Category: William Trevor

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Miss Gomez and the Brethren’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 264 pages; 2015.

Reading William Trevor’s books in chronological order is proving to be an interesting exercise because Miss Gomez and the Brethren bears many striking similarities to Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, the novel immediately preceding it.

Both revolve around intriguing female characters, outsiders thrust into a new community, where they disturb the equilibrium and exhibit signs of eccentricity — although the opening line in this novel puts it more bluntly:

‘In my opinion,’ said Miss Arbuthnot, ‘the child is not in her right mind.’

Both stories also feature disturbing male characters who visit prostitutes or sexually harass women, but Miss Gomez and the Brethren dials up the dark side of human behaviour much more than its predecessor.

A Jamaican orphan

The story, which is set in the late 1960s, begins in Jamaica, where we meet Miss Gomez, an 11-year-old orphan whose parents perished in “the Adeline Street disaster” in which 91 people were burnt alive.

At Arbuthnot Orphanage the legend grew that she was a mad girl, rendered so by the strange circumstance of being the only one spared in the Adeline Street disaster. Occasionally she accepted the legend herself and saw in it the explanation of all that was worrying in her life and her mind. She certainly preferred being mad to being stupid. With such thoughts the child grew up. As the years went by, her legs became excessively long; thin and dark, like autumn twigs. She was troublesome, the staff continued to repeat, because of some streak in her: she took no interest, she didn’t ask normal questions like other children. She overheard them talking about her and didn’t much mind when they were unpleasant about her.

This inability to fit in gets worse when Miss Gomez emigrates to England as a young woman — part of the Windrush generation — and finds herself in London, where everyone seems to be suspicious of black people. She has a succession of menial jobs before she lands a lucrative position as a “dancer” in a Soho club where she’s told that a “black girl naked in glasses […] was an excitement for all-white afternoon clients”. This later paves the way for a short stint as a prostitute in “Mrs Idle’s pleasure house”.

But then Miss Gomez is saved by religion when she answers an ad placed by the Church of the Brethren of the Way back in Tacas, Jamaica. A postal correspondence ensues with the Church founder, Reverend Lloyd Patterson, who encourages her to pray for criminals she reads about in the daily newspapers.

Miss Gomez becomes rather evangelical in this pursuit, and when she takes a job as a cleaner at the last two occupied buildings — the Thistle Arms and nearby Bassett’s Petstore — on a South London street earmarked for demolition, her “God bothering” is ratcheted up to the point where she predicts a “sex crime” that attracts the attention of the police.

A cast of motley characters

At Crow Street we get introduced to a small collection of odd characters — Mr and Mrs Tuke, who run the Thistle Arms, and the three people who live with them: their teenage daughter Prudence; Mr Batt, their 81-year-old lodger and veteran of the First Wolrd War; and Alban Roche, a young man who had previously been convicted as a peeping Tom but now works at the pet shop at the end of the street. Mrs Bassett, the pet shop owner, is a secondary character, as is Atlas Flynn, an Irish labourer who has a “thing” for Mrs Tuke and won’t take no for an answer, even though he knows she is married.

The increasingly derelict Crow Street is almost a character in its own right, providing a sufficiently creepy and isolated backdrop for the drama that unfolds when Miss Gomez infiltrates the street’s motley collection of residents.

Indeed, the street’s changing fortunes could be seen as a metaphor for the larger societal changes that are in play. London’s population is changing. There’s a steady influx of Irish labourers rebuilding the suburbs, and black immigrants are pouring in from the Caribbean.

Racism is rife. For example, Mrs Tuke claims she’s scared of Miss Gomez because she’s a “savage” (I will spare you other racist jibes because they’re offensive but Trevor is always careful to show it is his characters and not him expressing these abhorrent views.)

And there’s always the hint of escalating crime and violence. Miss Gomez, of course, is on a mission to pray for those committing such acts, and her scouring of the newspapers to find people to pray for elicits this:

Another judge, trying another case, said that in his opinion there was sickness everywhere. A woman couldn’t go out to post a letter without running the risk of God alone knew what. There were people walking the country’s streets and byeways who shouldn’t be walking anywhere. There were lunatics abroad and people obsessed with murder, violence, and sexual cruelty. His own niece had been insulted on a tube train. He’d heard of a woman who’d received a telephone call from a man who put intimate proposals to her. In public places advertisements were obscenely defaced, radio and television brought filth into decent folks’ sitting-rooms. In a hotel in Scotland he’d had to walk from a television lounge because of the one-track nature of a late-night show. Women with drinks in their hands, he said, had been sitting in the television lounge laughing.

