|
THERE IS TOO MUCH FEAR
In the longest and darkest story in William Trevor's After
Rain, a woman who could be the Angel of Death, an apparition,
or merely an anxious post-pubescent hallucination, unlatches
the gate of an apple orchard in Northern Ireland, approaches
a boy named Milton Leeson, and gives him a kiss on the mouth.
The orchard is a Protestant orchard and Milton is a Protestant
boy. But the woman (or the spirit) is a Catholic, and in fact
introduces herself to Milton with the words, "I am St.
Rosa." She then tells him not to be afraid, when the
moment comes. "There is," she says, "too much
fear."
And
so, very early in the story ("Lost Ground"), we
know that Milton--a boy who has the misfortune to live in
a country where brother kills brother--will be murdered. We
also very soon know which brother will commit this tragically
Irish crime of fratricide: his older brother Garfield, who
during the day works as a butcher's assistant in Belfast but
who at night has a role among the Protestant paramilitaries,
being a volunteer in an organization bent on avenging, via
a series of tit-for-tat murders, "the atrocities of the
other side".
But
before Milton is shot, he cycles from town to town, preaching
about St. Rosa (mainly to groups of children and to people
in parking lots). At least until his parents get wind of how
he's spending his Sundays and confiscate his bicycle. When
this doesn't adequately deter him, they put him under a sort
of rural House Arrest, carrying his meals up the stairs to
him on a tray and allowing him out of his room only long enough
to do his chores on the farm. No one speaks to him; surrounded
by his family, he lives in solitary confinement, and so both
symbolically and in reality becomes like the endangered child
the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing describes in The Politics
of the Family, the truthful child whose psychic death is necessary
for the neurotic survival of the rest of the family. But in
the family of Ireland the sacrifice must be a real death and
the family still won't survive.
Ironic, honourable, reticent, male, and moral, the stories
in After Rain can also occasionally seem dated and safe. Even
the stories that appear to be set in the present decade frequently
have about them the aura of another time, another place. (A
timelessly rural place.) This is especially true of "The
Piano-Tuner's Two Wives", "The Potato Dealer",
and "A Day". Everything in the characters' lives
that's most immediate and primal--sex, fights between husbands
and wives and, in two of the stories, murder--takes place
off-stage. And yet a number of the stories in Trevor's latest
collection do have a haunting afterlife. "Lost Ground"
most certainly does, and so does the story of the revenge
a son takes on his too-bonded parents ("Timothy's Birthday"),
as does "A Friendship" (a story about a woman acting
as a go-between for a woman friend and her lover). And so
does the book's final story, "Marrying Damien".
In
fact, "Marrying Damien" is both haunting and lively.
It also hovers between being a delicious anecdote and a lethal
moral fable, providing its narrator with a startling comeuppance:
Damien, family friend and sponger, has for years functioned
as an exotic diversion, the butt of a married joke shared
by the story's country doctor and his elegant wife, and yet
during the course of one whirlwind visit he changes their
lives radically. Con-man, poseur, self-described poet (his
only published work is a slim volume of poems called Slow
Death of a Pigeon) Damien is a sort of pop-cult leprechaun
in blue sunglasses and a powder-blue suit. He's also a moody
charmer who proceeds to seduce the doctor's daughter Joanna,
a lovely young woman who works to rehabilitate the inmates
of a local prison where one of her charges, doing a send-up
of the kind of Latin motto so often found above the portals
of official institutions, has carved Ad sum ard labour on
a sundial that he's made for the governor.
Damien's
story is raised above the anecdotal by exactly the right details:
his nails are rimmed, his tie seems to indicate membership
in a club to which he cannot possibly belong, and he's a messy
dinner guest who places "his cigarette, still burning,
on a side plate while he pours cream on the fruit." Which
is as good a time as any to note that Trevor writes extremely
well about cooking. In "Timothy's Birthday", for
example, there's a descriptions of preparing a lamb for the
oven that one feels only a man could have written: "Charlotte
pressed rosemary into the slits she'd incised in the lamb."
But "Marrying Damien" really does have more verve
than the other stories do; even the verbs have more dash as
the poet (metaphorically) runs away with the girl and runs
away with the book. (And even though the last words have been
given to the sadder and wiser physician: "It was too
late to hate him. It was too late to deny that our stay-at-home
smugness had been enlivened by the tales of his adventures,
or to ask him if he knew how life had turned out for the women
who had loved him. Instead we conversed inconsequentially.")
Preoccupied
not only by the damage that men do to women, but also--and
perhaps especially--by the damage that men do to men, Trevor
is skilled at conveying both psychic and domestic gloom. And
both the content and the style of After Rain are beautifully
supported by the book's cover--a detail from a fifteenth-century
fresco of the Annunciation that shows a doorway leading into
a garden. To the doorway's left, a teacherly raised finger.
To its right, the traffic-stopping raised palm of a hand that
turns out to belong to the Virgin Mary--the two hands symbolizing
not only what's instructive but also what's held back, while
the view into the garden is elegiac, orderly: the sky a rain-washed
pale yellow, the stone walks in the foreground an apricot
tone that's warm enough to set off the after-rain gloom of
the shrubbery, the brown gardens.
|
