William Trevor
publisher
Viking
format
Hardcover
pages
224
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
Can you imagine the mother of two boys under three sitting and reading a book in one sitting-and not by choice, either?
After I read the galley of William Trevor's new novel, LOVE AND SUMMER, I loaned it to Cai, and because this was her first experience with a Trevor novel, she was nearly overwhelmed. She couldn't put it down, and this is part of what she said in the email that she sent me. "I am reeling. I am swimming in this book because it's so simple, so complicated, and because Trevor is such a genius."
I read this book twice: once because the language was so eloquent that I was distracted from the story itself, and then I went back to read the story. Ask any contemporary author about his/her favorite writer, and he/she will immediately include Trevor on the list. Don't overlook THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT, an earlier novel.
LOVE AND SUMMER takes place in the mid-1950's in the small Irish town of Rathmoye, and Ellie Dillahan, a shy orphan from the hill country, married a man whose life has been blighted by an unspeakable tragedy. Ellie lives a quiet existence until she meets Florian Kilderry, a young photographer preparing to leave Ireland and his past forever. The chance encounter of these two lost souls sets in motion a poignant love affair that requires Ellie to make an impossible choice - whether to leave her husband for an uncertain future with the man she loves or remain in the home she has made for herself. Trevor delves into the circumscribed lives of the people of Rathmoye, exploring their passions and frustrations during one long summer.
About the Author
Novelist and short-story writer William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland on 24 May 1928. He was educated at St Columba's College, County Dublin, and Trinity College, Dublin. He worked briefly as a teacher, and later as a copywriter in an advertising agency before he began to work full-time as a writer in 1965. He was also a sculptor and exhibited frequently in Dublin and London. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958.
His fiction, set mainly in Ireland and England, ranges from black comedies characterised by eccentrics and sexual deviants to stories exploring Irish history and politics, and he articulates the tensions between Irish Protestant landowners and Catholic tenants in what critics have termed the 'big house' novel. He is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, and has adapted a number of his own stories for the stage, television and radio. These collections include The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967), The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (1972), Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1975) and Beyond the Pale (1981). His early novels include The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969). The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983) both won the Whitbread Novel Award, and Felicia's Journey (1994), the story of a young Irish girl who becomes the victim of a sexual sociopath, won both the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Sunday Express Book of the Year awards.
William Trevor was awarded an honorary CBE in 1977 for his services to literature, and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994. He is also a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He was awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize by the Arts Council of England in 1999 in recognition of his work. He lives in Devon, in South West England.
The Hill Bachelors (2000), a collection of short stories, won both the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Short Stories and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction in 2001. The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. William Trevor's latest short story collections are: A Bit On the Side (2004), on the theme of adultery; The Dressmaker's Child (2005); and Cheating at Canasta (2007). His most recent novel is Love and Summer (2009).
He was awarded the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature in 2008.
Beyond the book
Sebastian Barry applauds the timeless integrity of William Trevor
The Guardian
Saturday 22 August 2009
There is a touch of JD Salinger about William Trevor - except, of course, that Trevor publishes faithfully every few years: novels and collections of stories. He is 81 years old. His last short-story collection, Cheating at Canasta, began, as Roy Foster pointed out, with a masterpiece. "How does Trevor do it?" was Foster's marvelling question. How does he do it? Mysteriously. This vexed, misused and secret word also applies to his new novel, Love and Summer (a title that sings back to an earlier book, Death in Summer). His new work is all about life, and if there are dampers and de-accelerants on that life, it is nevertheless a fabulously benign book - almost, I might say, a work of sympathetic magic, as if to describe a troubled utopia might be to instate it.
It is useful to state Trevor's ground, his Ireland (inasmuch as one can guess it, think back into it). He was born in Cork into a middle-class Protestant family (this is important - not the great landowning Protestants with their flagstones of guilt weighing them down). He grew up seemingly untouched by the extravagantly unhappy marriage of his parents, moved around a lot as a child, attended maybe 13 schools - all the disruption a writer could ask for, though maybe not the child. He left Ireland while quite young, became a sculptor for a while, and then settled to writing. By his own account he writes from an early hour until 11am, and after that fills his days with the garden, this and that, cups of whatever with his wife, to whom all his books are dedicated. For all the day, though, you sense, he is a writer, writing like a sculptor, in that he creates a mass of material and then happily, passionately, brilliantly takes away, takes away, swirl of sentence by swirl of sentence.
