The Man of Feeling

Can a writer be guilty of an excess of sympathy for his characters? Sympathy, we are forever being reminded (Tolstoy and Chekhov being the great exemplars), is the hallmark of great fiction. But unless it is combined with a touch of icy objectivity, it can come to cloy, honeying the sensibility rather than truly taxing it.

William Trevor, in all other ways a marvellous writer, rains sympathy down on his characters until they are drenched in the stuff. More than half the stories in this new collection are excellent. But, cumulatively, they suffer from an excess of sentiment which leaves you yearning for a burst of nastiness or an inexplicable outbreak of mayhem.

That, however, is not the kind of writer Trevor is. His writing is bracing precisely for its lack of histrionics. He is interested in that area of human life which is forever ‘making do’ on ‘slim pickings’ (he would never use such terms; his writing is beautifully tuned and free of cliché). Love in this world, although a powerful force, is nonetheless mercurial, precarious. Money, too, is in short supply, and no one is overly articulate.

‘The truth, even when it glorifies the human spirit, is hard to peddle if there is something terrible to tell as well,’ remarks one of his narrators (which is true, of course, but perhaps not so very lamentable in the realm of fiction). The key term for Trevor, perhaps, is consolation. It is felt to be so from the very first story, when two women who make it their business to console the dying come to sit with a freshly hatched widow. The husband, it turns out, was loathsome, and the three women’s attempt to negotiate this fact over several pots of tea, with the body still upstairs, provides the story with its animating irony.