The single man's solitude

MURIEL Spark, in The Bachelors, analysed the 1960 version of the unmarried male. William Trevor analyses the 2000 version in his new collection of short stories. Spark, with deadly wit and Catholic judgment, accused the shabby unattached gentlemen circa 1960 of being repressed homosexuals, hypocritical spiritualists and secret sensualists, all prey to their petty demon selves. Trevor, with his humanist anxiety and ethical compassion, explores the Y2K solitary's retarded development, his stony, lonely fixity, the easy ways he'll slide into victimhood or predatoriness, the glazed intensity of his obsession with dream women. The difference is not just because Trevor and Spark are man and woman: the solitary male has, since the 1960s and the relative triumph of the women's movement, become a figure to brood over, feel obscurely fearful of and for, not castigate for the sins of the world.

There are 12 stories in the collection, all about bachelors: the structure allows Trevor to take short but deep views of the many varieties of single men in England and Ireland (though the story set in France would like us to say Europe). We have the simpleminded gardener caught in a dark pact with the mistress of the house, the Church of Ireland reverend lost in his unpeopled parish, the predatory child-abuser actor using filmmaking to trap his girl victims, the inept Northern Irish adolescent sent to London as navvy and IRA-fodder, the absurd bookseller buffoon who secretly adores another man's wife, an ageing brother and sister incapable of shrugging off nostalgia or unreal dreams of the future, a poor French boy raptly in love with a one-night stand who uses him to abuse her husband, a visionary hermit monk whose life is in the power of his rare visions of the Virgin Mary, an academic victim of a complex student prank, a bereaved farmer prey to a con woman, a fianc" at his mixed stag-and-hen party playing a cruel joke on an old woman, a hill farmer, in the title story, forced to accept his fate as eternal bachelor in the harsh, lonely high country where women will no longer live.

The seven Irish stories are vintage Trevor: isolated farmers or men of the cloth subject to dreams that are really other people's fabrications, or young people who have become crippled victims of Ireland's dark history. The English and French stories are deliberately outside this frame, exploring other ways single men weave dangerous sexual fantasies that make them victims or predators.

All the stories are intense, menacing in the very ordinariness of their detail, turning beautifully round the central subject from a variety of points of view, and, at times, rising to epiphanies of delicate contact across the divides between solitary minds.

Two finely-honed sentences from the collection give us a measure of Trevor's gift. "Fragments of intuition were their conversation, real beneath the unreal words" - Trevor's short stories are all geared to capturing this elusive matter strewn between the lines of lonely conversations. "Emptily, all sound came twice because an echo added a pretence of more activity than there was, as if in mercy offering companionship" Trevor, even when showing how dangerous are the echoing pretences that fuel solitary men's imaginations, has a deeply charitable feeling for the need that generates them. You might prefer Spark's sterner attitude. But don't knock William Trevor - he really is all heart.

Copyright 2000
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