Admittedly, Miss Gomez and the Brethren does head into some dark territory, but it’s all implied rather than outlined in detail — Trevor knows when to reign it in — but of his early novels, this is definitely the most sombre. And while there are occasional moments of black comedy, on the whole, it paints a rather unsavoury picture of human nature…

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Love Department’.  I reviewed the same book in 2019. My review is here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Hill Bachelors ’. and I plan to review ‘Elizabeth Alone’.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 281 pages; 2015.

William Trevor’s fifth novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel was first published in 1969. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.

It carries the black humour married with pathos that marks his early work. It also features a cast of truly eccentric characters, none more so than the titular Mrs Eckdorf who is, quite frankly, one of the most bizarre (and annoying) people I have ever come across in fiction.

A house of ill repute

The story is set in central Dublin, specifically a once-plush hotel that is now better known as a house of ill repute. 

Mrs Eckdorf, an English-born woman who resides in Germany (having married a rich German), arrives in Ireland to visit the hotel. She’s a photographer by profession and she wants to satisfy her curiosity: she had been told a story about the hotel by a barman on an ocean liner and it has intrigued her ever since. She’s convinced something tragic happened that changed the fortunes of O’Neill’s and she wants to hear all about it.

When she arrives she discovers that Mrs Sinnott, the deaf-mute owner, is about to celebrate her 92nd birthday. This is the perfect opportunity for Mrs Eckdorf to interrogate her under the pretence of photographing proceedings for a lavish coffee table book.

She moves into the hotel without having made a booking and then tries to ingratiate herself with its motley cast of characters. They include Mrs Sinnott’s feckless 58-year-old son, Eugene, who is addicted to drink and gambling on the horses; O’Shea, the loyal hotel porter, whose faithful greyhound follows him everywhere; Eddie Trump, the barman in the hotel’s Excelsior Bar; Morrissey, a man in his mid-thirties, who is a pimp and uses the hotel’s rooms for his clients’ “appointments”; Agnes Quin, who sleeps with men for money; and Father Hennessey, the local Catholic priest. 

‘As mad as a hatter’

It’s not an easy ride. They think she’s “as mad as a hatter”. Or, as Eugene says:

‘Your woman above in the hotel has a touch of the sawdust about her.’
‘Is that what she is?’ said Agnes Quin. ‘Out of Duffy’s Circus or something?’
‘Ah no, no.’ Eugene paused […] ‘You could see her on the back of a horse going round in the ring. She’s that type of woman.’

O’Shea has more time for her, believing that she’s here to buy the hotel and he longs for the establishment to return to its glory days, the kind of place that attracted the rich and famous. Mrs Eckdorf does not disabuse him of this notion, using it to try to get information out of him about the tragedy she suspects happened in the past.

‘O’Shea, what happened once in the hall of the hotel?’ He shook his head. The only thing he could remember that was of note, he said, was that a bookmaker called Jack Tyler had once fallen over the bannisters and landed in the hall and had not been hurt. He had not been sober at the time.

When she finally meets Mrs Sinnott she rudely reads the notebooks her visitors use to communicate with her (Mrs Sinnott cannot lipread and does not know sign language), thinking she might find some clues there. When she’s confronted about this, she shrugs it off.

‘I’ve read every page of those exercise-books.’
He stared at her and continued to stare. He said: ‘Those are private conversations. Those are the conversations that people have with Mrs Sinnott.’
‘Yes. And I have read them.’ 

A funny farce

The book is comprised of set pieces, largely involving Mrs Eckdorf (but not always), that are blackly funny. It’s almost like Mrs Eckdorf doesn’t have a filter between her brain and her mouth, and so she says the most outrageous things, or waffles on in a nonsensical manner. She’s loud and rude and narcissistic.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that she’s having some kind of mental breakdown and losing her marbles. 

But she’s not the only one who’s odd or behaves badly — and that’s what makes the book such a richly comic read.

Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel is a wonderfully farcical story featuring brilliant characters. It raises issues about madness, manners and declining morals. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

♥ This month Cathy is reviewing ‘The Boarding House’. I reviewed this same book in 2019. You can read my review here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Love Department’ and I plan to review ‘Miss Gomez and the Brethren’.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, England, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Venice, William Trevor

‘Cheating at Canasta’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 252 pages; 2008.

To kick off ‘A Year With William Trevor‘ — which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books — I randomly selected Cheating at Canasta, a collection of short stories that were first published in the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review and Tatler. 

It proved a perfect introduction to this year-long reading project, because the tales here, so masterfully written, showcase Trevor’s recurring themes: the complexity of family dynamics and relationships between men and women; the darker side of human nature; missed opportunities; and the ways in which the past has a habit of catching up with the future. Fear and shame dominate.

There are 12 stories in this volume, all roughly the same length, some set in Ireland, the country of Trevor’s birth, and some in England, the country where he spent most of his long life. But the title story, “Cheating at Canasta”, is set in Venice, specifically, Harry’s Bar, where a man, who is losing his wife to dementia, returns to the place they both adored and finds his time there disrupted by a younger couple quarrelling on a nearby table.

Young people caught up in events

When the hardcover edition of the book was published in 2007 it garnered mixed reviews, including a rather churlish one by Adam Mars-Jones in the Guardian (which I’m deliberately not linking to) which claimed Trevor couldn’t write about young people very well. I beg to differ.

In “Bravado”, a teenage girl witnesses a deadly assault on a boy she doesn’t know by her boyfriend who does it to impress her, earning himself an 11-year prison sentence in the process. Before her boyfriend is arrested, Aisling knows she should speak up but she’s understandably conflicted, caught between the excitement of her first romantic love and the responsibilities of the adult world she’s yet to fully join. What really holds her back, though, is the fact that she doesn’t want her father to know she went behind his back and kept seeing the boy he had warned her to stay away from.

It’s all resolved in the end, and Aisling does the right thing, but it leaves a long-lasting mark on her:

In a bleak cemetery, Aisling begged forgiveness of the dead for the falsity she had embraced when what there was had been too ugly to accept. Silent, she had watched an act committed to impress her, to deserve her love, as other acts had been. And watching, there was pleasure. If only for a moment, but still there had been.

Petty jealousy and imagined hurts

In ‘The Children’, an 11-year-old girl (and only child), Connie, handles the death of her adored mother with aplomb — “You’ve been a strength, Connie,” her father tells her after the funeral — and quickly adjusts to life without her.

But when her father falls in love with a local woman a few years later and installs her and her two children, one of whom is Connie’s best friend, into the house, Connie’s behaviour changes. She spends more and more time alone, hiding on the roof, which she’s forbidden to climb, to read her late mother’s books.

And in one instant she turns on her soon-to-be step-sister with the cruel words: “This isn’t your house.”  Connie’s sense of betrayal, of a deeply held hurt, petty jealousy and an inability to accept changed circumstances is palpable.

Teenager in danger

And in ‘An Afternoon’, teenage Jasmin meets up with an older man she’s only ever met online. Her naivety is alarming as she spends an afternoon in his company, laps up his attention — “You’re pretty,” he said. “You’re pretty, Jasmin” — accepts the alcohol he offers her and agrees to go back to his house.

Again there was the ripple of excitement. She could feel it all over her body, a fluttering of pins and needles it almost felt like but she knew it wasn’t that. She loved being with him; she’d known she would.

She’s rescued at the last minute — Trevor doesn’t always let bad things happen to his characters — and the sense of relief, for this reader at least, is enormous but hard-earned.

The first is the best

The stand-out story of the collection, however, is the first one, “The Dressmaker’s Child”, which you can read online at the New Yorker, and which I had originally planned to read at the end of the year according to the schedule Cathy and I put together for A Year With William Trevor. (I didn’t know it was in this collection, so I’ll have to substitute that with something else and will let you know in due course.) 

In this story, Cahal, an Irish car mechanic, drives two Spanish tourists to see the “Weeping Virgin of Pouldearg”, a religious icon discredited by locals, and thinks nothing of charging them €50 for the privilege. On the way back to town, he runs over a child, the daughter of the local dressmaker, but does not stop to help. The Spaniards in the back seat are too busy kissing each other to notice the bump in the road.

