WILLIAM TREVOR.(Review)

The Irish writer William Trevor is one of the finest storytellers in the world. That is a statement of fact, not opinion.

In an outstanding caree, which began quietly enough in 1958 with his debut novel, A Standard of Behaviour, now largely forgotten and usually absent from his list of published works, and has developed consistently for more than 40 years, Trevor has explored both the Irish Protestant and native Catholic traditions, as well as the class snobberies and failed relationships of West London and middle-class English life. There are also the Italian stories.

Yet there is even more to it than that, Trevor's deliberate work for all its grace and understatement, its unsentimental yet kindly reading of human nature, also possesses a darkly sinister streak. Misfits and monsters, liars and con artists also populate his world, or rather, worlds. The appalling and pathetic catering manager Mr Hilditch of the menacing Felicia's Journey (1994) may have come as a surprise for readers who had placed Trevor firmly in the Anglo-Irish setting of historical works such as Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence in the Garden (1988). But to those who have followed his diverse, curiously unpredictable, even elusive fiction over the years, Hilditch is not as out of place as some might feel. Anyone attempting an easy passage towards explaining Trevor's highly crafted art will find the author himself something of an enigma. There is no showmanship, no bravado. He has never offered explanations. Nor does he resort to intrigue. As far as he is concerned, there is no mystery. He writes stories --and, for him, stories are born in the imagination with a little help from memory, experience and observation.

Now 72, William Trevor, who was born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork in 1928, is long contracted to The New Yorker and has just published The Hill Bachelors, his ninth collection of short stories. It is his first since the magnificent After Rain collection of 1996. Included among the dozen strongly Irish new stories is the superb title piece, a subtle exploration of a young man's return to the remote family farm where his now widowed mother lives alone. It is a portrait of a family, but it is also a chapter of Irish social history.

Generations have left the farms where their parents worked to raise their children, the very children who now, as ageing adult strangers, return only to attend the inevitable funerals.