William Trevor Last Stories
by William Trevor (Viking, £14.99)
Derek Hand
The title of this posthumously published collection, Last Stories, signals that this is the final work from William Trevor who died in 2016. The title is doubly appropriate because the 10 pieces gathered here are imbued with a melancholy sense of things ending.
Trevor as a writer is attracted to the misfits and the outcasts of the world, with the lonely and the troublingly strange populating his fiction. One of his great gifts is one of understated suggestion so that malice and threat often hover disturbingly just below the surface of people’s daily interactions.
Menace
In ‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’, Miss Nightingale ponders the mystery of the young boy who steals some little thing from her home every time he comes to practice his scales. Her dilemma is that this rough youth plays so beautifully that she doesn’t mind. The menace comes from his side of the relationship, for we never know his story or his motivation.
‘At the Caffé Daria’ deals with whole lives in a way that only a meticulously written short story can do: seasons and years pass in a sentence and yet depths are plumbed and revealed with a single thought or memory. Lost friendship is the theme here, but so too is the desire for connection and affection. These themes are taken up again and again in the stories, seen from different angles and in varying situations but always bittersweet.
Of note in the collection is how the urban space, the city streets of London and Dublin, are open to chance encounters and meetings that reverberate and echo, that have far-reaching consequences beyond the seemingly unimportant initial moment of contact.
Wider historical or political context is eschewed because what Trevor is seeking out is the human sphere of interaction, the emotional worlds of his array of bank clerks and publishers, giving articulation to their hidden fears and wants.
Here are stories of lonely people, of the woman who comes to the door of Olivia who she believes is having an affair with her husband in ‘Making Conversation’, or in ‘Giotto’s Angels’ where a man who has lost his memory but comes alive as he loses himself in his work of picture restoration.
Here too are the stories of how people dealing with impossible tragedies, such as the characters in ‘The Women’, a mother who gave up her daughter for adoption and that daughter, each in their own ways coping with the wounds of absence and disconnection.
The mood of ‘The Unknown Girl’, perhaps, captures perfectly the tone of the entire collection. The death of a young girl, a cleaner, in a car accident forces her one time employer to reassess her sense of who she is or who she thinks she is.
But the story, too, recognises the power of silences, of what is not said, can be the real zone of significance and meaning. It is also replete with the kind of detail that brings colour and depth to our understanding. The woman listens to Bach, has prints of Bonnard in her house and reads Beau Geste: “She listened to music, took pains with cooking, gardened, kept up with friends. In Italy the early and mid-Renaissance delighted her. In France the Impressionists did. She read the novels that time’s esteem had kept alive and judged contemporary fiction for herself.”
Beneath this seemingly untroubled and bright middle class existence are profound anxieties about opportunities not taken and lives not lived, hers more so than that of the dead girl.
The stories here are not an afterthought to William Trevor’s celebrated life in writing. Their singular and compelling power lingers in the memory long after the book is set aside. His tales of life viewed from offset angle, their autumnal mood and atmosphere are testament to his brilliance as a prose writer and demonstrate, too, the veracity of the claim for his being a master of the short story form in particular.