What enfolds afterwards is a mixture of pure shame and fear and dread as Cathal wrestles with his conscience, even though the body is found not on the road, as expected, but at “the bottom of a fissure, half covered with shale, in the exhausted quarry half a mile from where she’d lived”. 

This strange development is quintessential William Trevor, a writer who likes to take seemingly ordinary characters and thrust them into unusual circumstances to see how things play out. Most of the stories in Cheating at Canasta contain moments of oddity that change the direction of the narrative. Each tale is an adventure. It’s like getting into a car and not knowing quite where you will end up…

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

This month Cathy has reviewed ‘The Old Boys’. I reviewed this same book in 2019. You can read my review here.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2019), Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, short stories, TBR40, Viking, William Trevor

‘Last Stories’ by William Trevor

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Fiction – hardcover; Viking; 224 pages; 2018.

Willam Trevor’s Last Stories are literally that: the last short stories he penned before his death in 2016. They were published posthumously as a handsomely bound collection by Viking last year, and have now been reissued as a paperback by Penguin.

As you may know, Trevor is one of my favourite authors and earlier this year I went through a bit of a phase reading his first three novels: The Old Boys (1964), The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966). But this is my first foray into his short fiction.

Ten tales

There are ten rather exquisite tales in this collection. Most focus on love — particularly love less ordinary — and are written with a deft eye for detail and a storyteller’s regard for the bittersweet and the unexpected.

There’s a watchfulness at work here, because Trevor is focused on the small happenings in people’s lives, but that is not to say these stories, nor the lives depicted within them, are small. Indeed, it’s often the accumulation of small happenings that leads to bigger things — domestic dramas, marriage break-ups, even death.

As ever when it comes to short story collections, I find it difficult to review them because I’m never quite sure what to focus on and what to leave out. Rather than give you a detailed account of every story, let me single out the one I found most memorable.

The paperback edition

The second story, The Crippled Man, represents William Trevor at his very best.

In roughly 24 pages he lays out a tale that feels quite run-of-the-mill, of a woman living in an isolated farmhouse with her crippled cousin, whom she cooks and cleans for. But by the time you reach the conclusion, you realise that this is no ordinary tale: it’s slightly creepy and malevolent and has a delightful little twist at the end. I immediately wanted to re-read it again to see what I had missed the first time around.

The story goes something like this. The woman, Martina, is having a long-term love affair with the local butcher. One day, when she’s out visiting him, her cousin hires two men — brothers — to paint the house. He thinks the men are Polish, but they’re actually Roma and have never done a job like this before. The immediate assumption the reader makes is that they are up to no good and that they will rip off the crippled man. This is what Martina thinks too. She is angry at her cousin for making this decision without her input.

The men, however, do a rather good job painting the house, but mid-way through the job, they are puzzled by a bizarre change in Martina’s behaviour. She stops bringing them their tea at the agreed times of 11am and 3.30pm and often just leaves a tray on the doorstep for them to find. One day the younger brother spots her through the window “crouched over a dressing table, her head on her arms as if she slept, or wept”.

Later they realise that they have not heard the voice of the crippled man — who has only paid them half the agreed price —  for quite some time and they’re fearful something has happened to him. They are also fearful that they will not be paid the rest of the money owed them when the job is complete.

The clincher at the end — which I won’t reveal here — is akin to a penny dropping in the well, but Trevor writes in such a deeply understated way it comes as quite a shock that such a calmly told tale could deliver such a deliciously dark blow.

If you’ve not read Trevor before and want to get a feel for his style, I’d recommend reading The Piano Teacher’s Pupil, which is in this collection but has also been published in The New Yorker (which is where I read it first). It showcases to perfection the way in which he tends to focus on people’s unexpectedly dark character quirks and highlights how we often fail to confront those who have wronged us because we can’t quite believe their bad behaviour.

This is my 9th book for #20BooksOfSummer; and my 28th for #TBR40. I treated myself to the hardcover edition for my birthday last year, but that copy is still in London. A few weeks ago I bought it on Kindle — it was the 99p daily deal — so I could read it here in my new home in Fremantle. 

