Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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William Trevor
Viking 2009
This was my first (possibly my second: did I read The Old Boys a long time ago?) novel by William Trevor. It had got brilliant reviews, and it didn’t disappoint. It tells of a long summer in a small Irish town in the 1950s. A young woman is living a humdrum life with her older husband, who is suffering feelings of guilt over the accident which killed his first family. A young man – rather unconvincingly a stranger, although he has lived just outside the town all his life - takes photos of its gradually encroaching dereliction. Their paths cross. What happens next is, of course, predictable. What Trevor excels at, however, in this short novel – scarcely longer than a novella – is creating both a sense of place, of a traditional town on the cusp of change , and a convincing picture of his characters’ inner lives, and a mingling of the imagination and the daily world. We get all the usual Irish suspects - nuns, priests, drinkers, guilt, decay – in this downbeat picture of thwarted hopes and lives dominated by past regrets, so it’s not a jolly read. However, it is a moving one which I wholeheartedly recommend .
5th October 2009
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth122
See also: Other People's Worlds
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