Tag: William Trevor

A Year With William Trevor, Reading Projects

A Year with William Trevor wrap-up: What I learned from reading 12 books in 12 months

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Last year I read 12 books — one per month — by the late Irish writer William Trevor (1928-2016) as part of a project I co-hosted with Cathy from 746 Books.

Immersing myself in his work like this, a kind of extended binge read if you will, was a fascinating experience. I learned so much about his writing and yet I still feel I know so little about him as a man. Or do I?

Award-winning writer

Most people associate Trevor with the Booker Prize, for which he received five nominations over the years, but he never took out the top gong. He had better luck with the Whitbread Prize (now known as the Costa Book Awards), winning it three times (for The Children of Dynmouth in 1976, Fools of Fortune in 1983, and Felicia’s Journey in 1994) and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, which he won once — for his 1965 novel The Old Boys.

He had an honorary CBE and a knighthood too.

But that’s not why I wanted to devote a year to reading his work.

Trevor has an esteemed reputation as a fine chronicler of human life in all its many facets and was regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in the English language. But he didn’t just write short stories. He wrote novels, novellas and plays, too.

Since beginning this blog almost two decades ago, I have read and reviewed a few of his novels and found them heartbreaking (The Story of Lucy Gault), slightly disturbing (Felicia’s Journey and Death in Summer) or gentle depictions of rural life (Love and Summer and Nights at the Alexandra).

It wasn’t until I’d read three of his early novels — The Old Boys (1964), The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966) — published in one volume, that I understood there was more to Trevor than the melancholy tales I had previously associated him with.

Those early novels were satires, up roaringly funny in places. All were set in London, rather than his native Ireland, and each felt like they might have fallen out of the Ealing Comedy playbook [1].

I was happily surprised by this discovery and wondered how he had gone from writing black comedies to writing sombre tales about outsiders and outcasts. Where did this change in direction occur? What else did I not know about his writing?

19 things I discovered

The only way to find out? To read all his work, preferably in chronological order so I could spot the deviations (or the commonalities) in tone, style and characterisation. Here’s what I discovered:

  • His early career novels (up until 1966) are black comedies set in London and are wickedly funny
  • His work takes on a darker edge, albeit with an eye on the funny side of life, with the publication of his fifth novel, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), a style that he maintained for around five novels
  • The publication of Fools of Fortune (1983) represents a major turning point in his career — it was the first book to be set in his native County Cork and the first to use a first-person narrator
  • From then on, his work shifts between English settings and Irish settings, but with a preference for rural Ireland
  • He loves an ensemble cast and rather than tell his stories through a single narrator he often uses multiple voices, switching the focus from character to character, all of whom have rich backstories
  • Pretty much every book features a character who is deaf or someone who has a learning difficulty or a mental health problem
  • The orphan count across his backlist is very high!
  • He is quite partial to children who have had terrible childhood experiences but somehow survived
  • There’s always a male character who is a cad or sexual deviant, while the women characters are often “troubled” or mentally disturbed in some way
  • Characters who are obsessed with something such as an idea that they can’t let go of or a dream they want to achieve feature pretty highly
  • He likes to write about middle-aged women, love affairs and the corrupting effect of religion
  • He’s not afraid to cover taboo subjects such as abortion, alcoholism, prostitution and mental health disorders
  • He fills his books with outsiders and outcasts, including drunks and thieves, and gives voice to people we would normally never hear from
  • His books set in England always have a reference to Ireland, usually in the form of an Irish character
  • His books set in Ireland often include references to the intricate dynamics between Protestants and Catholics, but this is rarely the main focus of his stories
  • He tends to write in the third person
  • His storytelling is always empathetic and compassionate; it is never judgemental
  • Not everything is spelt out; he regards his readers as intelligent people who can figure things out for themselves and if that gives rise to some ambiguity then so be it
  • There’s a timeless quality to his writing, but most of his work is set in the 20th century before the advent of mobile phones, the internet and social media

Immersing myself in William Trevor’s world taught me a lot about how he viewed the world himself. He championed the underdog and was adept at writing about people of all ages and backgrounds. His compassionate eye highlighted the quiet struggles and sorrows of ordinary people with empathy and a keen understanding of the human condition.

He has a soft spot for loners and those seeking love or human connection in any form they can.

If you have never read him before and are not sure where to start, read Two Lives, which is two novellas — Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria — brought together in one volume; the first novella is typically melancholic and heartbreaking, the second is a black comedy. From that, you should be able to figure out which style you prefer and then you can work out whether to explore his early career novels or his later work.

But of course, you might be like me, and appreciate almost everything he’s ever written!

My reviews

Here are the 12 books that I reviewed this year, a mix of novels, novellas and short story collections.

The only book I wasn’t convinced by was Elizabeth Alone, which felt like it was trying to do too much and didn’t feel like a cohesive story, more a collection of shorter tales, but on the whole, I enjoyed every single one of these amazing books.

If you wish to read my reviews, simply click on the covers below.

Thank you and a reminder about this year’s plans

Undertaking A Year with William Trevor was definitely a rewarding experience.

Special thanks to Cathy for keeping me company (you can read all her reviews here) and to those blog readers who (1) tolerated the avalanche of William Trevor posts here (2) responded to my reviews or (3) joined in and read and reviewed a Trevor book or two along the way. The support has been amazing and much appreciated.

I’m now greatly looking forward to repeating this exercise in 2024 — but with a different writer in focus: the great John Banville. This will be another project co-hosted with Cathy. You can read more about it on my dedicated A Year with John Banville page — expect the first review later this month.

