Linked by an oblique sadness

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the price one sometimes pays for dignity and even a sort of wisdom.

The cast will be familiar from earlier stories, divided in the main between provincial Irish and metropolitan adulterers on their lunch break. None of these people goes in for full disclosure. They speak in lowered voices, or not at all, like the young man in ‘The Dressmaker’s Child’ who has witnessed something incriminating and who is stalked by an onlooker to whom he will be forced to return. Or Katherine, in ‘The Room’, who sleeps with a man she hardly knows because the burden of keeping silent about one particular past action is too difficult to bear. These people do all they can to avoid explaining themselves, yet it is not guilt that inhibits them but rather knowledge. To give voice to this knowledge would destroy the impassivity they have cultivated and put them at far greater risk. The writing, too, is impassive, as it must be when dealing with matters to which there is no resolution. There is a sense of things better left unsaid, a discretion which paradoxically creates that unease which Trevor never fails to impart.