FICTION: William Trevor sets his mark upon this edgy, sure-footed novel within the opening paragraphs, and keeps the reader guessing throughout
A SMALL TOWN emerges as an insular, closed world in which one damaged character retreats into the comfort provided by old hatreds, while others choose less complex sanctuaries, including confusion. A widowed mother of unmarried, middle-aged twins, is about to be laid to rest, and her faithful service to the local church has been gratefully acknowledged. In life, she had made it quite clear she had no wish to be reunited on burial with a long-dead husband; as for her daughter, “she was glad to part from” her. William Trevor, with the authority of a virtuoso violinist, sets his mark upon this edgy, sure-footed novel within the opening paragraphs. Mrs Connulty may have been tested by her husband and erring daughter, but she always loved her son “now in his fiftieth year, her pet since first he lay in her arms as an infant”.
The Connulty family dominates the town of Rathmoye – hard work and good service have played their part in accumulating property and various business interests, including a pub and a respectable boarding-house. The setting is rural Ireland, probably during the mid- to late 1950s. Trevor, at times using colloquial syntax, a turn of phrase, a precise detail, has evoked a place sufficiently small to ensure that most of the people know each well enough to be aware of a passing stranger. That stranger is duly noticed, a young man on a bike. He was seen taking pictures at the funeral, not something that is usually done. His presence starts the tongues moving, and the speculations.
The widow is dead, yet her presence lingers. “Alone in the house, as she had not been since the death, Mrs Connulty’s daughter fondled the jewellery that now was hers; strings of lapis and jade, garnet and amber, the sapphire earrings, the turquoise, the pearls, the opals, the half-hoops of diamonds, the ruby engagement ring, the three cameos. There was a rosary too, but it did not properly belong, being of little value compared with the finery.” The daughter, long known as Miss Connulty, intended to wear them just as often as her mother had. “This reflection came coolly, without emotion.”
Trevor builds on the hint of festering resentment. The woman recalls a day from her childhood when her mother had caught her playing with the jewels. Outraged, her mother had despatched a servant to fetch the Garda. “A Guard was in the hall then, and her mother ordered her to tell him, and when she did he shook his head at her.”
THE DAUGHTER'Sapparent crimes against her mother culminate in a disgrace that is neither forgotten nor forgiven. In Miss Connulty, Trevor has created one of the most compelling of his lost women. Trapped by her past, she watches everything and sees more. When she hears about the funeral photographer, she tears at the information like a dog with a bone, pursuing it with her brother who remains non-committal – he knows his sister. "He had been told about photographs being taken because it would worry him to hear it, because there was a lack of respect, a funeral photographed like a carnival would be. He wondered if she'd made it up; she often made things up."
The uneasy relationship between the siblings is brilliantly done. It’s not that they don’t like each other; they simply have nothing to say. The brother, Joseph Paul, is content within his little empire and misses his mother. The sister is caught up in her own history, the romance that destroyed her. The savagery in McGahern is menace in Trevor. That is the essential difference between them; it also explains why Trevor’s psychological range is so much wider. Throughout this dark narrative, the threat of exposure dangles over several characters. Among the most frail and daring is Ellie, an orphan girl whose life changed when the sisters of a widower farmer decided to find him suitable help in the house.
About five years before the action begins, Ellie had gone to work for Dillahan, a good man torn apart by an accident in which he killed his wife and child. Dillahan was so grateful to young Ellie, he married her. Through this marriage, she has acquired an unexpected status. She also sells the farm eggs; old Mrs Connulty had been among her customers. Ellie and Dillahan exist in a contentedly unromantic enclave of their own. Trevor carefully describes the domestic rituals; Dillahan works with his dogs on the land while Ellie tends the house. Yet Dillahan is never free from the horror of the accident, seldom leaves the farm and attends early Mass to avoid the glances of others.
The insiders are caught up in their daily existence. They do their shopping, exchange small talk, remember the dead, rescue a bullock from a ravine and all the while old Orpen Wren maintains his vigil. Years earlier, he had been employed to catalogue the library of Lisquin, the local Big House and once home of the St John family. But that was long ago; the St Johns are gone and the house is in ruins. “Orpen Wren lived in both the past and the present.” In his mind, or what remains of it, he is waiting for the family to return. Is he a narrative diversion? Or is he a symbolic witness to the collapse of the Anglo-Irish world?
