Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
William Trevor
Penguin 1982
I picked this 1980 novel up in a charity shop in the Cotswolds on a wet Monday afternoon in March. It was a lucky buy. Trevor tells of the confidence trickster Francis Tyte and the consequences of his lies on the lives of three women unlucky enough to come across him. Tyte reminded me of Lewis Archer in Coronation Street; Archer’s a bit older but has the same charm and good looks and is clearly a wrong ‘un. He’s also reminiscent of Gorse, introduced in Patrick Hamilton’s late novel The West Pier. However, Tyte is a more fully drawn character: an actor who can scarcely distinguish between his own fictions and reality, traumatised by childhood abuse and passing on the misery to others. The link with a film about Constance Kent and the Road Hill House murder (a real-life Victorian crime explored in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher) seemed a little contrived to me, as did the rather unlikely events at the end of the novel, but overall I found this an engrossing and perceptively drawn account of the turmoil a chance meeting with a damaged person can wreak. Perhaps it’s showing its age a little now (Tyte’s daughter’s comprehensive school is pretty unbelievable) - but the plus side of this is that it’s well-written with no post-modern tricks up its sleeve.
30 June 2010
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth122
See also: Love and Summer
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