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PARTISAN REVIEW
A visionary hyperawareness justified by a symbolic intent and psychologi–
cal probability is part of Trevor's art.
But his use of description is only one of his means of structuring mean–
ing. In his richest stories, those dealing with Irish life, his narrative is a poetic
interweaving of sensation and memory, present and past, personal and pub–
lic time. In "The Distant Past," fifty years separate 1968 from the day when
the Protestant Middletons, brother and sister, had been locked into an
upstairs room of their George II house outside Munster while men waited
downstairs to murder British soldiers. Quaint and eccentric and poor, their
sterile sibling union somehow representing the decay of their kind, they
became, as the years passed thereafter, relics at whom the town smiled when
they rode in their Ford Anglia displaying the Union Jack on Elizabeth II's
Coronation Day. But everything changed. "Had they driven with a Union
Jack now they might, astoundingly, have been shot." In "Beyond the Pale,"
four English visitors to the Antrim coast encounter a contemporary tragedy,
the suicide of a fellow guest-someone Irish and "beyond the pale"-at a
tourist hotel catering to others like themselves. Only Cynthia had spoken to
the stranger and learned his story; the dead young man had killed his sweet–
heart after she became a terrorist. But neither her companions nor the
English hotel owner want to hear what Cynthia knows. She alone responds
sympathetically not only to this death but to the immemorial struggles
which m.ark the region for an Irish consciousness. But this is not all.
Cynthia, herself a victim of tyranny and hypocrisy, suddenly is empowered
to speak truth by this experience-the truth not of public but of personal
history. She reveals that she knows that her husband is the lover of the other
woman in their party. It is this other Englishwoman whom Trevor chooses
as his narrator, so making us unwJlingly participate in her killing hatred for
Cynthia as though private character provides an analog for politics. And in
still another Irish story, "Attracta," past and present, the anguish of history
and individual experience, are mingled again. When she was eleven some–
one told a Protestant girl the true story of her parents' death, how they had
been killed by mistake in an ambush meant for the Black and Tans. She
understands, then, why a mill owner and his Catholic mistress have always
been kind to her. They had put down the booby traps. Now a spinster school
mistress, she reads in the newspaper about a woman whose soldier husband
was murdered in northern Ireland and his head mailed home in a biscui t tin,
how this woman then went to Belfast to join the peace movement, and how
she committed suicide after being raped by her husband's murderers. The
teacher tries to tell her class that despite such horrors reconciliation and
peace are possible. Her parents' killers had repented and changed.
Trevor has denied that he has any particular message to give, and, unlike
the three just summarized, many of his stories seem to make little