[1] Ealing comedies are a series of British films made in the late 1940s to early 1950s that were known for their dry wit, social commentary and ensemble casts. They are wonderful fun but often have a dark edge to them.

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

‘Bodily Secrets’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 144 pages; 2007.

Bodily Secrets, by William Trevor, was published in 2007 as part of a 20-book series called “Penguin Great Loves”^^ which I bought as a beautifully designed boxed set many years ago.

This slim volume features five short stories — previously published in The Collected Stories of William Trevor in 1992 — all revolving around various forms of love, including unreciprocated love, adulterous love, sexual love and convenient love.

Black comedy

The opening story, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, is a black comedy in which four people — Mike, his colleague Swann, and two of Swann’s friends, Jo and Margo — go on a boozy lunch in London’s Soho that extends long into the night.

During this farce-like escapade, Mike is constantly looking for a phone to ring Lucy (in the days before mobile phones), a woman he is in love with but who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. In all the multiple conversations he has with her over the course of the day, Lucy is unfailingly polite, but he begins to wear her patience:

“Hello, Lucy. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mike.”
“Good.”
“Mike, you telephoned me at four fifteen. Do you know what time it is now?”
“What time is it now?”
“Four thirty-five.” (p9)

These nuisance calls are interleaved with conversations in which Margo beseeches Mike to help her with a personal problem. Her husband Nigel brings home elderly women, “explaining he has been attending some meeting with them and has brought them back for coffee”. But Margo doesn’t know what the meetings are about and is worried Nigel will start bringing home “tramps, grocers, one-legged soldiers”.

To find out what’s really going on, Mike pretends to call Nigel — under the guise of being an official from the Ministry of Pensions — but instead, he rings Lucy for advice. It’s ludicrously funny in places, especially when he reports back to Margo, telling her one lie after another.

The story ends with Mike musing on his need to get over Lucy — “the love of my life” — and to let time work its magic.

Unreciprocated love also features In Love with Ariadne, but this story is bittersweet rather than farcical. Barney, a medical student residing in a Dún Laoghaire boarding house, falls in love with the landlady’s daughter — but nothing comes of the relationship.

Forbidden love

Trevor turns his focus to illicit love between a married man and a much younger woman in Lovers of Their Time. The affair between Norman, a travel agent, and Marie, who is a shop assistant in a pharmacy, begins tentatively on New Year’s Day in 1963.

For the first 12 months, it’s a largely chaste relationship because they have nowhere private to go until Norman discovers a hotel where they can consummate their relationship.

Marriage and the prospect of children beckons, but ever-practical Norman is aware that getting a divorce from his wife Hilda will likely drive him into poverty: is his illicit love for Marie worth it?

This is a beautiful, largely melancholic story, but Trevor upends traditional stereotypes by making Hilda, the cheated-upon wife, as painfully uncouth. She’s lusty and “demanding in the bedroom” and makes Norman feel inadequate and unhappy, while Marie, whom he initially suspects may have a “tartish disposition”, turns out to be “prim and proper” and a genuinely lovely person who thinks highly of him.

Their love affair, gentle, romantic and sweet, offers the prospect of happiness for both of them.

“Oh darling,” she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. […]
“I know,” he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.
“I lie awake and think of you,” she whispered.
“You’ve made me live,” he whispered back.
“And you me. Oh, God, and you me.”

Marriage of convenience

In the titular story, Bodily Secrets, a wealthy widow, 59-year-old Norah O’Neill, contemplates remarrying to have a “companion for her advancing years”. Her choice is limited, but the town’s affirmed bachelor Agnew, who is 51, seems the best fit — although her adult children and most of the townfolk think otherwise.

Agnew is a dapper dresser, a good dancer and has been a loyal employee: for 17 years he managed the family’s toy factory until Mrs O’Neill’s son, the angry and opinionated Cathal, shut it down. The only blot on his character (apart from his Protestant religion) is his frequent weekenders to Dublin, where it is thought he sleeps around with women or goes drinking.

Mrs O’Neill, a handsome woman, despises her ageing body and is not seeking a sexual partner. Her marriage to Agnew is ideal. Not only do they have separate bedrooms, but she also gets the emotional support she craves, along with a man who can manage the apple orchard she wants to establish on the site of the closed factory. While Agnew gets the financial security he needs, along with a cover for his homosexuality (the “bodily secret” of the title).

A similar “marriage of convenience” occurs in Honeymoon in Tramore in which a farm labourer, Davy Toome, marries Kitty, the farmer’s daughter, when she falls pregnant to someone else. It’s 1948 and pregnancy out of wedlock is viewed as a sin, so a hurried marriage is arranged. The real father, who is revealed at the end of the story, comes as something of a blow to Davy who had been told it was someone else entirely.

As ever, Trevor’s stories are compelling and expertly crafted and full of memorable characters and incidents. Each one looks at how love — in all its many various forms — profoundly shapes, challenges and transforms the men in these vastly different stories, all set in different periods and locations.

These poignant tales also showcase the complexities and vulnerabilities of human relationships, which is why reading them is such a wonderfully intimate and rewarding experience.

And that’s a wrap! This is the final book in my 12-month project A Year With William Trevor, which I co-hosted with  Cathy from 746 Books. Please click here to see all the books we read between us and to see a brief round-up of William Trevor reviews published on other blogs. If you have reviewed a William Trevor book this year and it hasn’t been included, please do leave a comment (either under this post or the main William Trevor page) and I will update accordingly.

