Truth About Human Foibles Captured in Short Stories
AFTER RAIN
By William Trevor
Random House
ISBN 0-676-97025-7
Reviewed by Sharon Greer
Arguably one of the best contemporary Irish writers of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, William Trevor never fails, in his usual lucid style, to capture the truth about human foibles. He invariably leaves the reader envious with admiration. Trevor is one of the most astute observers of human frailties and is again in his element in After Rain, a series of 12 beautifully crafted short stories.
Trevor’s ability to make quite ordinary characters face extraordinary ordeals seems effortless and remarkable. In Gilbert’s Mother, a mother slowly comes to believe that her strange son is actually a murderer and rapist, although we can never be absolutely certain because we never find out. We only know that the mother’s guilt impels her to take the blame for the failure of her son’s life.
In A Bit of Business, two small time thieves rob an old man in his neighbour’s home. Neither can kill him but for several pages in the book they debate whether or not to go back to “finish him off.” The story leaves the characters as well as the reader “wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired.”
In Timothy’s Birthday, an elderly couple living in the country prepare for the annual birthday visit from their son. It is revealed slowly that their son is gay, a fact that is marked by the parents’ refusal to acknowledge it.
Tired of the pretense, the son talks his new lover, a tough, young bisexual, into visiting his parents while making excuses for his absence. In typical Trevor style, the possibility of an act of terror pervades the birthday party leaving us on tenterhooks. The crime turns out to be the theft of a silver ornament, but the refusal of the parents to acknowledge the theft is another reminder of their refusal to accept their son as he is and not as they wish him to be.
My personal favourite, Lost Ground, tells the story of a Protestant farmer boy kissed by what seems to be the ghost of a Catholic spirit which begins a chain of events that ends in tragedy. We never find out if what the boy saw is real but rather the story details the repercussions of his vision. An incredibly disturbing and realistic reflection on Northern Irish society.
William Trevor was born on May 24, 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He attended St. Columba’s College, County Dublin, where he came under the influence of the sculptor, Oisin Kelly, who taught him art. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin with a degree in history.
He worked for many years as a sculptor supporting himself by teaching. He became a full-time writer in the early 1970s and describes his work, “My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.” Indeed, William Trevor truly is a remarkable and excellent raconteur.
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