Reading Matters

'Death in Summer' by William Trevor

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 220 pages; 1999.

I don't know where I got the idea that William Trevor wrote lovely heartwarming stories: my two experiences reading him — Felicia's Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) — have been rather sad and distressing. And Death in Summer is no different.

Mournful beginning

The story, which is set in England, begins with a funeral. (See, it's sad already.)

Leticia, a new mother, has been killed in a tragic accident. Her husband, the much older Thaddeus, is bereft, even though he never truly loved his wife. He does, however, very much love and adore his young baby, Georgina, and it is to her that all his attention now turns.

Although he lives in a rather grand house (inherited from his parents) and has two servants, the impossibly named Zenobia and Maidment, he feels unable to raise Georgina by himself. So, with the help of his kindly well-to-do mother-in-law, Mrs Iveson, he screens four young women as potential nannies.

As it turns out, none are suitable, and one in particular, Pettie, is the wrong type altogether: she wreaks of cigarettes, shows them a badly typed reference, wears a too-short skirt. Fobbing her off with a £10 note (to cover her train fare to attend the interview), Thaddeus and Mrs Iveson think that will be the end of the matter.

They are wrong.

The story pitts these two hapless, loveless characters against one another. Thaddeus, blind to anything other than his natural state of melancholy, is unaware that Pettie has developed a rather unhealthy obsession with him. And Pettie, ignoring the advice of her devoted friend Albert (they grew up together in a childrens' home) that she leave well enough alone, rails against the news that Mrs Iveson has become the child's carer. She will do whatever she can to prove that this is a bad decision and that she should be put in charge instead.

Portrait of a stalker

As a portrait of a disturbed young woman with a penchant for stalking, you will find no better than Death in Summer. While there's a lovely aching quality to the overall storyline, there's also an unspoken tension and unease, a kind of creepiness that pervades Pettie's motivations, which makes the book difficult to put down.

This novel demonstrates what happens when people's emotional wounds are left to fester unabated over a long period of time. And it shows that no matter where you fit in the social spectrum, we can all be haunted by our pasts. What unites Thaddeus and Pettie, even though they might not know it, is their longing to be loved unconditionally.

This is a richly layered novel in which the back stories for all the characters — the servants; Albert; and Thaddeus' former lover, the desperate blackmailing Mrs Ferry — are skillfully fleshed out.

Without ever talking down to his readers, Trevor somehow captures that sense of lives being misspent, of all too real human failings, of life's disappointments and cruelties, of the ways in which people are trapped by circumstance. It is an exceptional achievement.

'Felicia's Journey' by William Trevor

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 213 pages; 1994.

This is a wonderful, heartbreaking tale of a teenage girl's search for the father of her unborn child. That search takes her from her childhood home in Dublin, Ireland, to the bleak, post-industrial heartland of the British Midlands. Her journey is fraught with difficulty and disaster until she meets the seemingly kindly Mr Hilditch who takes her under his wing. At just 17 years of age, Felicia's stranger-danger radar seems far from tuned and she naively accepts his assistance.

This perfectly written novel (not a sentence, not a word, is out of place) is an enriching read. Felicia's character - her naivety, her grit, her determination - is in stark contrast to Mr Hilditch's smarmy, insidiously creepy, traits.

"Watching" Felicia blindly going on her wild goose chase is difficult enough without having the menacing Mr Hilditch - a catering man in love with food - follow her every move.

Without wishing to spoil the ending for anyone, I can say it is heartbreakingly sad, and some tissues might come in handy.

'The Story of Lucy Gault' by William Trevor

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 227 pages; 2003.

It is 1921. Ireland is in a state of unrest. Captain Gault and his wife decide to flee their home on the coast and move to England, but their nine-year-old daughter, Lucy, has other ideas. She loves her home so much she doesn't want to leave. She goes missing and when her clothes are found on the beach her parents assume that she has drowned. Devastated by grief, they pack up their belongings and head off to Europe to start their lives again. When Lucy is later discovered, still alive but with a bad ankle injury, no one is able to trace her parents.

William Trevor's novel — shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2002 — is a gripping account of what happens to a young child unwittingly abandoned by her parents. The writing is stripped-back, almost old-fashioned in a way, but it is never dull. Instead it is magical and fairy-tale like and incredibly evocative of a past era. And Trevor has such a deft way with words that it is often the things that go unsaid that have the most impact.

In many ways this book reminded me of Ian McEwan's Atonement, in the sense that it is about a young girl who knows that she has done something wrong and then spends the rest of her life trying to atone her guilt. But where McEwan tries to be clever, Trevor never plays games with his readers.

This is an intelligent, mesmerising and moving novel. It is also incredibly, devastatingly sad and I defy any reader not to shed a tear when reading it. This is the first William Trevor story I have read; it won't be the last.