Update: This month Cathy has reviewed Trevor’s posthumously published short story collection ‘Last Stories‘. I have previously reviewed this collection here.

^^ Other books in this series which I have reviewed here are:

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

‘Two Lives’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 384 pages; 2016.

Two very different women, with different attitudes, personalities and lived experiences, star in William Trevor’s novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, which are brought together in one volume under the title Two Lives, originally published in 1991.

It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to suggest the two female protagonists in this volume share commonalities, or are linked in any way, but reading each story, one after the other, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

Both Mary Louise Dallon, who stars in Reading Turgenev, and Emily Delahunty (Mrs Delahunty), from My House in Umbria, are childfree and financially secure, but they are lonely and yearn for romance.

And perhaps because they don’t fit into the templated lives that society deems “normal”, both experience a kind of insanity. Mary Louise, moves into an attic to escape her much older alcoholic husband and his controlling sisters, and is later committed to an asylum, while Mrs Delahunty’s behaviour, fuelled by drink, becomes increasingly more unhinged as her past comes back to haunt her.

Innocence versus experience

Of course, they are also vastly different. Mary Louise is sexually inexperienced, having entered a marriage that has never been consummated, while Mrs Delahunty was sexually abused as a child and once supported herself through prostitution.

Mary Louise is quiet and introverted; Mrs Delahunty loud and convivial. Mary Louise longs to escape the family she married into; Miss Delahunty dreams of finding a family she can call her own.

The tone, style and setting of both novellas are also different. Reading Turgenev employs a third-person narrator to tell Mary Louise’s sad and melancholy story. It also features a dual timeline that intertwines the story of an unhappy marriage with Mary Louise’s confinement in a psychiatric institution for more than 30 years

By contrast, My House in Umbria is narrated in the first person using a jolly, upbeat and deeply intimate voice.

The former is set in Ireland in the mid-20th century, the latter in Italy in 1987.

So, what are the stories about? Let me briefly explain each in turn.

Reading Turgenev

Reading Turgenev is about a farm girl who secures her future by marrying Elmer Quarry, a man much older than her — “the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around” — who runs a drapery store in town with his two (meddling and not very nice) spinster sisters, Matilda and Rose.

And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop.

The marriage does not get off to a good start, because Elmer, who is normally a teetotaller, gets drunk on their honeymoon and passes out. The pair never consummate their relationship, even when they return home, and consequently never have children, to the puzzlement of many, including family (his and hers), village residents and busybodies.

But the issue is never discussed between the pair. Instead, Elmer deals with it by drinking in secret, while Mary Louise begins bicycling out to visit her impoverished aunt and her invalid cousin, Robert, with whom she has been in love since she was a young girl.

It is Robert who reads the works of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev to her, hence the novella’s title, but their relationship is a clandestine one, which is what makes it all so heart-rending when he dies unexpectedly.

In her bereavement, Mary Louise becomes increasingly more introverted and isolated, with dire consequences for her own sanity. When she is seen buying rat poison, the sisters believe their lives are being put at risk… but is that really the case?

Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

My House in Umbria

My House in Umbria is about a romantic novelist who survives a terrorist attack on a train in Italy and invites fellow survivors from her carriage to spend their convalescence at her villa free of charge.

This brings together a diverse group of individuals, including a British general, a German man whose fiancee was killed in the bombing, and Aimee, a young American girl who has been orphaned and has now retreated into silence.

Mrs Delahunty delights in the company of this new “family”, especially as their imagined lives and backstories will provide fodder for her next novel, but everything is thrown into disarray when Aimee’s uncle, a rather aloof man called Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home.

Our narrator, who has a troubled past — her sideshow parents sold her to a foster family and her foster father later “satisfied his base desires” with her — becomes infatuated by Mr Riversmith and sets her amorous sights on him. When she overhears him saying not very nice things about her, she’s even more determined to have her way with him.

He was remarking, when I lifted the receiver, that he had never before encountered a romantic novelist. Then, distressing me considerably, he referred to as ‘trash’ what last night he had called most interesting. He referred to the grappa we’d enjoyed together as an unpleasant drink. The word ‘grotesque’ was used in a sentence I couldn’t catch.

The book ends with all the patients returning to their respective homes and Mrs Delahunty renting out her spare rooms once again to tourists, but something has irrevocably changed in her: “Perhaps I’ll become old, perhaps not,” she muses. “Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it.”

My House in Umbria was adapted for American television in 2003, starring Maggie Smith.

Trevor’s trademark best

Together these two novellas pack a powerful punch and demonstrate Trevor at his trademark best: showing us the remarkable interior lives of two ordinary but highly resilient women getting by as best they can. The first showcases his melancholy life-in-an-Irish-village style, the second his black comedic style.

If you have not read him before and want to get a taster for his different types of writing, this would be a good one to start with.

Both are highly engaging reads, but if I had to choose between the two, I preferred My House in Umbria, only because the voice was more comedic and the story less gloomy. I found Mrs Delahunty larger than life and her antics ludicrously entertaining, somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Eckdorf in his 1970 novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, and also Miss Gomez in Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Finally, there’s an eloquent review of both published in the New York Times, which describes Two Lives so much better than I ever could.

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. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy also reviewed ‘Two Lives’.

♥ Next month Sadly, December will mark the end of ‘A Year with William Trevor’. Cathy plans to read ‘Last Stories’ (which I have previously reviewed here) and in a slight change to our schedule, I plan on reading the novella ‘Bodily Secrets’, which was published as part of Penguin’s Great Love series.

I also read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Italy, London, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘After Rain’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 224 pages; 1997.

