The short story, as Elizabeth Bowen wrote, is located just below an altitude line with only poetry above. Many poets, and more than a few prose writers, have taken that as a licence to write prose poetry, purple prose or first-person monologues, gather them together and pass them off as a short story collection. Not so William Trevor.
Ours, for better or worse, is an age of unmediated experience in writing. Autobiography, barely disguised as fiction, served up like raw meat on a platter. Classicism, emotional distancing, are out; immediacy, accessibility are in. The author is always there or thereabouts, hovering like a shadow on his own creations, wearing his anguish on his sleeve. Here, by contrast, are 12 stories in which the author is apparently absent, the experience refracted through traditional craft, and a certain effort demanded. The reader has to meet the author half-way.
That, I suspect, will not be a problem for a Trevor readership already well established, knowing in advance the myth, the territory, the approach. Whether a newer readership will be drawn in is another matter. Trevor's characters, and the countries of the mind he places them in - most often Ireland in this case - tend to have pasts rather than futures, and unhappy pasts at that, little nodes of crisis, personal or historical, that happened long, long ago and led to their present bleak situation. They are also, in a strange way, defenceless against their own author's pessimistic vision; little people stripped, almost deliberately one might say, of culture and religion, and left instead with eating rituals - tea and biscuits tremulously offered, mashed peas, bread and jam in drab cafes - as a last line of defence against the blackness.
A rare redemptive exception is "The Virgin's Gift", an Irish pilgrim's spiritual progress, set in a kind of allegorical no-time. Most of the stories, though, are socially grounded in the here and now, be it the English suburbia of "Three People", the Blairite London of "The Telephone Game" or "A Friend in the Trade ", the post-Agreement Northern Ireland of "Against the Odds" or the IRA-haunted Britain and Ireland of "The Mourning ". More often than not, the functional neutrality of the prose allows the author to move between milieux and social levels without failure of tone, but there is at times an irritable reaching after period detail - Ecstasy overdose, The Father Brendan Smyth trial, a Boney M song - which backfires in its attempt at socially dating a person or an event, and ends up sounding out of touch.
This is important, for although most of Trevor's characters are presented as a little off-centre in contemporary terms, whether through mental slowness, social isolation, sexlessness or lowness of intensity - we are always being asked to identify with them, at least with the side of ourselves that is forever lonely, or dependent on one other person, or trapped in the melancholia of ageing. They fail or succeed as universalisable scenes, by the degree to which we do or do not make them our own.
Which brings me to "The Hill Bachelors", the final story and the title of the volume as a whole. It is a quintessential mix of land and family elements adding up to a checkmate in a remote mountain valley for a bachelor left looking after his mother and a few cattle, with a companionless end in prospect. Nothing, we are led to understand, neither goodness nor pragmatism, obliges him to be there. Unlike the Maguires and Tarry Flynns in Patrick Kavanagh's world, tied to their mothers by wind-toughened navel-cords, there is no escape into Christian mysticism. He is simply there, inert as a ball-bearing under inexorable forces, waiting to be reclaimed by his own hills. The slightly dated sociology, with time and fate at work in and through it, is of a piece with the rest of the stories, but there is something more. The poetry has been left in. Call it weather or mountain space, but the extra dimension is there, standing like an amphitheatre behind the cramped little family drama, elevating it almost imperceptibly to the level of tragedy.
As I read the stories I kept thinking of Trevor's famous "Ballroom of Romance" and the film made of it. The bony structure of the story, the restored poetry of the film. How texture, at times the texture of reality itself, has to be sacrificed for the purity of the narrative line. As the transitive verbs and short end-stopped sentences banged in like divots, and the characters went to their fated ends, I felt the integrity of Trevor, the storyteller and the death of Trevor the poet. Though it depends - to come back to Elizabeth Bowen - from which side of the altitude line you view the matter.
Harry Clifton's new collection, Berkeley's Telephone and Other Fictions, has just been published by Lilliput