Culture

Prospect recommends: William Trevor's Love and Summer

September 05, 2009
article header image
Love and Summerby William Trevor (Viking)




William Trevor is the supreme fictional chronicler of memory. Few writers have better understood—or more expertly conveyed—the way in which a person’s past can overwhelm their present, fixing them in a mould from which they cannot escape. This dual emphasis on past and present gives Trevor’s fiction its satisfying complexity, even when his plots—as in this new novel—are straightforward.

Love and Summer tells the story of a one-sided love affair that takes place in and around an Irish town in the 1950s. Ellis, a young farmer’s wife, is befriended by and falls in love with Florian, a man from a more sophisticated background who, unbeknownst to her, is preparing to leave the country. Their liaison is observed by the town’s inhabitants, who interpret it in the light of their own past misfortunes. It’s a scenario that seems primed for tragedy—but Trevor subverts our expectations.

By deploying multiple perspectives and overlaying the present with his characters’ memories, Trevor builds up what feels almost like an emotional ecology of the affair. This skilful and subtle work, more ambitious than many of his previous novels, proves Trevor to be the great under-sung (if not unsung) Anglo-Irish writer.

William Skidelsky is books editor of the Observer