William Trevor is in no need of praise, no need of the superlatives which serve to underscore superb writing.
Trevor’s work is extraordinary, its polished perfection beyond routine criticism. Still, plaudits seem once more in order for fiction of such subtle power as the Irish writer’s new novel, Love and Summer, long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Love and Summer centres on Ellie Dillahan, a young, convent-bred orphan who marries her employer, Mr. Dillahan, a mild-mannered, unassuming farmer who lost his first wife and a child in a tragic accident for which he blames himself. Ellie’s employment as housekeeper at the farm had been arranged by Dillahan’s sisters and the nuns at Ellie’s convent school, Cloonhill, and the subsequent marriage had been one of mutual gratitude. The union had proved comfortable, Dillahan tending his fields and flocks, Ellie cooking, shopping and managing the poultry. Love had not entered the equation.
Love, however, was about to cast a wider net as Ellie meets Florian Kilderry, a charming rake returned to the region to sell the crumbling, mildewed manor left to him by his late parents. When his debts are paid he hopes to end his hopeless attachment to his Italian cousin, Isabella, by beginning a new life somewhere in Scandinavia.
When their paths cross in the small Irish town of Rathmoye where Florian has bicycled to photograph a burned-out cinema and where Ellie does her shopping, a spark is ignited which sets Trevor’s suspenseful story ablaze; an emotional time bomb with a short fuse. What begins as a casual encounter becomes a summer-long love affair which changes the lives of all concerned.
Florian Kilderry’s trip to town coincides with the funeral of Mrs. Connulty, a wealthy patron of the community, who had always bought her eggs from Ellie. Her daughter, Miss Connulty, who had been estranged from her late mother, continues the weekly egg delivery and extends her alarm for Ellie into a dogged interest in the young woman’s comings and goings.
Gradually, Trevor reveals the source of Miss Connulty’s bitter pride, her rejection of love affairs as painful reminders of her own once-tragic circumstances and on the role her mother played in blighting her one chance at happiness. Her twin brother, Joseph Paul, a failed priest, tries to dismiss his sister’s suspicion of Florian and his intentions toward Ellie, but is rebuffed. Miss Connulty waits and watches, as does Orpen Wren, an ancient librarian who shuffles about town caught in a time warp. When Wren mistakes Kilderry for a son of the long disappeared St. John family, former owner’s of Rathmoye’s grand estate, Lisquin, lives will be altered.
Ellie’s encounters with Florian begin casually, chance meetings in the shops of Rathmoye. But when exchanged pleasantries turn to planned trysts, Ellie falls deeply in love. Florian, too, becomes fond, but only for the summer. Ellie is a pleasing distraction, a welcome diversion in a summer fraught with change and upheaval. When his home is sold he will leave Ireland behind.
But Ellie, who has never known passion, is unwilling to relinquish it. Florian’s shiny new green passport spurs her to buy a green “carry-all,’’ something she will need if she is to flee her settled married life.
Yet Florian cautions her. We have had our summer, he reminds her.
Running like a thread through Trevor’s novel is a sense of impending doom, a sense that Dillahan, a man already wounded, will once again suffer injury. Orpen Wren, determined but confused, may, perhaps, hold the key to the stoic farmer’s fate.
Part of the pleasure of reading Trevor is his sense of place, the familiar dailiness of the scenes he sets: Ellie shopping for Rinso, cornflour and light bulbs at the Cash and Carry, making sandwiches in the farmhouse kitchen. But as she goes about these daily chores, Ellie thinks of Florian and of the way he held his cigarette outside the Cash and Carry.
Trevor’s 14th novel is wonderfully wrought and superbly plotted, its autumnal asperity and quiet assurance so well woven not a word is wasted. As always, Trevor’s prose is spare, lucid, yet freighted with meaning.
To read him is to savour one of the most powerful storytellers writing in English today.
The Darkest Room
By Johan Theorin
To the growing list of Scandinavian crime fiction writers who have achieved international recognition, add the name of Sweden’s Johan Theorin. In this second novel (his first was Echoes of the Dead), Theorin sets the scene on the isolated but beautiful island of Oland, off the coast of northern Sweden. A young couple, Joakin and Katrine Westin, and their two children have returned to a reclaimed family house to begin a new life far from the urban sprawl of Stockholm. But when an unbearable tragedy occurs, Joakin is forced to confront past events. And a parallel story of local petty criminals who like to burgle empty summer cottages heightens the suspense as a record storm beckons and murder looms on the horizon. (Random House)
Dead Tomorrow
By Peter James
Peter James has created a memorable detective in his best-selling series featuring British detective Roy Grace. Recently promoted to Det. Supt., Grace is currently working in Brighton with his girlfriend, Cleo, and finally accepting that his wife Sandy, who disappeared nine years earlier, is probably dead. His newest case, however, has him stumped. The body of a teenage boy has been found trapped in a dredger off the coast of Sussex, missing its vital organs. In the meantime, the mother of a desperately ill 15-year old, Caitlin, is trying to get her daughter a liver transplant, but the shortage of donors and Britain’s clogged health service is making that impossible. As Grace’s lines of enquiry start to intersect with the mother’s search to save her daughter’s life, the story becomes a dramatic tale of the black market organ transplant racket. (Pan Macmillan)