After Rain, by William Trevor, is a collection of 12 short stories which were first published in Antaeus, Harper’s, The Oldie, The New Yorker and The Spectator.

Upside down lives

The stories are all framed around ordinary people whose lives are turned upside down by milestone events such as love affairs gone wrong, divorce, pregnancy and bereavement. The settings move from Ireland, London and Italy (and back again) and are largely focused on fraught relationships between parents and children, or husbands and wives, or within extended families.

Each story is perfectly crafted, but don’t expect any grand finalés or sudden denouements: the endings are sometimes abrupt, giving them an unfinished feel, but I suspect that’s a deliberate ploy by Trevor to allow these characters to live on in your own imagination.

I know I am still thinking about Joanna and her 60-year-old parents from the story “Marrying Damian”.

In this story, Damian is an attention-seeker and a drifter who claims to be a poet but has never had anything published. He experiences one personal disaster after another and always asks his friends if he can “borrow a little money” which he never pays back.

When his third marriage ends, he returns to Ireland “out of the blue” to visit his friends, Claire and her husband, the unnamed narrator of this story. They are happy to see him, of course — their friendship is a long one — but they’re not prepared for their 20-something daughter Joanna, who once declared as a five-year-old “I’m going to marry Damian”, to become romantically involved with him:

Then, quite suddenly, everything was different. Perhaps in the same moment — at dinner two days later — Claire and I were aware that our daughter was being charmed all over again by the man she had once picked out as the man she would like to marry. To this day, I can hear their two voices in my dining-room, and Damian laughing while Claire and I were numbed into silence. To this day I can still see the bright flush in Joanna’s cheeks.

Abrupt changes

There are many moments of similar volte-face in these stories. In “Gilbert’s Mother”,  for instance, a woman suddenly clocks that her adult son (who still lives at home) might have murdered a local 19-year-old girl.

It was always the News, on the radio or the television, that prompted her dread. When a fire was said to have been started deliberately, or a child enticed, or broken glass discovered in baby-food jars in a supermarket, the dread began at once – the hasty calculations, the relief if time and geography ruled out involvement. More than once, before she became used to it, she had gone to lie trembling on her bed, struggling to control the frenzy that threatened.

In “A Day” a married woman discovers that her husband is having an affair and must choose whether to tell him she knows or continue on as normal. In “The Potato Dealer” a man is made an offer of money and land in exchange for marrying a young pregnant farm girl, even though he is not the father. In the titular story, a heartbroken woman holidays alone in Italy after the end of a love affair, but when she sees a painting of the Annunciation she has an epiphany.

All of these are tightly written and evocative. Trevor is an expert at capturing small moments in detail while simultaneously exploring the darkness in human hearts hardened against life and love.

Perhaps the story which left the biggest impression on me is the incredibly dark “Lost Ground”. At 35 pages, it’s the longest in the collection (and the one that follows the normal conventions of the short story because it has a shock ending).

It explores the lengths one particular family will go to when their teenage son Milton behaves in a way they don’t like. Milton claims to have seen the supernatural vision of a Catholic saint in the family’s orchard and now he wants to preach this news far and wide. But his family are Protestant and thinks he’s gone crazy, so they lock him up in his bedroom, where he remains until he manages to escape — with deadly consequences.

More to explore

I’m just skimming over the surface of these deeply human stories, rather than providing a comprehensive review of each tale.

But I came away from After Rain thinking it is probably the most accomplished collection of his stories I have read (so far), probably because they encapsulate all the major themes of his body of work — the complexities of human relationships, the intricacies of family life and the communities in which we live, and the quiet but profound moments of human connection and disconnection.

He is just so good at revealing loneliness, isolation and heartache in his characters regardless of their age, gender or social class.

If you have not read his short stories before, this would be a good place to start.

Cathy has also reviewed this book.

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. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed his memoir, ‘Excursions in the Real World‘.

♥ Next month Both Cathy and I plan to read ‘Two Lives’, which is two of his novellas — ‘Reading Turgenev’ and ‘My House in Umbria’ — brought together in one volume.

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

‘The Silence in the Garden’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 202 pages; 2015.

The residents of Carriglas, an island estate off County Cork, are the central focus of The Silence in the Garden, a mid-career novel by William Trevor, first published in 1988.

The story follows the exploits of the wealthy Anglo-Irish Rolleston family whose troubled history mirrors that of Ireland’s own.

The construction of a bridge to unite the island with the mainland — and which threatens to break open the family’s solitude and seclusion — also acts as a metaphor for what is happening in the country at the time:

By July the iron supports of the bridge had been set in concrete, twelve on the mainland, twelve on the island. Alien, perfectly upright, the line of their height on either side sloping to meet the level of the land, their graceless presence was only ugly. The girders that were to stretch between them lay among rocks and gorse, those resting on the ground lost in a growth of cowparsley and meadow daisies. […] The place of the bridge had already acquired a personality that had not been there before, a fleeting spirit of its own, imposed by labourers.

The family — widely respected because their ancestors helped Catholic tenants during the Great Famine — is headed by Colonel Rolleston, a widower with three children. When he is killed on the battlefield of Paschendale in the First World War, his mother, Mrs Rolleston, takes over.

Kind and generous, she has a particular soft spot for young Tom, the illegitimate child of the household’s long-serving Catholic maid, Brigid, for reasons that become clear towards the end of the book.

