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Human beings everywhere love a good story, the Irish especially so. Over centuries, the Irish evolved an impressive and richly textured panorama of stories – finely woven and charming tales that were intricate, lugubrious, scary, funny, or fantastical – which by way of the spoken word were conveyed by the revered keepers of that oral culture: the sgealai who related the long sagas of legendary heroes, and the seanchai who possessed an abundance of shorter tales.
As this venerable ancient practice gave way inexorably to the printed page, Ireland would confer its unique cultural stamp not on the novel, but on the short story, which, says Cork-born William Trevor, “deals in moments and subtleties and shadows of grey. It tells as little as it dares. It teases in a way that, still today, delights the Irish sensibility and the Irish mind. It suits the Irish mood.”
Indeed the realm of fiction and the short story in particular has well-suited Trevor, who will turn 80 this May. In his latest volume of stories, Cheating At Canasta, Trevor again proves himself a magisterial conteur. Over the course of the 12 stories that comprise this splendid collection, this most assured and seasoned writer serves up a vibrant salmagundi of emotions and apercus.
Trevor leads off with a riveting tale, “The Dressmaker’s Child.” A young man named Cahal works at his father’s common garage. He is the only son and the only child to have remained at home. Life is uneventful; work is sporadic and not very lucrative. A young couple — foreign visitors — inquire about a local roadside religious shrine. They have no car and ask if Cahal would be willing to drive them there. Hoping to make some easy money, Cahal does not tell them that a church bishop and two parish priests have officially disclaimed rumors of the statue’s miraculous properties: “None of those three men, and no priest or nun who had ever visited the crossroads at Pouldearg, had sensed anything special about the statue; none had witnessed the tears that were said to slip out of the downcast eyes when pardon for sins was beseeched by penitents.”
As Cahal and his passengers return from the shrine along a dark road, Trevor demonstrates his mastery at creating an unanticipated sense of menace. In an instant, a disturbed girl appears out of the gloom and runs deliberately toward the moving car. She is the troubled child of the dressmaker of the story’s title and she collides almost silently with the vehicle. Fear and dread well up within Cahal, even though his passengers have noticed nothing. He drives on without stopping to check if the crazed girl was hurt, or worse. This jarring moment transforms the entire narrative, precipitating an atmosphere of foreboding that dominates to the conclusion.
In “An Afternoon” a plain, lovelorn teenage girl, Jasmin, keeps an appointment with a man she has only encountered on the phone, on a chat line. Her life is a drab affair with an overbearing and unaffectionate mother. Her stepfather is kind enough, but equally dominated by his caviling wife. In an effort to escape from her distressing home life, Jasmin meets her on-line acquaintance, Clive, in person. He is older than she envisioned. Clive is suave, gentle, and patient. He is a veteran pedophile. Jasmin tells Clive that she is 16. Again, Trevor is here at his best, limning a disturbing environment wherein tension is effortlessly laid on layer by layer: “All the time he kept his smile going. He was the happy sort, he’d told her on the chat line, not the first time, maybe the third or fourth. He’d asked her if she was the happy sort herself and she’d said yes, even though she knew she wasn’t.”
Though a quintessentially Irish writer who repeatedly revisits Irish themes, not all of Trevor’s stories here have an Irish ambience. For decades he has made his home in Devon, England. And having grown up Protestant in the predominantly Catholic south of Ireland, Trevor has a refined acuity for nuances of culture, language, and human psychology, and he renders his insights into the human condition with an incomparable grace and facility of style. Those who love good literature will do well to spend some time with Trevor’s latest offering. An undisputed doyen of the craft, he shows no signs yet of putting down his elegant pen, and for that, all lovers of the literary short story should be most grateful.
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