BOOKS

News from Ireland

James Buchan

THE COLLECTED STORIES by William Trevor Viking, £20, pp. 1261 In William Trevor's last collection, Family Sins, there is a story called 'Events at Drimaghleen'. As literature, as opposed to the TV film made of it, it is not entirely satisfactory: there is a double-murder and suicide which is oversized for the story and the writer's sympathies are unevenly distributed. Even so, it tells a story that all journalists might consider: the magazine writer and her seedy local photographer, with their persistence, money and arrogance, end up visiting on a small Irish Village a horror as great as the first tragedy. There is a consequence of this argument that is even more interesting. In writing the story, William Trevor appears to be saying that for any but the most trivial account of human affairs, fiction will be truer than the literary artefact known as non-fiction (which is here represented by British Sunday magazine journalism and TV documentary). I believe him, and I sus- pect that years from now, people will want to read William Trevor's stories for their documentary value, rather as we now read Kipling's Indian stories or Ambrose Bierce. This is not just because William Trevor invariably lists his characters' dress and attributes and is careful about continuity — but because of the granular, even crunchy, texture he gives to certain quaint and vanished social milieux: for example, the Private side of the Headmaster's house at an English prep school, an Italian restaurant specialising in drunken office groups c.1970, a dry dance hall in rural Ireland, a tour agency in pre-revolutionary Isfahan etc. No wonder TV producers adore him.

, His characters erxist in history. In the nizarre and touching story, 'Lovers of their Time', a travel agent and a chemist's clerk discover love in 1963 in a forgotten corridor bathroom of the station hotel at Paddington. The bath itself takes on a hallucinated femininity:

The walls were marble, white veined delicate- ly with grey. Two monstrous brass taps, the biggest bath taps he'd ever in his life seen, seemed to know already that he and Marie would come to the bathroom.

For all its oddity, or rather because of it, the story has the authentic atmosphere of !he 1960s: the intoxicating sense that sex /lad been discovered, alive, in the heart of a Shabby ex-Victorian England. (The story is

v. erY tenderly handled, as if William Trevor nad a

era.) kindness for that halcyon or drippy ,..In writing about the civil war in Ulster, william Trevor is both courageous and prudent, the very model of a thoughtful writer. Rather than engage the IRA in the territory of non-fiction — the housing estates of Belfast, say, or the British law courts — he goes instead to places where the sound of bombs can only faintly be heard: the Fulham house of an Irish gas- meter reader in 'Another Christmas', a family of impoverished Protestant gentry in a southern Irish resort town in 'The Distant Past':

Because of the distant past they would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their beds.

The sheer weight of Irish history oppresses these fine stories from the 1970s:

'The Battle of the Yellow Ford,' she suddenly chanted in a singsong way that sounded thoroughly peculiar, 'the Statutes of Kilken- ny. The Battle of Glenmama, the convention of Drumceat. The Act of Settlement, the Renunciation Act. The Act of Union, the Toleration Act. Just so much history it sounds like now, yet people starved or died while other people watched.

These stories do have problems with rhetoric or slide (like the closing passages of 'Beyond the Pale') into lyric or lose themselves (as in 'The News from Ireland') in historical authenticity and shimmering production-values. It isn't easy to write about this terrible subject. He tries.

Beside the pathos of history in William Trevor's stories is the pathos of time. The tone is melancholy and sweet, rather than tragic. People go broke, take to drink, die in horrible or ludicrous circumstances. Love dries up or runs riot. Some event in the past springs up to ruin you: William Trevor is peculiarly conscious of how mis- ery is transferred, like some hellish relay baton, across the generations. Country houses fall to bits. The universe is indiffer- ent or spooky or slightly malicious. In one of my very favourite stories, 'The Day We Got Drunk on Cake', a young man loses his girl and goes on a drunken rampage only to realise, in horror, that time will cure even his sorrows, probably sooner rather than later.

As I went back to the party the sadness of all the forgetting stung me. Even already, I thought, time is at work; time is ticking her away; time is destroying her, killing all there was between us.

(Note also even here the faint rhetorical tinge.)

How good is William Trevor? This collection of collections makes a couple of things very clear. The first is the extraordinary even quality of William Trevor's short fiction. None of these stories is bad and some are very good. 'Access to the Children' from the first collection is just as technically satisfactory — it works! — as 'The Paradise Lounge' from the 1980s or 'Children of the Headmaster' and 'Kathleen's Field' from the most recent collection. The subjects also haven't changed much. There's a bit more drink and dope in the 1960s, bombing in the 1970s and Italy in the 1980s, but the very last story in the book, 'Kathleen's Field', is a tale of lower-middle-class Ireland at mid- century, classical William Trevor.

But how good is William Trevor? Is he up with the master short-story writers of Ireland, Russia, the US and France: Chekov, say, and Melville, Maupassant, Henry James, Nabokov, Hemingway and James Joyce? Can any of these collections stand alongside The Dubliners, which is the one all Irish writers of short fiction have to beat?

I re-read 'The Dead'. I had in mind a story of William Trevor's called 'Angels at the 1it7' which is about a wife-swanninct

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Except it can't. 'The Dead' is to Irish lit- erature as Arkle is to Irish horse breeding. Ireland is always sending over strong and brave horses who, after a couple of winters' hard campaigning, arrive at Cheltenham with a dozen wins to their name. 'But is she as good as Arkle?' says Brough Scott. The TV goes black and white. From a great height — they have to use the camera on the ton of the stands — von see a horse looking embarrassed. There is a show of betting.