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Forebodings and a funeral one summer
By Thomas Mallon |
September 20, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WILLIAM Trevor's 14th novel begins about 50 years ago with a funeral in the Irish country town he calls Rathmoye. The deceased is Mrs Eileen Connulty, a prosperous widow who ran a local lodging house for traveling salesmen, Number 4 The Square, and who, as death came near, "feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to." The emotional realignments Mrs Connulty's two middle-aged children will undergo as a result of her passing are in the normal order of things; her funeral's true importance, however, will lie not in its grim grinding of life's usual gears but in the way it fatefully joins two bystanders.
A young amateur photographer named Florian Kilderry, who has cycled 7.5 miles into Rathmoye to take some pictures, finds himself blocked by the funeral procession and in need of directions. They are provided by a shy young farmer's wife, Ellie Dillahan, who will later recall "noticing the hands that operated the camera. Delicate hands, she'd said to herself." Raised as a foundling by the nuns at Cloonhill convent, Ellie had eventually been placed as a housekeeper with Mr Dillahan, the owner of a snug, successful farm, an entirely decent man haunted by the accident that took the lives of his wife and infant child. After a few years he married Ellie, and they have now settled into a peaceable, dull routine.
Ellie is "content but for her childlessness," or so she believes, but after a second encounter with Florian she is unable to banish the photographer from her mind. For a moment she considers taking her thoughts to the confessional, since, for all their blamelessness, they seem to have consecrated the simple objects she and Florian were surrounded by when they met in the local grocery store. "She wondered if they would ever be the same again, if what she'd bought herself would be, the Brown & Polson's cornflour, Rinso. She wondered if she would be the same herself."
If not so transfigured as Ellie, Florian is infatuated with her gentle innocence. "The sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father," a gaily artistic pair who lived mostly on love and charm, Florian has inherited neither their talents -- he knows he has no real gift as a photographer -- nor their romantic luck. Ellie will never extinguish the torch he's been carrying for an Italian cousin, Isabella, ever since the summer visits she made to Ireland when they were both adolescents.
Possessed of a curious but convincing combination of fecklessness and strong will, Florian sits inside Shelhanagh, his parents' decaying country house, wondering what to do. After deciding to sell the place and go abroad, he makes a bonfire of his father's diaries and his mother's postcards. But he delays revealing his intentions to Ellie during their chaste meetings at the gate-lodge of what was once a fine estate. "Perhaps Scandinavia," he finally says, in answer to her question about where he'll go.
Though he does have a "fondness for concealment," Florian is not so much caddish as emotionally lazy.
"He had loved being loved, and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough." And so the idyll continues, drawing Ellie toward the brink: "She had meat to get in Hearn's, and a few groceries in the Cash and Carry. Then she looked up Scandinavia in Hogan's, where she had once bought a new exercise-book for the accounts. School books were kept too, and she found Scandinavia in an atlas."
Ellie and Florian are threatened by the madness of two other people. Devotees of Trevor's slyly plotted fiction will guess early on that the addled local wanderer, Orpen Wren, once a retainer on the estate where Ellie and Florian have their meetings, will end up playing a key if inadvertent role in bringing matters to a crisis. More directly dangerous is the late Mrs Connulty's unhappy daughter, who misses nothing that's visible through the blinds at the lodging house, and whose "bristling imagination" is ready to make malevolent work of all she sees.
Trevor is fantastically effective at foreboding; he can make a reader squirm just by withholding the next bit of some long-past anterior action he's been recounting. When he wishes, as in "Felicia's Journey," he can depict the most gruesome violence, but always in the same even tones with which the hens get fed. This new novel, except for the accidents that took Mrs Connulty's husband and Dillahan's first wife, is a delicate sort of drama -- there is no corpse in the basement, no bomb lies hidden in a drawer -- but even so, readers' hearts will be in their mouths for the last 50 pages.
A young amateur photographer named Florian Kilderry, who has cycled 7.5 miles into Rathmoye to take some pictures, finds himself blocked by the funeral procession and in need of directions. They are provided by a shy young farmer's wife, Ellie Dillahan, who will later recall "noticing the hands that operated the camera. Delicate hands, she'd said to herself." Raised as a foundling by the nuns at Cloonhill convent, Ellie had eventually been placed as a housekeeper with Mr Dillahan, the owner of a snug, successful farm, an entirely decent man haunted by the accident that took the lives of his wife and infant child. After a few years he married Ellie, and they have now settled into a peaceable, dull routine.
Ellie is "content but for her childlessness," or so she believes, but after a second encounter with Florian she is unable to banish the photographer from her mind. For a moment she considers taking her thoughts to the confessional, since, for all their blamelessness, they seem to have consecrated the simple objects she and Florian were surrounded by when they met in the local grocery store. "She wondered if they would ever be the same again, if what she'd bought herself would be, the Brown & Polson's cornflour, Rinso. She wondered if she would be the same herself."
If not so transfigured as Ellie, Florian is infatuated with her gentle innocence. "The sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father," a gaily artistic pair who lived mostly on love and charm, Florian has inherited neither their talents -- he knows he has no real gift as a photographer -- nor their romantic luck. Ellie will never extinguish the torch he's been carrying for an Italian cousin, Isabella, ever since the summer visits she made to Ireland when they were both adolescents.
Possessed of a curious but convincing combination of fecklessness and strong will, Florian sits inside Shelhanagh, his parents' decaying country house, wondering what to do. After deciding to sell the place and go abroad, he makes a bonfire of his father's diaries and his mother's postcards. But he delays revealing his intentions to Ellie during their chaste meetings at the gate-lodge of what was once a fine estate. "Perhaps Scandinavia," he finally says, in answer to her question about where he'll go.
Though he does have a "fondness for concealment," Florian is not so much caddish as emotionally lazy.
"He had loved being loved, and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough." And so the idyll continues, drawing Ellie toward the brink: "She had meat to get in Hearn's, and a few groceries in the Cash and Carry. Then she looked up Scandinavia in Hogan's, where she had once bought a new exercise-book for the accounts. School books were kept too, and she found Scandinavia in an atlas."
Ellie and Florian are threatened by the madness of two other people. Devotees of Trevor's slyly plotted fiction will guess early on that the addled local wanderer, Orpen Wren, once a retainer on the estate where Ellie and Florian have their meetings, will end up playing a key if inadvertent role in bringing matters to a crisis. More directly dangerous is the late Mrs Connulty's unhappy daughter, who misses nothing that's visible through the blinds at the lodging house, and whose "bristling imagination" is ready to make malevolent work of all she sees.
Trevor is fantastically effective at foreboding; he can make a reader squirm just by withholding the next bit of some long-past anterior action he's been recounting. When he wishes, as in "Felicia's Journey," he can depict the most gruesome violence, but always in the same even tones with which the hens get fed. This new novel, except for the accidents that took Mrs Connulty's husband and Dillahan's first wife, is a delicate sort of drama -- there is no corpse in the basement, no bomb lies hidden in a drawer -- but even so, readers' hearts will be in their mouths for the last 50 pages.
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