William Trevor's About Works

The analogous figure most often mentioned about his work is Chekhov. He is the writer who has had the most short stories ever published in The New Yorker magazine. He was a super-idol (and parody) of the Chinese American novelist Yiyun Li - and many other young European and American writers. The stories are constructed to near perfection, comparable to Chekhov's - comparisons between the two are inevitable - and they always leave the reader room for contemplation.

--Anita Bruckner (Booker Prize winner)

Like Rembrandt, Trevor always gazes fervently and benevolently at his characters ...... His understanding of human nature is exacting! ...... His stories invariably reflect a calm wisdom.

--The Times

His first major work, The Old Alumni, won the 1964 Hawthornden Prize. A group of old alumni committee members collude and are jealous of each other in the process of electing the next president, and is a reminiscent look at the conflicts and rivalries of this group of old alumni when they were at the school. Despite their advanced age, they are still unable to let go of the humiliation they suffered back then. Having to cope with pressure from the outside world and defend themselves against others' attacks, as well as facing their aging bodies and illnesses, they are extremely lonely and sad inside. The novel puts forward such a theme - how should people face their own misfortunes? What should be the attitude towards success and failure? How can we protect ourselves in modern society?

Despite the fact that Trevor's work includes many authentically English characters, his preferred subject is Ireland and the Irish. Like Joyce, he chose a kind of self-imposed exile, displaced from his homeland to create. This allowed Trevor to examine the culture of his homeland with the calmness of a bystander, both in time and distance, revealing how artificial barriers such as race, class, and religion affected every aspect of people's education, love, and marriage. Some of his most iconic works are "The Mockery of Fate" and "The Silence of the Gardens".

The Mockery of Fate is a work that explores the impact of the weight of history on Irish life. Plots from several different periods are blended together in a magnificent historical spectacle. The Quinton family of Ireland has a long tradition of marriage with the Woodcum family of England.In the early 1800s, Anna Woodcum marries into the Quinton family's Kilney estate in County Cork. When famine struck Ireland, Anna tried to provide relief and alerted her family and British colonial officials to the plight of the people. As a result, she angered the entire family and was disinherited. The tradition of marrying English brides continues for generations to come on the Kilney estate. The novel switches to another traumatic era in Irish history, the Anglo-Irish War. William Quinton and his English wife Eve have an idyllic married life with three children. They support the common good and lean toward Mark Collins during the Anglo-Irish War, and are thus isolated in their own class and religious circles. Their political activities eventually led to the arson of Kilney Hall. William, his two daughters, and many of the servants were burned to death, and Eve and her son Willie retired to a cottage in Cork. Unable to cope with the loss of her husband and daughter, Eve becomes increasingly disillusioned and drinks to drown her sorrows. As Willie grows up, he falls in love with his English cousin Mariana. However, Mariana, who is pregnant, arrives at the decaying Kilney Manor to find Willie has mysteriously disappeared. Mariana raises her daughter, Imelda, on her own with the help of Willie's aunt and a reverend priest. In their old age, they finally reunite, but it turns out that Willie has fled Ireland in revenge for the murder of the man who ordered the arson of Kilney Manor. The decline of the Quinton family ended with Imelda becoming so mentally overwhelmed by this generational burden that she lost her mind.

Trevor's view of history, both personal and political, is unique. Despite the work's references to the British government's indifference and even use of force against Ireland during its rule, he refuses to blame everything on historical British misrule. He has always explored the torment of history on the living, always suggesting that it is the duty of mankind to break free from the noose of memories, to rise above such misfortunes, to triumph over them and to shape a whole new future for their next generation.

Silence in the Garden is in a sense a continuation of The Mockery of Fate, still set in the mansion, and attempting to reach a compromise between the past and the present. With a particular emphasis on the successive waves of "violence", the work is unflinching in its indictment of the negative impact of Irish history on its people.

While reflecting on Irish history and culture, his work also focuses on the problems faced by women. In The Mockery of Fate, the portrayal of damaged women -- the disinherited Anna, the alcoholic Eve, the abandoned Mariana, the mentally deranged Imelda -- is written in sympathetic strokes. None of the novel's husbands are wiser or stronger than their English wives, all of whom are victims of male decisions made in the name of nobility. The husbands are either unwilling to act, unable to act, or act unwisely. And only the women in Silence in the Garden are portrayed as dynamic, courageous and full of reason, tenaciously fighting the irreversible decline of a family. On the axis of history and masculinity, Trevor's women traverse history with a waveform line that parallels or even surpasses that of men.

