Last Stories

A very prolific and long-standing writer of short stories reveals himself. William Trevor, who died in 2016, owned up to 133 short stories in the two-volume 2009
Collected Stories, and here are ten final ones, written in his last seven years. One shy of a gross, he might have had a character put it.

Reading through them, we see occasional echoes and repetitions; characteristic ways of looking at life, and of putting a story together; a slowly emerging political stance; a turn of phrase; some favourite words; a delight in sentences. The novels are splendid. The sequence from The Boarding House to Other People’s Worlds hardly misses a step, and The Children of Dynmouth (1976) is a masterpiece. But the stories are many and multiple, and give us a more total sense of Trevor. The more facets a solid object has, the more rounded it appears.

Trevor had a pungent literary personality that emerged in all sorts of minor ways. His names have a particular flavour — Mulvihill, Belhatchet, Frobisher, Thrive, Torridge, Unwill, or (a particular favourite of mine) Peggy Urch. Somewhere between Mervyn Peake and Victoria Wood, they seem perfectly possible, and even to reflect a respectable antiquity. And yet after a while one realises that one’s probably never met anyone with any of these names.

The same is true about the trappings and labels that flit through Trevor’s work: a character is brought up short by the revelation that someone called Olive Gramsmith is rumoured to be ‘a slapparat, whatever a slapparat was’; or that their mistress is cooking ‘a nice fresh mackerel in a custard sauce’. (‘He imagined he must have heard incorrectly: he could not believe that the sauce was a custard one.’)

That territory, of the strangeness of possible behaviour, is Trevor’s own.