Parting gift is a welcome reminder of Trevor’s status

Rosemary Goring on a posthumous collection of stories just as potent and vivid as author’s earlier works

LAST STORIES William Trevor

TViking, £14.99

HIS, the 13th collection of stories by William Trevor, who died in 2016, arrives with the sense of a parting gift. Often, the final, frequently unvarnished work of writers approaching their end is of dubious quality.

Literary executors must surely swither between the urge to earn royalties from material the author might not, in life, have considered fit to publish and giving an eager public more of what they had enjoyed, even if in diluted or substandard form.

It says much, then, that what you might call Trevor’s parting shots are as robustly vivid and potent, as wistful and emotional rigorous, as his more youthful oeuvre. Across a career spanning six decades and more, Trevor published 14 novels, but it is for his short fiction that he is particularly revered. John Banville has said he is, “at his best, the equal of Chekhov”. It is a very Banvillian qualification, his critical teeth still sharp in the presence of a fellow Irishman whose reputation exceeds that of all his peers.

Yet the caveat is fair. Fawning enthusiasm of even the finest writers does no one any good, least of all a posthumous reputation. Unalloyed adoration is a dereliction of aesthetic principles, and if anyone refuses to be guilty of the easy or the false, it is Banville. The comparison with Chekhov is amply justified but, like all great writers when they expire, Trevor’s literary standing is now at the mercy of fashion, availability and changing taste.

No matter how they excelled in life, it always takes time for the departed to find their rightful niche. For some, sadly and undeservedly, they never do.

For this reason, Last Stories is doubly welcome as a reminder of where Trevor stands, and why. As with all his stories, it begins and ends quietly. The atmosphere of watchful restraint, of implying far more than is said, is maintained from the first to the tenth and final tale. Altogether they create a substantial collection, with no sign of weakening that this reader could discern.

Would it be possible to divine the author’s vintage from its contents? Well, perhaps death appears with more insistent regularity and emphasis. Yet it is more in the repeated apprehension of a sense of ending that Last Stories earns its name. These can be the finality, in An Idyll in Winter, of a parting between lovers whose passion destroys the woman’s sense of peace and justice. Once her lover’s pupil, her distress at learning of the unhappiness of the family he has abandoned for her ruins their joy.

When they separate, however, the depth and integrity of their love is indelibly, hauntingly described. “He will not come back, not once, not ever. There’ll be no tawdry attempt at a revival, no searching in the falsity for something that might be better than nothing.” The renunciatory tone catches an echo of Charlotte Bronte, yet it feels generous and self-protective rather than morbid or pious.

In the London-set story, At the Caffè Daria, Trevor presents two friends who are unexpectedly reunited in advanced middle age after the death of their shared love. The cheated first wife could choose to be forgiving, for the mistress – who was in turn often betrayed – intimates that she never meant enough to him. But too much time and resentment has passed for the wife, in thrall to her consoling misery, to alter her emotional style.

Their encounters take place in a cafe whose name immortalises the Italian owner’s wife, who left him for another man. That was more than half a century before, shortly after the war, when the broken-hearted Andrea Cavalli “travelled the shattered countries of a Europe that reflected his melancholy”. In this instance, the story behind the stage on which his characters step out is the precursor of their own. You could see the cafe as a skating rink, on which other spurned lovers will perpetually whirl.

But in Last Stories not everything is poignant, or turning towards the last things. The opener, The Piano Teacher’s Pupil, is a startling vignette of opportunism and control, and of snatched, almost guilty joy. A gifted young pianist begins to steal from his teacher but, rather than lose the pleasure of his weekly performances, she pretends not to notice.

Her life is not sad, but it is muted: her manipulative father dead, married lover long gone. The drama and vigour the boy’s playing brings into her house amply compensates for his crimes. Even if, as she senses, “there was mockery in the music that faintly lingered”, his talent helps her adjust and see her departed menfolk in their true colours. As a consequence she feels less put-upon. Yet the bigger point, perhaps, is of the quality of genius, which can only be rejected or accepted for what it can offer.

TO alight on individual stories risks making the inspired sound pedestrian. The genius in Trevor’s work lies in the confluence of thought and style. There is a richness to his manner, and a musicality, yet individual sentences are spare, and much space left for the reader to interpolate or divine meaning. With each opening line, though, there is the well-placed anticipation of beguilement. He lies in a long line of Irish storytellers, and their business is to entertain, in his case royally.

The foundations on which Trevor’s work is often built are life-changing encounters: between lost connections, or acquaintances, or with strangers who are passing by, in so doing turning the direction of a life, or throwing what has gone before into stark relief. A familiar figure is the prostitute in Giotto’s

Trevor captures the human condition: aspiring higher than we can or will allow ourselves to reach