who said ‘Love and Death, that’s all any of us ever writes about,’ and that, together with the multi-faceted relationships within families and among neighbours in a small community are indeed what William Trevor writes about so wonderfully well. He is an elegiac, thoughtful novelist but, as the very best, standing slightly back from his characters and their world, the better to observe them, and to maintain clarity of vision. But he is always compassionate, always affectionate. I know of few other writers who better understand and exemplify ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner.’

Love and Summer is set in the small town of Rathmoye, where nothing happens and yet everything happens, life trundles along, sometimes even seeming to go backwards, and death and grief intervene. And love.

There are two separate strands to the story, two sets of people who become briefly interwoven, and two onlookers who see most but by no means all of the game. Still, this being a small and nosy place, what they do not see in reality their imaginations can satisfactorily supply.

Dillahan is a farmer whose wife and infant were killed together in a dreadful accident but who plods stoically on, bearing his grief deep down.