While the story doesn’t revolve around Tom per se, the circumstances surrounding his father’s death looms large. Why, for instance, had an IRA man killed him as he travelled along the lane to the Big House during “the Troubles” just a week before his impending nuptials to Brigid? And why had the Rolleston family remained tight-lippped about it given the murdered man — a butler they had “poached” from one of Dublin’s finest hotels — was in their employ?

Trevor takes his time to reveal the details of what happened, which lends the story a quietly understated power.

Period drama

The novel is largely set in 1931 — after the Civil War and the partition of Ireland but before it became a Republic — with callbacks to an idyllic summer in 1908.

That summer is primarily seen through the eyes of Sarah Pollenfax, the daughter of a clergyman, who is a distant cousin of the Rolleston family. She moves to Carriglas as governess to the Rolleston children — two boys, John James and Lionel, and a girl, Villana — and to keep an eye on her younger brother Hugh, who visits during the school holidays.

The children have free run of the island, which, alongside the big stone house, is set in lavish grounds and features an ice-house, a kitchen garden — “where peaches ripened on brick-lined walls” — a tennis court, a boathouse and disused landing stage. There’s also a ruined abbey and a series of “standing stones that marked a burial ground on the hill above it”.

Trevor uses an omnipresent third-person narrator throughout but tells Sarah’s version of events via first-person diary entries, which are italicised in the text. The story follows different characters as they go about their business that fine summer and then follows them again, more than 20 years later, when Sarah returns to the island at the behest of a now very elderly Mrs Rolleston.

Return to the island

The return in 1931 allows Sarah to observe notable changes, both to the estate, which has become rundown and overgrown, and to certain family members, such as John James, who is carrying out an affair on the mainland with an overweight and overbearing boardinghouse landlady he does not love.

Villana, too, is all grown up and about to marry the family’s solicitor, Finnamore Balt, a boorish man 20 years her senior, despite the fact she would be a better match with Hugh, Sarah’s brother, to whom she had once been engaged.

The wedding forms the focal point of the story and gives Trevor the chance to add a dash of black comedy to the mix when John James’ lover turns up, drinks too much whiskey and causes quite a scene. A cast of drunks and gamblers in the local village, and the chatty ferryman, also lend some colour.

Quiet and restrained

But for the most part, The Silence in the Garden is a quiet and thoughtful account of Ireland’s simmering tensions and altered circumstances as seen through the prism of one family’s changing fortunes.

I found The Silence in the Garden to be a rich and rewarding read, one that has grown fonder in my memory as time has passed. I especially loved the close-knit portrait of an Anglo-Irish family grappling with a new, emerging Ireland, and found that the tapestry of timeframes, characters and themes, all relayed in Trevor’s carefully restrained prose, created a deeply contemplative reading experience.

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. Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’, the first William Trevor novel I read, back in 2003. My (rather inadequate) review is here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review the memoir ‘Excursions in the Real World’, while I plan to review the short story collection ‘After Rain’.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Fools of Fortune’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 211 pages; 2015.

As I continue to work my way through William Trevor’s extensive backlist in chronological order (as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books), I’ve been waiting to discover the book that would signal a turn in direction. Fools of Fortune is it.

First published in 1983, Fools of Fortune won the Whitbread Prize (precursor to the Costa) in 1983. It is a mid-career novel that moves away from Trevor’s typically English setting to an Irish one. He substitutes black comedy for a more serious and sombre tone. And the third-person voice is eschewed for a more intimate first-person narrative.

The story, which spans the years 1918 to 1982, looks at the long-lasting and far-reaching impact of trauma on the Quinton family, who own a flour mill and live in a Big House, called Kilneagh, in County Cork. They are Anglo-Irish protestants but have Home Rule sympathies —  Irish independence leader Michael Collins, for instance, is a semi-regular visitor, and a defrocked Catholic priest is a live-in tutor for the family’s young son, Willie.

But this is not a political novel. While it’s about murder and revenge during Ireland’s troubled history, it’s really an examination of intergenerational trauma and follows what happens to a small cast of characters caught up in a conflict beyond their control.

A story of two halves

The story is divided into two main sections; the first part is told through the eyes of Willie Quinton; the second is from the perspective of Willie’s English cousin, Marianne, with whom he later falls in love and bears a child.

The crux of the novel almost happens off the page: one of the mill workers is suspected of being an informer, so he is lynched by the Black and Tans, who cut out his tongue and hang him from a tree as a warning. They later set fire to the Quinton’s house, resulting in the death of Willie’s father and his two sisters.

After the devastating arson attack, Willie and his mother move to a smaller house in town. Willie is given succour by a school teacher, Miss Halliwell, who suffocates him with pity and unwelcome affection. It’s only when he is sent to boarding school that he is able to free himself from her overbearing attentiveness and fall in with a group of boys who take pleasure in sending up their professors.

It is in this short part of the novel that Trevor adds a dash of his trademark black comedy — Willie and his friends, for instance, dub the headmaster Mr Scrotum, and there’s an excruciatingly funny scene in which they play a devious prank on a maths teacher that is outrageous in its audacity and crudity. But this humourous take soon gives way to romance — all beautifully evoked — when teenage Willie falls in love with his English cousin during a visit home.

That summer, that last week of July and all of August, three days of September: I have loved that summer all my life. Your dark brown eyes, darker than my mother’s, your oval face, your smile that brought a dimple to one cheek, your long brown hair, soft as mist it seemed. I stole glances at you while we stood near Mrs Haye’s shop and looked down at the city, at the distant green hills that always reminded me of Kilneagh. […] We strolled by the river and railway track […] Further and further from the city we walked, and all the time I wanted to take your hand.