It sounds like a life perfectly arranged, and may be so, especially in light of this new book, which is also about achievable happiness at some level. The old Trevorian music of sadness doesn't dominate quite so much. Although there are great forces brought against the lives of Ellie, his beautiful heroine, her husband Dillahan, Miss Connulty fingering her late mother's jewellery, hers at last, and Florian, the young man Ellie falls in love with, there is constantly a sense of human happiness achieved. Miss Connulty's brother, though entirely becalmed, yet has a taint of happiness in him. The parish priest is in a permanent state of elation. The nuns who brought up Ellie as a foundling seem the epitome of thoughtfulness and grace, and are the little gods to whom she refers in her mind. All fabulously strange in our understanding of a past Ireland, and all fabulously, deliciously familiar. An act of magic: write it down and it may be so. It is also restating the godly fact of singularity. Every story is possible, even a story of grace in a country holding on to grace with exhausted hands. Every great story, in fact, may possess this quality of one time only. This happened, but not generally. Specifically.
It's from the subtle yet ferocious specificity of this story that its power rises. The most entrancing character among the vivid cast is Ellie. When Trevor writes about her, something happens to his very syntax. It clears out, it rises up, it breaks away into a sort of floating condition. It becomes breath and life itself. Here is the young woman dressing in her farmhouse: "Soft fair hair, once difficult, was now drawn back, the style that suited it best." Who is considering the style that suits her best? She herself? The world that knows her? Trevor? Ourselves? He places her before us with such strange tact that we are to see her in utmost privacy, not with human eyes exactly, but with the new eyes that art lends us for a moment. We are drawing Ellie with new hands even as she is unfolded before us.
In this landscape and place, which is "some years after the middle of the last century", there are other new strangenesses. Miss Connulty, who in other fictional worlds might be expected to move against Ellie and her affair with Florian, becomes instead the safety net that would catch her if she fell. The strange character of Orpen Wren, a sort of lost historian who sees everything and knows nothing, who goes out to tell Ellie's husband something catastrophic at the end, does not bring catastrophe as such. Her husband, meanwhile, is another beautifully composed character, who has accidentally killed his first wife and their child and farms in a place he does not seek to escape, as a thousand other Irish fictional characters like him might. It is all turned on its head.
In this way it might be suggested that the novel is about freedom. Florian, the young man not quite of the big house, but big enough, whose eccentric parents are dead, will break a vow and leave - and more extraordinarily, will achieve the leavetaking, with his failed attempts at painting and photography behind him, but with some hope for the fragments of writing in his notebook before him. It is not about freedom from self, but the necessity to bring the self to the place where it can be free. Dillahan the husband is free at home; Florian is not, so he must go. Miss Connulty is free because her mother is dead. Orpen Wren is free because he is mad.
Most wonderfully of all, Ellie becomes free because, although she has already been there for some years, she only finally arrives at the farm, one might say, because she is pierced through with compassion for her husband.
The ordinary throughout is presented as instances of paradise just about to be reached. That Trevor allows his characters so much is not only due to the innate generosity for which he is justly worshipped as a writer, but to a new grace again, something further, that marks this book as particular, miraculous; in it old matters are made new, transformed, redeemed.
The last pages represent freedom of another sort, when a writer untethers himself, and his prose rises to new heights. After a thousand details, thousands of lovely sentences, we have this one: "They sing in their heads a song they mustn't sing, and wonder who it is who doesn't want them."
Trevor lives quietly, his countless awards seeming to leave no disruptive mark (he recently received the David Cohen award, a sort of English Nobel; Love and Summer has been longlisted for the Man Booker). One can imagine him accepting the Nobel itself in a quiet way and getting back as quick as he can to his refuge in England, the chats, the garden, the workroom. He is a great writer balanced in the beneficent guise of anonymity. It is worth stating, for its uniqueness in these present times, what he does in order to make these books. What he has done for some 60 years to make such a book as this possible, the time he has spent well to create something timeless.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009