Trevor keeps us guessing and makes effective use of a character who could so easily have faltered into caricature, yet doesn’t. It is Wren, in his confusion, who thinks that the photographer, Florian Kilderry, is a St John. Kilderry is oblivious to this, and to the former existence of the St John family. He is the outsider who visits the small town on a personal quest. He wants to photograph the cinema, in ruins after a fire.
The various sightings of Kilderry acquire their own symbolism and, true to Trevor’s deliberate, watchful art, each individual has their own story. Kilderry’s is romantic and plausible. His mother was a beautiful Italian girl who defied her parents to marry Florian’s father. They came to live in Shelhanagh, the country house that is the only home Florian has ever known. It seems a gorgeously ramshackle place to which memories of the many spontaneous parties of the past still cling. His parents had been artists. They loved each other. Now they are dead and Florian is alone with his aging dog.
On his various cycling excursions he meets Ellie, who had already noticed him at the funeral. Trevor brings them together with heartbreaking efficiency. For Kilderry, she is a summer companion. For Ellie, he is her destiny. All the while Miss Connulty, with a seething vigilance worthy of her late mother, watches Kilderry and demands her brother deal with him. Her goading finally causes the passive Joseph Paul to retort: “There isn’t a reason in the wide world why I should cause offence to a man I don’t know just because he rides his bicycle through the town.”
Fearful of history repeating itself, Miss Connulty wants to save Ellie: “She felt a wave of pity for Ellie Dillahan, as once, so wretchedly, she had for herself.” While an almost comic rescue is being planned on her behalf, Ellie is becoming increasingly involved with Kilderry, a man whose life has been paralysed by his love for Isabella, his Italian cousin. The shockingly beautiful narrative is familiar Trevor territory, and yet it is not; he continues to surprise, shift and side-step.
Ellie’s characterisation is handled convincingly as she moves from her previous position of gratitude to sullen resentment. Suddenly, she realises she does not love her husband. Her new defiance makes her devious, intent on being with the distracted Kilderry who is becoming increasingly detached from Ireland. The final bond keeping Kilderry attached to his old home is not Ellie, it is his dog. Ellie cried herself to sleep and yet when she woke, “her tears had gone as if she had imagined them, but she knew she hadn’t”.
Trevor is among the finest exponents of the short story – yet when he writes a multi-layered narrative such as this, he does not merely move his characters about, slotting them into sequence. Unlike many novelists who write novels consisting of several stories pulled together, his narrative strands are cohesive, the connections are plausible, not laboured. Of his 13 previous novels, most have had English settings. His Ireland of another, not yet forgotten era, remains recognisable, authentic – the only false note is the Anglo-type couple who buy Kilderry’s family home.
WHEN HE ANDEllie become regulars in a tourist cafe, the waitress tells them she is heading back to Dublin when the summer ends. Predatory, disconnected Kilderry is like something from another world, precisely because he is from another place, another time. Ellie's need bewilders Kilderry. He needs a short-lived friendship, she wants a future.
The menace is always there. Ellie thinks her husband has shot himself. Is the crazy Wren telling the truth or simply adding to the confusion? Is Dillahan’s guilt heavier than his suspicions? Could Miss Connulty be re-living her past? Doe she see Ellie as her salvation? Trevor misses nothing, even the smug, if tragic, office assistant, Bernadette O’Keefe, who dresses well, watches television romances and drinks alone. Then there is Mr Clancy, the shoe repair man “who liked to keep a conversation going.” Trevor, at 81, pursues his characters with a forensic if humane attention to detail. Kilderry’s ceremonial leave-taking is described in prose of Joycean beauty.
Trevor's finest novels to date have tended to be set in England; this is a powerful Irish narrative, often funny and ultimately elegiac, which surpasses even The Story of Lucy Gault(2002). Should logic and literary merit play any part in the outcome of this year's Man Booker Prize, Love and Summeris the obvious winner.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of
The Irish Times
