William Trevor, who has long lived in England, was born in County Cork, and all the better stories in his latest book are set in Ireland, with Irish characters, both Protestant and Catholic, rural and urban, educated and not. These stories, like most of those in his previous five collections, concern themselves largely with his homeland’s tortuous relations with Britain, the exploitation of the poor by the rich or even the slightly better off, and the twisted relations within families whose members have been shaped by Ireland’s historical, political, and material circumstances.
There is much to admire in Trevor’s short fiction. He is a master of compact characterization, and of a unique sort of melancholy lyricism; he can also evoke any number of powerful and delicate feelings. Here is the conclusion of “Honeymoon in Tramore,” in which a thirtyish bridegroom, who as a boy had been sent by his orphanage to work on a farm in Cork, has just put to bed his drunken wife, the former’s many-suitored daughter:
Once more he looked down into her face: for eighteen years she had seemed like a queen to him and now, miraculously, he had the right to kiss her. He straightened her slackened body, moving her arms and legs until she was lying comfortably. Slowly he pulled the bedclothes up and turned the light out; then he lay beside her and caressed her in the darkness. He had come to the farm with a label round his