Fiction Last Stories

William Trevor (Viking, £14.99)

The Monolith that is William Trevor’s The Collected Stories (2009) no longer marks the apex of his career as one of the greatest prose-fiction writers of the past half century. Published posthumously, to mark what would have been his 90th birthday, this fresh valedictory collection is distinguished by the same creative rigour and penetrating empathy he brought to each and every one of his intricate but capacious evocations of humanity’s outsiders.

Born in Co Cork to unhappy parents, Trevor was an outsider by creed, class and temperament. After a peripatetic childhood and schooling, he studied at Trinity College, Dublin before becoming a sculptor. he escaped ireland in the 1950s, abandoned sculpture— ‘too abstract’—for storytelling, and settled in Devon, where he died in november 2016, longheld domestic contentment no fetter to his prolific and peerless imaginative understanding of the distressed, lonely or simply odd.

Such characters demand patience, rendered here within stories that accommodate the passage of time—the universal experience least respected by most short fiction. each of these nuanced and beautifully honed narratives brings the shape of whole lives into precise, often discomfiting focus. in Trevor’s hands, ‘the art of the glimpse’— his own estimation—means an unflinching gaze into hidden recesses of the home and heart. Whether measuring the natural compassion of illegal immigrants for an invalid, mapping a cartographer’s infatuation or unveiling the sustaining fantasies of a widow, he moulds substance and explicit significance from the type of small epiphany defined by compatriot elizabeth Bowen as ‘contact of absolute separations’.

Last Stories exemplifies his genius for transfiguring ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ from ‘bewilderment’. it’s a monumental epitaph. Caroline Jackson