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, TBR40, William Trevor

‘The Love Department’ by William Trevor

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 272 pages; 2014.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a lot of William Trevor’s novels lately — and here’s another one.

First published in 1966, The Love Department was his third novel. Like his two earlier novels — The Old Boys and The Boarding House — it is set in suburban London (Wimbledon, to be precise), has a rather cutting comic element running throughout and stars a cast of suitably eccentric characters, including:

  • Septimus Tuam, a good-looking, seductive man, who charms married women and then runs off with their money;
  • Edward Blakeston-Smith, a 20-something chap desperate to make something of himself, who is hired (in a round-about way) to locate Septimus and stop him in his tracks; and
  • Lady Dolores, a ferociously over-the-top agony aunt in charge of the “Love Department” at a national publication, who hires Edward to find Septimus in order to stop more lovelorn women from falling under his spell.

Fast-paced story

The narrative, which moves along at a cracking pace, charts Edward’s often farcical attempts to find his quarry. A nervous, anxious type, he’d much prefer to sit in the office and answer letters from readers, but Lady Dolores refuses to let him pen a word: she wants him out on the street doing old-fashioned detective work to track down the scheming Lothario breaking hearts and ripping off women in the suburbs.

It’s told in a dry, detached manner that only makes the humour — and the dialogue — more pronounced.

The Love Department is essentially a farce filled with uproariously funny moments — there’s one scene involving a pet monkey running amok at a dinner party that had me in stitches — but this is a William Trevor novel, so it’s tempered by pathos and there’s a rich vein of social commentary lying just beneath the surface, too, which examines loneliness, heartache and melancholia. It’s a very fine — and darkly comic — read, one that has proved to be my favourite of his first three novels.

This is my 13th book for #TBR40. I bought it second-hand several years ago (as part of a trilogy of Trevor’s early novels). You can read all my other reviews of his work on my William Trevor page.

Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, TBR40, William Trevor

‘The Boarding House’ by William Trevor

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 272 pages; 2014.

The Boarding House is one of William Trevor’s early novels, having been originally published in 1965.

Set in suburban Wimbledon during the 1950s, it tells the story of a disparate group of eccentrics and oddballs living under the one roof who must band together following the death of their landlord, Mr Bird, in order to save their home.

These residents include Rose Cave, who spends all her time knitting; Miss Clerricot, a romantic; Major Eele, who frequents seedy strip clubs; Obd, a Nigerian immigrant who refuses to believe the woman he loves doesn’t love him back and hence resorts to stalkish behaviour; Scribbens, a trainspotter who plays vinyl recordings of steam trains at very high volume, annoying everyone else in the boarding house; and Venables, who has a phobia about all things medical.

The house is also home to two sworn enemies — the prim and proper Nurse Clock and the dodgy Mr Studdy.

Mr Bird himself, it seems, was also a bit of a peculiar character, keeping notes on all his residents and then, from beyond the grave, stirring the pot by leaving his home to Clock and Studdy knowing full well they will fall on each other fighting and the place will fall to rack and ruin.

The twist in the tale comes when Clock and Studdy decide to unexpectedly work together for a secret ulterior motive — they want to turn the boarding house into a profitable aged care facility. This means they must force the current residents to find accommodation elsewhere without ever telling them about their big plan. Together they employ every dirty trick in the book to get each resident to leave one by one.

The book works as a succession of set pieces revolving around the incidents that “encourage” the residents to leave the boarding house and the ways in which Clock and Studdy help to destablise the once happy atmosphere of the house. This gives rise to a mix of situations that either cause hilarity or heartbreak.

The whole tale is very much in the vein of an Ealing comedy but it is underpinned by pathos, for the residents, as kooky and strange as they may be, are at risk of destitution should Clock and Studdy’s underhand plan come to fruition.

All in all, The Boarding House is a fine black comedy, but it’s also a rather marvellous story about humans and their flaws. Not only does it highlight the fact that loneliness, poverty, despair — and criminality — are never far away, it also paints a rather grim picture of suburban London at a particular point in time.

But for all the book’s plus points, not least its wonderfully realised cast of characters and the quick-fire dialogue that brings them so much to life, I struggled to connect with any of the characters and didn’t much feel like cheering on the amoral protagonists of the story. I did, however, let out a loud whoop! when they got their comeuppance!

