Oct
29
Love and Summer is the latest offering from William Trevor, one of Ireland’s most important literary prize-fighters, and passing into the hand of the critic it makes a promise. Like all of his other work, it promises to be first-rate. Literary correspondents all over have bemoaned this latest novel’s exclusion from the Booker shortlist; thus, the bar is raised even higher. But does it deliver?
Yes. Love and Summer is instantly one of those classic Irish novels, denoting the claustrophobia of the family unit, swaying always on a pendulum of guilt and innocence, crying out in its Catholic way for confession. There are traits of McGahern here, and similarities with the Big House desolation of Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, but Trevor has always been his own man, unique.
The book charts a summer-long affair between Ellie Dillihan, a farmer’s young wife, and Florian Kilderry, a stranger in the town who is the last in his family’s line and on the verge of selling the family home and leaving Ireland. In depicting this affair, Trevor maps Irish town life. As a result of her mother’s passing, Miss Connulty has been freed of an adult life of oppression. Her brother John Paul is trying to come to terms with their loss while also maintaining the family business and placating his cold sister. Dillihan, the farmer being gradually cuckolded, works away and plans to buy a neighbouring field. Orpen Wren patiently awaits the return of the great St. John family, whose libraries he catalogued, never once considering in his madness that the family are gone forever. In short, nothing exciting is really happening in Rathmoye, but neither does Trevor want it to, and neither is the book less compelling for that.
In fact, there is a love in this novel of procedure, an elevation of the mundane. Aside from Orpen Wren and Florian, who is mostly confused about what he is and what he wants, each character is excruciatingly normal, and this normality is celebrated by Trevor in his frequent forensic descriptions of the most basic tasks: “Later that same day Miss Connulty prepared beef for a stew, cutting it into oblong pieces, dusting them with flour when she teased out what fat and sinew she could, then laying them ready on a dinner-plate while she diced carrots and onions. She seared and browned the meat, turning the pieces over once and then sliding them into the saucepan…”
This voyeuristic recipe goes on and it works very well. You live in the skins and minds of these normal people who carry out normal tasks, and thus relate to them all the more intensely. In remembering Connulty’s mother (Mrs), the townsfolk recall with reverence how “no task had been too menial for her to undertake… had [ever] been begrudged.
A sense of loss also pervades Love and Summer, because each character is quietly coming to terms with some unwitting personal tragedy. Ellie was orphaned; Miss Connulty cannot forget the circumstances of an abortion long ago; Dillihan accidentally caused the death of his first wife and their child. The effect of Trevor’s simple style and close third person perspective is that the reader has a ringside seat in the psychological battles of each character as they guiltily struggle to accept “the blemished truth”, or, from Ellie’s point of view, “to be ashamed and know it was right to be ashamed.”
The novel opens with Mrs. Connulty’s funeral and that image of decay persists. The big house that Florian has inherited is crumbling, good only for emptying of content and selling off to cover debt, and signals the end of a way of life. Likewise, Ellie’s dedication to her husband moulders; the wilting foxgloves signal the end of a summer. Miss Connulty cannot escape the memory of her own affair and abortion (even birth has been stifled by death) and she is determined to halt the decline of Ellie’s virtue. This is the point at which the story gathers you close and, so like a family, won’t relinquish you.
There are issues here too. Trevor has a strange impatience with dialogue, often reporting as opposed to letting the characters speak, and though it enhances the colloquial tone of the book, it prevents the story from coming fully to life. Also, at two or three places in the narration, the reader becomes aware of the writer making a judgement about specific characters and, being so close to them, the reader feels the judgement should be their own to make. A third frustration is in the omission of the affair’s first true ‘clinch’. Having been built and built, the moment of passion, the expected crescendo, is completely bypassed, leading to a sense of anti-climax.
It must also be pointed out that these faults may be deliberate, because anti-climax seems to be the issue here—psychology as opposed to passion—and, if so, it is well considered. At the end of the day, Love and Summer is about the anti-climaxes, the settling for less involved with family life, with guilt and innocence, with love, with town life. But town life in Rathmoye will go on regardless and, in this first-rate novel, this is the crux of the matter.
"Danny Denton is a writer and critic from Cork. He has published fiction and non-fiction in various journals, and is currently completing his first novel."
