I was saddened to see on the BBC website the news of the death of William Trevor, aged 88.Having not published anything for a few years, to my knowledge, he had dropped off my radar and would have been in that category of people who might have died without me finding out that they had. I am glad that he was still held in high enough regard to warrant such a mention because he was a big favourite of mine and I read virtually all of his books in the 1980's and some that appeared since.
His short stories were his greatest achievement, along with the novellas like Reading Turgenev, and The Wedding in the Garden, Angels at the Ritz and Mulvihill's Memorial are pieces that come readily to mind for the lives of their downbeat characters, realized with irony that seemed gentle and reserved but could equally be savage in its implications. If it ever looked commonplace, there was something at least seedy, sinister or guilt-ridden not too far below the drab surface. The past, whether in small details or with larger, tragic implications, often hung over the present quite ominously.
Quite deliberately, he inherited something from Dubliners and thus belongs in a lineage that goes back through Joyce, acknowledged in his story, Two More Gallants, to George Moore, Turgenev and Chekhov.
In those days, when Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis were grabbing the attention of a good proportion of readers of the 'literary novel', they weren't grabbing mine. I was reading William Trevor and tracing back to find much to admire in George Moore, too. It was his example that led me to try writing short stories myself but only one ever apeared in print. It wasn't as easy as he made it look.