Later, after finishing his education, Willie returns home to begin his career at the mill, still thinking about Marianne and trying to work up the courage to confess his love to her (via letter). But then his mother, who has numbed her pain and grief with alcohol for many years, takes her own life and he has other things to worry about.

Marianne’s tale

When we hear Marianne’s point of view, in the second half of the book, we discover that she feels similarly about Willie. Their romance kicks into gear at the time of Willie’s mother’s funeral, but it’s short-lived: Marianne has to go to finishing school in Switzerland, something that has been prearranged by her parents, for a few months.

While in Montreux, under the care of an English professor and his wife, she not only has to fight off the advances of the lecherous professor, who is in his sixties, she also learns that she is pregnant with Willie’s child. Knowing that this will bring shame on her family — her father is a rector in Dorset — she heads straight to Ireland to tell Willie the news. But Willie is no longer in Ireland and no one will tell her where he has gone or why.

The narrative jumps forward considerably when the story is taken up by Marianne’s school-age daughter, Imelda, who is an inquisitive and imaginative child and is, unknowingly, bearing the burden of her family’s past — in particular, Marianne’s difficult decision to become a single mother at a time when such decisions were condemned.

To compensate for being teased and bullied at school for being “illegitimate”, Imelda constantly daydreams that her father, whom she has never met, will sweep in to rescue her. This fantasy soon becomes an obsession, one that develops into a form of insanity…

Devastating tale

Fools of Fortune is a quietly devasting but hugely mature novel in Trevor’s extensive oeuvre.

The storytelling seems more reigned in, more gentle and nuanced, and less prone to exaggerate human behaviour than his earlier work. Everyone’s just trying to get on with their lives as best they can but their happiness is often thwarted by circumstance, politics and societal conventions rather than the untoward behaviour of psychologically damaged people that often characterise Trevor’s stories.

There are more than 60 years of history crammed into this compact novel, which is tinged with sadness and asks many more questions than it answers. How does Ireland’s story affect the personal, lived histories of its citizens? Who takes responsibility for past actions?  How can we overcome trauma? And how is it passed on?

For other takes on this novel, please see Ali’s review at Heavenali and Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers.

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. Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘Death in Summer’, which I have previously reviewed here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’, the first William Trevor novel I read, back in 2003. My (rather inadequate) review is here. I plan to review ‘The Silence in the Garden’.

This is my 16th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it on Kindle in March 2022.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Other People’s Worlds’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 232 pages; 2015.

We are midway through A Year With William Trevor, a joint reading project I’m undertaking with Cathy from 746 Books, and I think I might have found my favourite William Trevor novel so far!

Other People’s Worlds, first published in 1980, tells the story of a conman who leaves a trail of devastated women in his wake.

Francis Tyte was thirty-three years of age, an actor who might well become more successful than he had been, a charming, good-looking man.

But Francis, who has acquired a certain level of fame for starring in a TV advert for tobacco, is also a liar and a narcissist.

It was hard to remember that he lived in fantasies and make-believe, that not for an instant did he cease to practise his actor’s art, smiling nicely.

He tells everyone he meets that he was orphaned when his parents were killed in a train crash. Yet they are alive and well, living in an old people’s home in south-west London and he has not visited them for more than six years.

He has no home of his own and little money. Whenever he needs quick cash, he prostitutes himself in seedy back lanes off Picadilly.

An eye for the ladies

When he proposes to 47-year-old Julia, a widow with two adult daughters, his eye is on her jewellery and the lovely Cotswold village house she resides in with her elderly mother. But little does Julia know that the charming man with whom she’s fallen in love is already married — to a much older woman, a dressmaker with a weak heart, whose money he hopes to inherit.

He also has a daughter by another woman, a sales lady in a London shoe shop, whom he continues to string along as it suits him to stay with her whenever he’s in town. But that woman, Doris, is aware of his first marriage and labours under the misapprehension that when his dressmaker wife dies he will move in permanently with her.

Oh, it’s all awful. And it doesn’t help that Francis is in love, not with Julia, who is his fiancée, but with another woman — Susan Music, the actor starring opposite him in a telemovie about Constance Kent, a 19th-century murderer, which he is midway through filming. Susan, of course, has no idea of his dark background, and she doesn’t even realise her leading man has designs on her.

Bad behaviour

Trevor draws all these divergent characters together in an unexpected way, highlighting how Francis’s devious antics impact different people in different ways.

He expertly contrasts the darkness with plenty of light.

The opening chapters are charming, almost frothy, as we are introduced to Julia and her mother, Mrs Anstey, in their home, Swan House, with its lavish garden in the quintessential English village of Stone St Martin. It is here that Julia, who makes a living typing legal documents for a firm of solicitors, plans her wedding and the Italian honeymoon that will follow.

Everyone, it seems, is charmed by Francis, who, like Julia, is Catholic (a rarity in this part of England, although Francis is, of course, faking it), willing to help with the gardening, quick to smile and unfailingly polite.

But Mrs Anstey has a niggling suspicion that Francis may not be all that he seems, yet she keeps her concerns to herself.

It is that seed of doubt, once planted in the reader’s mind, that Trevor exploits to the full. He takes his time to reveal the darker elements of Francis’ character, but when he does it transforms the narrative into a near-horror story. Mrs Anstey says it best near the end:

With one hand on the bannister, the other grasping a stick, she dragged herself from step to step. ‘Malign,’ she suddenly said, stopping and turning around. ‘He brought malevolence to us. That’s what we have to live with now.’