Trevor is very good at depicting the details of women's lives and their subtle inner activities. His early works, Mrs. Eckerdorff of O'Neill's Inn, Miss Gomez and the Parishioners, and Lonely Elizabeth, all represent female subjects and portray the psychological state of female loneliness. Lonely Elizabeth was particularly well received. Elizabeth, a divorced woman with three daughters, is hospitalized and befriends three other women in similar circumstances. In the interaction Elizabeth sees her own sad fate, but also feel the life in the world completely alone, no one can enter the complex inner world of others. In his short stories women are portrayed more often. Romantic Ballroom", "Atramentous", "chance", etc., the female image covers almost every aspect of society, in all its forms, but the true loneliness of the heart always lingers.

Female subjects are only a means by which Trevor reflects Irish society in three dimensions and conveys his own humanistic ideas, which go hand in hand with other subjects, such as religious subjects. In a country where religion can determine social peace and cultural development, how would a writer reflect his religious views in his work if his beliefs were not part of the mainstream religion from an early age?

The more recent collection of short stories, A Bachelor in the Mountains, contains a dreamlike story, "The Gift of the Virgin". Three times in his life, the devout Mike had visions of the Virgin Mary, which shaped his life: at 18, he was guided by the Virgin to leave his father's farm and enter a monastery; at 35, he was guided by the Virgin to leave the monastery again and "find peace of mind" under a mountain crag; and then a few years later, in a final apparition, she guided him to return to his homeland. A few years later a final apparition of Our Lady guided him back to his homeland. Mike, who has no doubt about all this, treks through the villages and hamlets of Ireland, like a stray dog finally returning to his homeland after decades of absence. Although there is no apparent irony in the novel, it is hard to believe that Trevor wants the reader to share Mike's belief in the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Mike is a man who is governed entirely by his intuition and lacks judgment. Are his visions real? Has this lonely man's life been in vain? Looking beyond religion, are séances and deception in religion the same thing? Trevor doesn't say a word about this, instead depicting Mike's parents' overflowing joy after their son is lost and found.

Others, such as the confused Protestant priest in this collection's "Vestments," feel disconnected not only from Catholic Ireland, but from the world at large. Death in Jerusalem, which explores the place of religion in the secular world, offers equally sympathetic portrayals of Catholic and Protestant characters. From his work, Trevor does not seem to have an explicitly religious outlook, and may have intentionally kept his views hidden from his work. He comes across more as a religious skeptic, and there is little sense of God's manipulative power in his work.

The characters in Trevor's work are given naturally precise depictions -- specific times, specific places -- as if each person's story were like a ballad passed down from generation to generation, with some kind of archetype. Particularly noteworthy is the astounding variety of character types he writes about. In Trevor's short stories, there is a mysterious connection between character and place, as if the soul of a people is shaped by the land above which they live. Especially in novels set in remote villages, individuals seem to be entirely a product of the small world into which they were born, even to the point of losing their freedom of will and their determination to make a living elsewhere. The title story in the short story collection, A Bachelor in the Mountains, reflects this idea of the author very prominently.

The story is about a 29-year-old son, Paulie, who accepts a bit of real estate that daunts him and returns to a small farm in the middle of nowhere in order to please his widowed mother. Irish women nowadays would rather work in gas stations or fertilizer plants than marry bachelors like them and live a life of soul-numbing hardship. For Irishmen like him, the knowledge of their forefathers is something they cannot give up. Was Paulie a hero? A fool? Or merely the meek son? To say that he represents Ireland's past is ambiguous; to say that he represents Ireland's future is by no means possible; bachelors have no descendants, and what they represent will continue no longer. Such a prospect is like the ancient Irish ballad, where the content has perished, the form remains, but it will not continue.

Influenced by Joyce, many of Trevor's works focus on symbolic detailing and abandon dramatic choreography; they are haunting, nostalgic, and full of ambience, but often unobtrusive, and they use Joyce's typical "fade-out" ending. Examples include Romantic Ballroom, A Bachelor in the Mountains, and Family Sin. Overall this influence is positive and beneficial, but at times the ending feels like it lacks a certain vigor.

Trevor also writes other types of literature. Examples include Landscape in a Photobook (screenplay) and Juliet's Story (children's literature). A stage play based on The Old Alumni was staged in 1971, and he went on to write a number of successful stage plays and television series based on his short stories, with a stage play or television series being staged or broadcast in London almost every year.

Trevor has seen Ireland through nearly a century of stormy times. The source of nostalgia has nourished the flow of 80 years of wandering and created yet another brilliant piece of Irish literature, and he deserves to be the laurel tree in the garden of Irish literature.