William Trevor, the Writer and His Work, review by Pat Boran

William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dolores MacKenna. New Island Books. £9.99 pb.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

'By his own admission William Trevor is an outsider and has been so all his life.' Thus begins Dolores MacKenna's exploration of the work and, to a lesser extent, the personal history of one of Ireland's finest if hardly most public living writers.

Born William Trevor Cox, into a family that five generations before had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism (probably because Catholics were still denied the right to vote), Trevor clipped his name back by one third for the publication of his first novel A Standard of Behaviour in 1958. The loss of his old surname was in effect a double reinvention, for prior to his writing career he had already gained something of a reputation as a sculptor, one review of a Dublin show in the late 50s calling him, with prescience, "a painstaking perfectionist who is prepared to go to endless trouble to achieve his often startling effects".

In truth, however, Trevor's ability to switch from sculpture to writing (that first book was, he says, just to make money) seems less extraordinary on second glance: in many ways his writing technique involves a great deal of paring and chipping away. Readers of the recent novels Death in Summer and Felicia's Journey, for instance, will see how effectively he uses the less-is-more approach, but the evidence is there through most of his more than 30 books, not to mention dozens of television plays. The dialogue glitters, so much so that even in that first novel, the reader fills in the missing geographical detail (In what country is this set?) from hints, tones and speech patterns of the characters. Authorial comment, as MacKenna elsewhere suggests, is kept to a minimum, and nowhere more so, naturally, than in the screen work.

In fact, if it can be said that there is great visual, even televisual, material in Trevor's writing, MacKenna not only traces it back to his interest in sculpture (at one stage, in his late Trinity College years, he made visits to the Books of Kells on a daily basis to study details for a carving), but she also goes back to his childhood love of cinema, and the experiments with moving pictures undertaken by himself and his younger brother, Alan.

In a way it might be said that Trevor's childhood was itself a moving picture and that it was from this fact that his sense of being an outsider and, thence, of being an observer developed.

Born in Michelstown in 1928, his family moved 4 times in a little over a decade, going where his father's Bank of Ireland employers posted him. In addition, Trevor was sent to boarding school, and it may be that the combination of seemingly constant motion at home and institutional life provided him with his general fascination for melting pots, boarding houses in particular where, in MacKenna's words, "the most unlikely characters may live in harmony".

This phrase is perhaps MacKenna's most telling and subtle, for 'unlikely' and often undesirable characters do inhabit Trevor's worlds, in every complicated shade from Septimus Tuam, the seducer and deceiver of married women in The Love Department, to Pettie in the most recent book, a young would-be child-minder who becomes dangerously obsessed with the widower advertising a vacancy in his big house. If there is the impressive control and harmony of Trevor's writing, both in plot and style, this is necessary because, as MacKenna rightly points out, evil itself is his big subject. Earlier books such as The Children of Dynmouth explored it in detail, and recent books demonstrate 'how evil often emanates from circumstances in which the human need for love has been either unfulfilled or violated'.

MacKenna does a very fine job of sketching the life in the light of the work, and vice versa, without oversimplifying either. Her portrait of Trevor's parents 'shackled by convention' in a long-failed marriage, and then a reminder of so many other constantly bickering older couples throughout his fiction makes one wish there might have been a little more direct access to Trevor himself than seems to have been granted here. Which means, in short, this is a fine, considered book indeed.