Classic Trevor trademarks

Other People’s Worlds has all the trademarks of Trevor’s work, including a man who is a cad and a swindler and a woman who begins to mentally unravel.

I loved following along with the dastardly behaviour, unsure as to how bad it would get, and found the ways in which Trevor explores the outfall on innocent people who are caught up in unimaginable drama masterful.

My only quibble is that the story might have had more impact if it had finished at the end of the penultimate chapter because the last line in it comes like a hammer blow that turns everything on its head. The final chapter ties up loose ends which might have been better left unravelled… But the novel is such wickedly good fun it hardly seems to matter.

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 ‘Family Sins‘, a short story collection.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘Death in Summer’, which I have previously reviewed here. I plan to review ‘Fools of Fortune’.

This is my 6th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it on Kindle in August 2021.

Book lists

18 books to make you laugh

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Many years ago now (try 13!), I produced a list of books to make you laugh and restricted it to just 10 titles. I’ve now taken that list and updated it to include some of the funny books I’ve read and loved in the intervening years.

Admittedly, I generally prefer my fiction a little on the darker side, but every now and then it’s refreshing to read something a bit more light-hearted, and if it gives me a belly laugh or two, then all the better.

Of course, humour can be subjective, so not everything here will appeal to everyone. What’s funny to one person, may not be funny to another.

Humour can also occur in different forms, from biting satire to dry wit, so describing a book as “funny” isn’t always straightforward.

Those caveats aside, here are some of my favourite funny novels from the past 15 years or so of my reading life, arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname — as ever, click on the book’s title to read a more detailed review:

‘Diary of a Somebody’ by Brian Bilston (2019)

The story follows (the fictional) Brian Bilston’s resolution to write a poem every day for an entire year, a way of distracting himself from the pain of a broken marriage, an unsatisfactory relationship with his teenage son and an office job at which he’s failing. It’s full of wordplay, puns, witty one-liners and funny poetry. A wonderful blend of satire and black comedy, I laughed all the way through it.

‘A Short Gentleman’ by Jon Canter (2009)

This novel pokes fun at the British upper classes. The story is narrated by Robert Purcell, a distinguished barrister who finds himself on the wrong side of the law. The book is essentially a confession of his downfall told in a very long-winded but brilliantly witty way. We don’t know what crime it is that Robert committed, and part of the joy of reading this book is trying to figure it out as you go along.

Continue reading “18 books to make you laugh” →

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

‘A Bit on the Side’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 172 pages; 2005.

The title of William Trevor’s short story collection A Bit on the Side might hint at love affairs and adultery, and while there is, indeed, some of that, the real theme that runs throughout is loneliness and solitude. 

Most of the 12 stories feature characters dealing with situations in which they are friendless or somehow isolated from the rest of mainstream society. It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that many are set in provincial Ireland.

And while this book was published toward the latter part of Trevor’s career (it was first published in 2004), it still has all the hallmarks of his earlier work in that it explores the darker side of humanity and offers up a range of characters who are perhaps misguided or selfish or psychologically damaged.

A widow’s relief

The opening story “Sitting with the Dead”, for instance, is about Emily, a woman recently bereaved, who is secretly relieved that her controlling husband, a racehorse trainer with a surfeit of anger, has died but must maintain a mourning wife facade.

When two middle-aged Catholic sisters arrive slightly too late to sit with the dying (as they have made a habit of doing), Emily invites them in for a cup of tea even though she doesn’t know them and doesn’t want the company. But their mere presence invites confession because she’s never had anyone to share her truth with: 

‘He married me for the house,’ she said, unable to prevent herself from saying that too. The women were strangers, she was speaking ill of the dead. She shook her head in an effort to deny what she’d said, but that seemed to be dishonesty, worse than speaking ill. […] ‘He married me for the forty acres,’ Emily said, compelled again to say what she didn’t want to. ‘I was a Protestant girl that got passed by until he made a bid for me and I thought it was romantic, like he did himself – the race cards, the race ribbons, the jockey’s colours, the big crowd there’d be. That’s how it happened.’
‘Ah now, now,’ Kathleen said. ‘Ah now, dear.’

A strange date

In “An Evening Out”, probably my favourite story in the collection, a middle-aged man and woman go on their first date, having pre-arranged it via the intriguingly named Bryanston Square Introduction Bureau. They meet at a theatre bar in London because it would be empty when they arrived and therefore there “wouldn’t be the embarrassment of approaches made by either of them to the wrong person”.

But both of them have different agendas. Evelyn, who is lonely following the death of the mother she looked after for years, is now looking for companionship — “marriage did not come into it, but nor was it entirely ruled out” — while Jeffrey, a photographer, is looking for someone with a car who can drive him to photoshoots across town.

He’s also looking for a free meal (with plenty of expensive wine) and manages, by sleight of hand, to get Evelyn to pay for it when he discovers she sold her Nissan a year ago and is therefore of no practical use to him.

A woman’s confession

In “Solitude”, a young girl pushes her mother’s lover down the stairs, a tragedy which brings her parents together but has other consequences: they move out of their grand house in London and spend the rest of their lives cosseting their daughter and wondering about Europe where they take up residence in a succession of hotels.

It’s only when her parents die, both aged in their 80s, that she feels able to confess what she did as a child to complete strangers.

Each time I found my listener, each time across a teashop table or in a park, there was politeness; and moments later there was revulsion. Some traveller killing tedious time in a railway waiting-room would look away and mumble nothing; or on a tram, or in a train, would angrily push past a nuisance. And the whisper of an apology would not be heard. 