For another take on this novel, please see Jacqui’s review at JacquiWine’s Journal.

This is my 1st book for Reading Ireland Month, which is hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Niall at The Fluff is Raging. It is also my 8th book for #TBR40. I bought it second-hand several years ago (as part of a trilogy of Trevor’s early novels). You can read all my other reviews of his work on my William Trevor page.

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, TBR40, William Trevor

‘The Old Boys’ by William Trevor

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 176 pages; 2014.

The Old Boys was William Trevor’s first novel. It was published in 1964. Having read several of his later novels, such as Death in Summer (1999) and Love and Summer (2009), I can safely say it wasn’t quite what I expected.

For a start, it’s set in suburban London (Trevor is an Irish writer) and is more of a black comedy than a poignant tale of thwarted love (with which I have come to associate him).

It tells the tale of four septuagenarians who all went to boarding school together more than 50 years earlier and behave very much as you would expect a group of immature schoolboys to behave — badly! They connive, cheat and backstab each other, all in an outlandish bid to establish who is the “top dog”.

While the novella is told in the third person, it centres largely on Jaraby, a self-centred old coot, who believes he is going to be elected as president of the Old Boys Association, to which they all belong. But his former schoolboy associates have other ideas and, whether by accident or design, act to thwart Jaraby’s narcissistic intentions.

The plot moves forward mainly through a series of set pieces, some funnier — and more bizarre — than others, most of which feature quick-witted, snappy dialogue. Many of the conversations that ensue between characters are at cross-purposes and it is this confusion and ambiguity that leads to misunderstandings that are all blackly comic.

Comic tale about marriage and parenthood

As well as being a humorous look at male rivalry and revenge, it’s also a laugh-out-loud look at a marriage between the thoroughly dastardly Jaraby and his long-suffering wife, who he believes is mentally deranged. He goes to extraordinary lengths to have her medically diagnosed as such and yet she appears to be one step ahead of him all the way. (What she does to Jaraby’s pet cat, which she hates, is one of the most memorable — and wicked — elements of the story.)

Their estranged adult son, Basil, who moves back home with a menagerie of budgerigars, adds another dimension to their complicated relationship.

All the characters are well drawn, if somewhat over the top, but this gives Trevor the chance to mine a rich seam of human flaws and foibles. And while The Old Boys is full of amusing moments, the narrative is underpinned by a darker, albeit understated, undertone that demonstrates humanity’s most base tendencies. It’s a book full of laughs, but it is not a happy tale…

This is my 6th book for #TBR40. I bought it second-hand several years ago (as part of a trilogy of his early novels). You can read all my other reviews of his work on my William Trevor page.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2018), Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘Nights at the Alexandra’ by William Trevor

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Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 103 pages; 2015.

William Trevor’s Nights at the Alexandra is a bittersweet novella about love, longing and devotion.

Brimming with nostalgia, it is told through the eyes of Harry, a 58-year-old bachelor looking back on his teenage years in provincial Ireland during the “Emergency” (Second World War).

Through Harry’s reminiscences, we learn he comes from a “Protestant family of the servant class which had come up in the world” and he had been expected to work in his father’s timber yard as soon as he finished his schooling.

But when, as a 15-year-old, he met Frau Messinger, a young British woman married to a German man twice her age, Harry’s eyes were opened to an alternative future.

Love at first sight

This is how Harry describes his first meeting with the woman who was to have such a long-lasting impact on his life:

She was an extremely thin, tall woman, her jet-black hair piled high, her eyes blue, her full lips meticulously painted: I had never seen anyone as beautiful, nor heard a voice that made me so deliciously shiver. ‘You looked for a blemish on her hands, on the skin of her neck or her face,’ I wrote in a notebook I kept later in my life. ‘There wasn’t one. I could have closed my eyes and listened to that husky voice for ever.’

Their platonic friendship is formed when she stops Harry in the street one day and asks him to deliver a flat car battery to the garage for her. She then asks him to bring a new one to Cloverhill, the big stone house on the edge of the village, where she lives.

This one request turns into a regular “gig” running errands and delivering packages for Frau Messinger, who often invites Harry into the house for tea, cake and conversation.

