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PARTISAN REVIEW
dream-world, play-acting at being their elders. Torn apart by new adult
combinations, they realize that "the easy companionshi p that had allowed
them to sip cocktails and sign the register of the Hotel Grand Splendide
had been theirs by chance, a gift thrown out from other people's circum–
stances. Helplessness was their natural state" ("Child's Play") .
Most of these stories represent the side of Trevor which, in the past,
has produced many deft vignettes of modern life with an English locale or
English
characters; and, if employing Irish material, giving that choice no
special significance. After all , he has lived most of his long life in England.
But the strongest of them have a more essential origin in his ineradicable
Irishness and especially that "lace curtain" Protestant Ireland into which
he was born. This was not the seignorial world of lingering wealth and
authority which Elizabeth Bowen knew, but that of the Protestant rem–
nant on hard-worked farms and in the poor, small towns of the south
where life for Catholics and Protestants alike is straitened. In Trevor's sto–
ries of this kind, the helplessness of women-and sometimes of
children-repeatedly illustrates the restrictedness of human options. In the
new collection, Ellie, who will bear the child of a priest she has loved, is
made to marry the gross older man who, for taking her, will inherit her
uncle's farm ("The Potato Dealer"). "Lost Ground," the prize of this new
lot, makes a child's consciousness the center of a fable of modern Ireland.
In this story, too, religion, in its ambiguous mingling with politics, is
a source of insight and not merely an ironic backdrop, like the Pope's
Dublin visit in "A Bit of Business." No apparition could be more ordi–
nary-more unlike the 'Annunciation angel in "Mter Rain"-than the
woman observed by a Protestant farmer's son in his father's orchard one
day in 1989. Milton Lesson thinks she has been stealing apples, but she
kisses him and tells him that she is Santa Rosa and that he must not be
afraid. What he must not fear, it
d ~volves,
is his mission to preach forgive–
ness and the end of bloodshed. He has never heard of Santa Rosa, and the
local Catholic priest, to whom he goes for information, is chidly annoyed
that she has appeared to a Protestant instead of to a Catholic boy. That
summer, as always, his family had participated in the annual celebration of
"King William's victory over the PapistJames in 1690"-a march of local
Protestants down the silent, shuttered main street of the littl e Catholic
town. When he begins his preaching in the neighborhood, Milton is
hauled home by his horrified family and kept locked up, and is finally
killed by his own elder brother and a fellow terrorist from Belfast. Trevor
makes this happen in the most matter-of-fact fashion while depicting the
not-at-all monstrous family forced to come to terms with Milton and to
participate in his murder-his righteous but bigoted father, his mother and
his sister and her husband, the local Protestant minister, as well as that elder
