William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections.
William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. But since reaching the standard age for retirement, Trevor has produced four further volumes, and now Penguin has brought out a handsome new edition, in two slipcased volumes.
The industry is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the quality. Trevor is routinely described as the world’s greatest living writer of short stories (I suppose the competition is Alice Munro), which makes the reviewer’s task a little tricky. It boils down to this: is he?
Those already familiar with Trevor’s stories know the answer already, and need not bother with the rest of this piece: you will be better employed simply spending the book tokens you got for Christmas on this collection. You may not want to spend several days reading 133 stories, spread over 1,800 or so pages, at a stretch (though I have seldom enjoyed a job so much), but you won’t be doing that. You will be putting them on your bedside table, where they will become as permanent a fixture as the lamp, and where they will keep you company for the rest of your life.
How should I go about justifying these extravagant claims to those who have not read Trevor’s short stories? What is arresting, seeing them gathered together, is the remarkable consistency in quality and tone which has been present from the first, ‘A Meeting in Middle Age’, in which the brash, frightful Mrs da Tanka meets a shy, cautious bachelor who has been paid to fabricate grounds for her divorce, to the last, ‘Folie à Deux’, in which two middle-aged men encounter one another for the first time since a boyhood incident in which they drowned a dog.
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