I remember reading Katherine Mansfield’s story 'The Garden Party' during a sixth form lesson and finding its indirect, impressionistic style haunting and yet real. Mansfield’s young protagonist Laura discovers death’s centrality to her existence one summer afternoon and the story’s slow, elegiac tone reveals her maturing acceptance of life’s final inexpressibility. ‘Isn’t life'... Laura attempts to say near the end; her inability to add a question mark, an acknowledgement of her sudden humility; a discovery of life's ineffability.
William Trevor is a writer celebrated for his short stories and novels which explore the problematic and uneasy relationship between the past and present. Things are only ever finished, never finished with in Trevor’s chronicles of change and revisitation, and it is this subtle but enduring truth that illuminates all the stories in this haunting collection. People are enmeshed with each other in ways that escape direct translation - and such dependencies may silence yet define them.
In 'The Children' a grieving daughter subtly sabotages her father’s attempt at a new marriage through the consolation of reading her dead mother’s books each day. ‘Time would gather up the ends, and see to it that his daughter’s honouring of a memory was love that mattered also and even mattered more.’ Some departures must be respected for their unutterable finality and hierarchies of affection must be observed.
Trevor’s apparent exploration of adultery in 'The Room' unnervingly reveals that a wife’s affair is an attempt to communicate her unresolved fears that her husband murdered a woman nine years before. Instinctive loyalty precipitated her alibi for him yet such loyalty is both finite and corrosive. People just leave in Trevor’s world. Their words and worlds, run out on them. ‘The best that love could do was not enough, and he would know that also.’ When love turns to irony, then Trevor’s protagonists seem more isolated and lonely than ever.
This latest collection of short stories also includes one of the most casually cruel tales I have ever read, a story concerned with the contamination of a childhood friendship, through silence and complicity. In 'Folie a Deux' two estranged childhood friends accidentally meet again in a backstreet Parisian cafe and barely acknowledge each other. Trevor bleakly unveils the childhood incident which seemed arbitrary, pitiless and beyond evaluation. The two boys, Wilby and Anthony, had once put their old friendly dog named Jericho on a Lilo one summer day and had watched him float out to sea. ‘Far way already, the yellow of the Lilo became a blur on the water, was lost, was there again and lost again, and the barking began and became a wail.’ We are spectators here upon a literal ‘lost’ horizon of innocence.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Thanks for a beautifully written contribution.