Love And Summer by William Trevor
Love and Summer is the latest offering from William Trevor, one of Ireland’s most important literary prize-fighters, and passing into the hand of the critic it makes a promise. Like all of his other work, it promises to be first-rate. Literary correspondents all over have bemoaned this latest novel’s exclusion from the Booker shortlist; thus, the bar is raised even higher. But does it deliver?Yes. Love and Summer is instantly one of those classic Irish novels, denoting the claustrophobia of the family unit, swaying always on a pendulum of guilt and innocence, crying out in its Catholic way for confession. There are traits of McGahern here, and similarities with the Big House desolation of Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, but Trevor has always been his own man, unique.
The book charts a summer-long affair between Ellie Dillihan, a farmer’s young wife, and Florian Kilderry, a stranger in the town who is the last in his family’s line and on the verge of selling the family home and leaving Ireland. In depicting this affair, Trevor maps Irish town life. As a result of her mother’s passing, Miss Connulty has been freed of an adult life of oppression. Her brother John Paul is trying to come to terms with their loss while also maintaining the family business and placating his cold sister. Dillihan, the farmer being gradually cuckolded, works away and plans to buy a neighbouring field. Orpen Wren patiently awaits the return of the great St. John family, whose libraries he catalogued, never once considering in his madness that the family are gone forever. In short, nothing exciting is really happening in Rathmoye, but neither does Trevor want it to, and neither is the book less compelling for that.
In fact, there is a love in this novel of procedure, an elevation of the mundane. Aside from Orpen Wren and Florian, who is mostly confused about what he is and what he wants, each character is excruciatingly normal, and this normality is celebrated by Trevor in his frequent forensic descriptions of the most basic tasks: “Later that same day Miss Connulty prepared beef for a stew, cutting it into oblong pieces, dusting them with flour when she teased out what fat and sinew she could, then laying them ready on a dinner-plate while she diced carrots and onions. She seared and browned the meat, turning the pieces over once and then sliding them into the saucepan…”
This voyeuristic recipe goes on and it works very well. You live in the skins and minds of these normal people who carry out normal tasks, and thus relate to them all the more intensely. In remembering Connulty’s mother (Mrs), the townsfolk recall with reverence how “no task had been too menial for her to undertake… had [ever] been begrudged.
A sense of loss also pervades Love and Summer, because each character is quietly coming to terms with some unwitting personal tragedy. Ellie was orphaned; Miss Connulty cannot forget the circumstances of an abortion long ago; Dillihan accidentally caused the death of his first wife and their child. The effect of Trevor’s simple style and close third person perspective is that the reader has a ringside seat in the psychological battles of each character as they guiltily struggle to accept “the blemished truth”, or, from Ellie’s point of view, “to be ashamed and know it was right to be ashamed.”
The novel opens with Mrs. Connulty’s funeral and that image of decay persists. The big house that Florian has inherited is crumbling, good only for emptying of content and selling off to cover debt, and signals the end of a way of life. Likewise, Ellie’s dedication to her husband moulders; the wilting foxgloves signal the end of a summer. Miss Connulty cannot escape the memory of her own affair and abortion (even birth has been stifled by death) and she is determined to halt the decline of Ellie’s virtue. This is the point at which the story gathers you close and, so like a family, won’t relinquish you.
There are issues here too. Trevor has a strange impatience with dialogue, often reporting as opposed to letting the characters speak, and though it enhances the colloquial tone of the book, it prevents the story from coming fully to life. Also, at two or three places in the narration, the reader becomes aware of the writer making a judgement about specific characters and, being so close to them, the reader feels the judgement should be their own to make. A third frustration is in the omission of the affair’s first true ‘clinch’. Having been built and built, the moment of passion, the expected crescendo, is completely bypassed, leading to a sense of anti-climax.
It must also be pointed out that these faults may be deliberate, because anti-climax seems to be the issue here—psychology as opposed to passion—and, if so, it is well considered. At the end of the day, Love and Summer is about the anti-climaxes, the settling for less involved with family life, with guilt and innocence, with love, with town life. But town life in Rathmoye will go on regardless and, in this first-rate novel, this is the crux of the matter.
"Danny Denton is a writer and critic from Cork. He has published fiction and non-fiction in various journals, and is currently completing his first novel."
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