The relationship is an intimate but chaste one. She tells him stories about her life and writes him long letters when he’s away at boarding school in England. When his school friends tease him about it, he’s embarrassed by their taunts. (“Houriskey wanted to know if I ever got a look about her skirts. At Liscoe grammar school there was a lot of talk like that; all humour was soiled, double meanings were teased out of innocence.”)

It’s only when Harry’s mother discovers that “the woman at Cloverhill” has given him a tie pin that he is forbidden from seeing her, a decision that he later defies.

Taking a stand

Nights at the Alexandra is a book that is as much about being an outsider as it is about growing up and taking a stand against your parents, for the Messingers are refugees, friendless in small-town Ireland because everyone assumes they are Jews, and Harry is a Protestant in a largely Catholic country, sent away to England to go to school and expected to work in the family business when he graduates.

When Herr Messinger decides to build his wife a cinema — The Alexandra of the title — he asks Harry to run it. As much as he does not want to work for his father, Harry is torn, because he’s not sure he wants to run a movie theatre either, but later, partly in defiance of his parents but mainly through his love for Frau Messinger, he jumps at the chance to do so.

The story drips with Trevor’s trademark flair for melancholy and missed opportunities, and his prose is typically elegant and elegiac. The book is just 60 pages long but it’s written so tautly, with nary a word wasted, that it feels so much more powerful and authentic than a book, say three or four times longer, might.

It’s the mood of the novella that makes it such a memorable, haunting read, one that lingers in the mind long after the final page has been finished. Poor heartbroken Harry and the kindly Messingers will stay with me for a long time.

Added extras

This edition of Nights at the Alexandra (first published in 1987) comes with two additional short stories — The Ballroom of Romance (first published in 1972) and The Hill Bachelors (first published in 2000) — which carry on the melancholy theme. Both are set on Irish farms in the hills. In the first, Bridie realises her hopes of finding a husband have been dashed now that she’s trapped on the farm looking after her father who has had a leg amputated; and in the second, Paulie returns home to help his widowed mother and reluctantly settles into a new life as a “hill bachelor” when all the women of marriageable age that he courts don’t want to take up with him.

This is my 16th book for #20booksofsummer (yes, I’m still playing catch-up with reviews). I bought this one earlier in the year, attracted by the new livery that Penguin has used to republish all of Trevor’s wonderful stories. I’m mighty tempted to buy the whole set: I’m yet to read anything by this author that I haven’t immediately fallen in love with. You can read all my other reviews on my William Trevor page.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Love and Summer’ by William Trevor

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Love and Summer by William Trevor
Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 221 pages; 2009.

The oppressive nature of village life — in which privacy is virtually non-existent —  comes to the fore in William Trevor’s 2009 novel, Love and Summer, which also explores guilt, forbidden love and the strength we all require to rise above our circumstances.

Set in Rathmoye, a small Irish town “some years after the middle of the last century”, it follows a handful of residents over the course of one fine summer.

Trevor takes his time to introduce them all, chapter by chapter, including: the former librarian Orpen Wren, who seems to have lost his marbles and only talks about people and events from the past as if he is stuck in a time warp; the troubled Miss Connulty, who has taken over running the town’s B&B with her “weasel-faced” twin brother, Joseph, upon the death of their community-minded mother; and the hardworking widowed farmer Dillahan and his second wife, Ellie, a foundling who first moved to the farm as a housekeeper, an arrangement organised by the nuns who raised her.

But the equilibrium of Rathmoye — where “nothing happened, its people said” — is disturbed by the arrival of a tweed-clad stranger on a bicycle. He causes a bit of a stir when he turns up on the morning of Mrs Connulty’s funeral asking for directions to the ruins of the local cinema, which he wants to photograph.

His name is Florian Kilderry, “the sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father”, who has inherited Shelhanagh, a large crumbling house, with its own lake, seven-and-a-half miles from Rathmoye. He cannot afford its upkeep, so his only option is to sell it:

“She’ll fetch a bit, I’d reckon,” the man from the estate agents’ office had said when he’d finished with his tape measure; and the Bank of Ireland thought so too. With the debts paid, there would be enough to live on, if not in splendour at least in comfort for a while. Enough to be a stranger somewhere else, although Florian didn’t yet know where. He had never been outside Ireland.