Oblique approach

What’s interesting stylistically about many of these stories (not all) is the way Trevor seems to shun a more straightforward narrative style and opts for an oblique approach.

I often struggled to get an initial handle on the stories — who was who, and who had done what and why, for instance — and had to readjust my expectations. I was not going to be told anything. I was going to be shown. And I might even have to wait until the end of each story for all the information to be revealed so that I could make sense of the whole. Sometimes I even went back and reread a story once I had all the facts to fully understand it.

A Bit on the Side is, therefore, not a collection to rush through. It’s a collection to savour and to take your time with. It’s a collection that will reward the patient reader.

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 ‘Felicia’s Journey‘. I have previously reviewed this book, which you can read here.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘Death in Summer’ and I plan to review ‘Other People’s Worlds’

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘The Children of Dynmouth’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 195 pages; 2014.

The first Sunday of the month means it’s time to review another William Trevor book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up his 1976 novel The Children of Dynmouth, but it didn’t take long for me to feel that I was on familiar William Trevor turf in which he takes a seemingly ordinary character with eccentric traits and lets them loose in a confined setting, such as a pub (Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel), boarding house (Miss Gomez and the Brethren) or hospital ward (Elizabeth Alone), to see what will unfold. 

In this case, it’s a lonely teenage boy called Timothy Gedge, who is obsessed with a serial killer from the past, and the setting is a small village where everyone knows everyone else and therefore can’t escape or ignore the lad. 

A personality transformation

Initially, Timothy comes across as friendly and helpful, even charming. He’s quite comfortable around adults and able to engage in proper conversations with them. And the adults in the small coastal town of Dynmouth seem happy to have him around to help with odd jobs and errands.

He’d seemed an engagingly eccentric child, solitary in spite of his chattering and smiling, different from other children. 

But as the narrative progresses it becomes clear that Timothy is socially intrusive, can’t take no for an answer and gets on people’s nerves. In the case of two 12-year-olds, Kate and Stephen, whom he befriends, his cloying attentiveness terrifies them. In fact, Kate believes he is “possessed by devils” and runs crying to the local reverend demanding he do something about it.

If you believed he was possessed, she whispered between her sobs, everything was explained.

Timothy’s transformation from a well-meaning teenager to a person who frightens others through inappropriate and unwelcome behaviour forms the heart of this very fine novel.

Search for fame

It all begins with the promise of an Easter talent show in the village. Timothy has big plans to be the stand-out act. He daydreams about TV presenter Hughie Green discovering him and putting him on the TV show Opportunity Knocks.

He starts to badger local villagers for the props he requires, which include a pair of curtains, a bathtub and a wedding dress. That’s because his act is going to be based on the English serial killer George Joseph Smith who became infamous for his “brides in the bath” murders in the early 1900s.

His frequent hassling of people for the bits and bobs he needs turns him into a serious pest. But most villagers are too polite to tell him to go away. They tolerate him — up to a point.

Mr Plant, the local publican, who agrees to let him take an old tin bath rusting in the back yard, wonders if Timothys’s mother had “dropped the boy when he was a baby”:

You heard that kind of thing, a kid’s head striking the edge of something when the kid was a couple of months old and the kid never being normal. […] The Gedge boy seemed intent on something […] with a gruesome flavour, murders taking place in a bath. Sick they called it nowadays, and sick it most certainly was. In his entire life, he estimated, he’d never heard anything like it.

The village spy

While Timothy’s motivations are never fully explained (that isn’t Trevor’s style; he leaves it to his readers to work things out for themselves), his behaviour changes over time. He becomes increasingly obsessed with murders and murderers, particularly within marriage. 

When he spies on neighbours he often sees things he shouldn’t, and when he reveals these closely guarded secrets he is oblivious to the harm he may cause. 

He looked in people’s windows […] He followed people about. He listened to people’s conversations. He harassed people with jokes that weren’t funny.

His vivid imagination often runs away with him and he puts two and two together to come up with five. The consequences of this go beyond just a little harmless tittle-tattle…

Common themes

Of the early Trevor novels I have now read, The Children of Dynmouth is probably my favourite. While he explores many of the same themes — marginalised people in a world that doesn’t quite know how to deal with them, the nature of evil and madness, and the tragicomic absurdity of life — this one really ratchets up the tension and the narrative doesn’t necessarily go in the direction you think it might.

The machinations of small-town life and the interconnectedness of residents are paramount. In fact, Dynmouth, nestled on the Dorset coast, with its curving promenade, modest pier and grey-brown cliffs, is a character in its own right.

His human characters are, as ever, brilliantly realised — and it is through their relationship with Timothy that we see them being tested and pushed to the limits. Who will crack first? Will it be the kindly vicar Mr Featherstone or his wife Lavinia who runs the local nursery? Perhaps Commander Abigail and his long-suffering wife, who invite Timothy to supper once a week, will be the ones to finally tell him to go away and never come back. Or maybe Mr and Mrs Blakley, who are minding step-siblings Kate and Stephen while their newly married parents are off on honeymoon, will step up to the mark.

The Children of Dynmouth won the Whitbread Award (the precursor to the Costa Book Awards) in 1976. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that same year. Apparently, it was also adapted for BBC Two in 1987. (I’m not sure I’d want to see it.)

For other takes on this novel, please see reviews by Cathy at 746 books, Jacqui at Jacqui’s Wine Journal and Ali at HeavenAli.

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 ‘Nights at the Alexandra’.

♥ Next month Cathy plans to review ‘Felicia’s Journey’ and I plan to review the short story collection ‘A Bit on the Side’.