Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 02 Feb 2017

Reading Turgenev by William Trevor

I have sorely neglected William Trevor over the years and as with too many great writers have only really been prompted to reassess his work following his recent death.

In 1991 he published Two Lives, a single volume consisting of two substantial novellas, the first called Reading Turgenev, and the second, My House in Umbria. They both have central female characters who are determined that life should be more fulfilling than the circumstances of their time will seem to allow, and both are a kind of meditation on the creative act, on the power of reading and the mystery of writing.

But they are vastly different types of novel and while Reading Turgenev is without any doubt a masterpiece, My House in Umbria is a disaster. This may explain why contemporary reviews rarely even mention it.

But don’t let this put you off acquiring Two Lives for Reading Turgenev alone. It is set in rural and small town Ireland in the mid-1950s and like John McGahern’s work, concerns the oppressive social and religious views of the time and the stifled prospects that many had in what McGahern called Ireland’s ‘virtual theocracy’. It concerns the life and marriage of Mary-Louise Dallon, who leaves the cramped and limiting life of her parents’ farm to marry Elmer Quarry, the local small town draper, a shopkeeper, it might be said, to his marrow.

But the marriage is loveless. They can’t have children and Mary-Louise is loathed by her husband’s two unmarried sisters, both of whom live with the pair above the shop and who despise her as their social and religious inferior. Whatever it is Mary-Louise wants from life – and she can barely articulate this, even to herself – this relationship cannot provide it.

Her escape from this second confinement is in many ways as shocking as anything in, say, Madame Bovary. She falls in love with a gentle, reclusive invalid cousin. While they knew each other as young children – they were at school together – she in fact hasn’t seen or even thought of the young man in years, but in her loneliness becomes convinced that fate has separated her from the only true soul-mate she is destined to be with. And that their love is the only thing that matters and cannot be undone, even by death. It is a love that seems simultaneously delusion, madness and salvation.

Central to this relationship are the occasions on which her cousin reads passages from Turgenev to her in a deserted country graveyard. There is an extraordinary audacity about this touch because despite Mary-Louise never having heard of Turgenev – nor of any other novelist, Russian or otherwise – it is completely convincing. The snowy silences of nineteenth century Russia and the mysterious power of literature to conjure up worlds we can almost touch come to represent every opportunity that has eluded her, every chance that may have existed for a better, richer, deeper life.

I won’t spoil the story by giving too much away, because it is as satisfying dramatically as it is emotionally. Suffice it to say that Reading Turgenev works superbly on every level. It is a masterpiece of lyrical, Irish realism, a meditation on loss and thwarted love, an elegy for a kind of life swept aside by modernity, a lament for those crushed by life – and a mischievous rhapsody for those who assert their outsider status and rebel against repressive norms and small-mindedness.

Its greatness lies in the fact that at no point does it seem to be striving for effect. It is utterly rooted in realism and social observation, consistently illustrates an unparalleled ear for dialogue and speech patterns, and is free of the touches of gothic melodrama that so seemed to attract Trevor at various times throughout his writing career.

Sadly, none of these things can be said of the second novella, My House in Umbria, and my advice is not to read it: it can only detract from the marvels of what precedes it.

Towards the end of Reading Turgenev a character asks: “Does love like hers frighten everyone just a little?” And of course the answer is yes – in its power, its determination, its forlornness; and in its victory and its paradoxical redemption. Reading Turgenev is an extraordinary and haunting achievement.

 

Alun Severn

February 2017