Models of design and performance
Penelope Lively
AFTER RAIN by William Trevor Viking, £16, pp. 224 Short stories take up almost as much space in William Trevor's long list of titles as do novels — After Rain is his eighth col- lection. He is indeed blessed in this facility with both fictional forms. It is hard to write a good novel, but to serve up even one memorable story is to pass through the eye of a needle. Anyone can write a story oh, dear me, yes — but it is the form that most definitively sorts out the men from the boys. There is something about a Rolls- Royce of a short story that is apparent within the first few lines — control, economy, tension. The aftertaste remains for ever, with luck — whether it is the Chekhovian mood and manner story, or the Dahl twist-in-the-tail, or the Elizabeth Bowen magical accretion of atmosphere and character.
Several of the stories in this collection are Rolls-Royces, a couple are Ford Escorts and all the rest are BMW or Jaguar or thereabouts. I have never been a Dahl fan — the slap-the-reader-in-the-face ending seems to me in the last resort a cheap trick. The story form deserves better. Trevor is not a twist-in-the-tail man; indeed, he often deals a surprise right at the start, wrong-footing the reader within half a page. And this is just what we want of the short story, that sense of something held back, the authorial control that can lead the reader to think that things are going to be thus and then demonstrate with the flick of a word or a phrase that nothing is as it seems.
The deception of appearances lies at the heart of several of the best stories here. The second wife of a blind piano-tuner becomes so jealous of the past that she dis- torts and contradicts her dead predeces- sor's descriptions of places and people whereby the husband had envisaged the world. But the man has rumbled her and tolerates the duplicity with sad indulgence, we realise. Sometimes the deception is over the significance of an event. A rogue decorator tries to dun a widow for the bill which she knows her husband had paid before he died. At the end, we see that the outcome has nothing to do with either the decorator or the dead man, but concerns the woman's relationship with her sister. Similarly, a story about an adultery turns on the long friendship between two women. The price asked of the adulterous wife is that she should drop the childhood friend who had facilitated the infidelity.
That particular story reminded me of the series of Trevor stories that were translated into television plays a number of years ago. By the time I finished reading it I had cast it, designed the sets, had a shot at the script and done a pretty good job on direction. His stories translate well to the screen because so much depends upon dialogue and upon characterisation. Much of the tension comes from what is said, but much of the flavour from the characters. There are bit-players who hardly say a thing, whose potency comes from a throw-away description — their presence on the screen would be differently powerful. In what is perhaps the strongest and certainly the most harrowing story here, 'Lost Ground', the absent and barely mentioned son of a Protestant Armagh family becomes in the end the focal figure when he returns and shoots the adolescent brother who has shamed the family by bringing into the open the buried, unmentionable misery of sectarianism.
This last is a desolate tale. Many of the others are melancholy. Lacrimae rerum has always been an abiding theme of Trevor's work. He is masterly at the subtle indica- tion of suppressed frustration, of grief held in check. In the most telling stories, the aftertaste is the realisation that apparent calm conceals despair. But at the other end of the spectrum is that lightness of touch which is his other hallmark — dexterity with language, the turns of phrase that bring a reader up short, the ability to con- jure up a person with a line of dialogue and an authorial aside. This collection of stories is archetypal Trevor — entertaining, uplift- ing, sobering.
Previous page