As Florian goes about getting the house ready for sale — disposing of its contents, including a car — he often travels into the village on photographic excursions (he’s dabbling with it as a potential occupation), and it is here that he strikes up a friendship with Ellie when she’s out and about on her errands. This friendship blossoms into something much deeper and it is this forbidden love affair that forms the heart of this rather genteel novel.

But to dismiss this book as merely a romance would be to do it a disservice.

Trevor is an economical writer, keeping both his prose and his narrative pared back to basics, but his characterisation is superb and the ways in which he draws such a diverse cast together is nothing short of genius. Every character has a back story — Dillahan’s first wife and young child died in a tragic farming accident for which he blames himself, Miss Connulty was “disowned” by her mother following an abortion 20 years earlier, Ellie was raised by nuns who taught her to be chaste and pure, Florian holds a torch for the Italian cousin he no longer keeps in touch with   — and it is these heartaches and desires which play a key role in giving Love and Summer such unexpected strength and power.

Trevor is also superb at capturing the tenets of rural life — the changing seasons, the day-to-day tasks that a farmer must carry out, the routine of keeping a house, the reliance on neighbours and community for help, amongst others — often bringing to mind some of my favourite rural Irish novels, such as John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun and Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn.

There’s no doubt that Love and Summer is a deftly written novel, one that unfolds gently to reveal what it is to be confronted with difficult, heart-rending choices. I loved its quiet beauty and its truthful depiction of rural life and romantic love.

For other takes on this novel, please see KevinfromCanada’s review and Lisa from ANZLitLovers review.

To see reviews of other William Trevor novels on Reading Matters, please visit my William Trevor page.

Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, William Trevor

‘Death in Summer’ by William Trevor

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Death-in-summer

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 220 pages; 1999.

I don’t know where I got the idea that William Trevor wrote lovely heartwarming stories: my two experiences reading him — Felicia’s Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) — have been rather sad and distressing. And Death in Summer is no different.

Mournful beginning

The story, which is set in England, begins with a funeral. (See, it’s sad already.)

Leticia, a new mother, has been killed in a tragic accident. Her husband, the much older Thaddeus, is bereft, even though he never truly loved his wife. He does, however, very much love and adores his young baby, Georgina, and it is to her that all his attention now turns.

Although he lives in a rather grand house (inherited from his parents) and has two servants, the impossibly named Zenobia and Maidment, he feels unable to raise Georgina by himself. So, with the help of his kindly well-to-do mother-in-law, Mrs Iveson, he screens four young women as potential nannies.

As it turns out, none are suitable, and one in particular, Pettie, is the wrong type altogether: she wreaks of cigarettes, shows them a badly typed reference, wears a too-short skirt. Fobbing her off with a £10 note (to cover her train fare to attend the interview), Thaddeus and Mrs Iveson think that will be the end of the matter.

They are wrong.

The story pits these two hapless, loveless characters against one another. Thaddeus, blind to anything other than his natural state of melancholy, is unaware that Pettie has developed a rather unhealthy obsession with him. And Pettie, ignoring the advice of her devoted friend Albert (they grew up together in a childrens’ home) that she leave well enough alone, rails against the news that Mrs Iveson has become the child’s carer. She will do whatever she can to prove that this is a bad decision and that she should be put in charge instead.

Portrait of a stalker

As a portrait of a disturbed young woman with a penchant for stalking, you will find no better than Death in Summer. While there’s a lovely aching quality to the overall storyline, there’s also an unspoken tension and unease, a kind of creepiness that pervades Pettie’s motivations, which makes the book difficult to put down.

This novel demonstrates what happens when people’s emotional wounds are left to fester unabated over a long period of time. And it shows that no matter where you fit in the social spectrum, we can all be haunted by our pasts. What unites Thaddeus and Pettie, even though they might not know it, is their longing to be loved unconditionally.

This is a richly layered novel in which the back stories for all the characters — the servants; Albert; and Thaddeus’ former lover, the desperate blackmailing Mrs Ferry — are skillfully fleshed out.

Without ever talking down to his readers, Trevor somehow captures that sense of lives being misspent, of all too real human failings, of life’s disappointments and cruelties, of the ways in which people are trapped by circumstance. It is an exceptional achievement.