[In the following excerpt, Morrison discusses Trevor's Irish nationality and recurring themes within his works.]

From some perspectives William Trevor might seem to be a British author: he lives in Devon, on the southwest coast of England; his publishers are two important British firms, Penguin and the Bodley Head; he has been awarded an honorary CBE by Queen Elizabeth II for his valuable services to literature. His work usually occupies a foot or two of shelf space in major bookshops throughout the United Kingdom. And his speech is accented by an urbane mix of various regions of Britain. Even so, William Trevor remains an Irish author—Irish by birth and by owned identity. That simple fact is essential to any full appreciation of his fiction.

In a 1976 interview with Jack White on Irish television (RTE), Trevor stated that Irish history is "the only academic subject I've ever been the least interested in" and described himself as a young man being "very, very nationalistic, intensely Irish." Going on to consider the transition from his early work as a sculptor (in his teens and twenties), deliberately using Irish motifs, to his early work as an author (in his thirties), wherein Irish elements are not immediately apparent, Trevor speculated that he "must have used something up": contrary, he says, to standard advice given fledgling authors, he began by writing about what he did not know—England—rather than about what he did know—Ireland. Yet it is clear, throughout this early interview and in subsequent ones, as well as throughout Trevor's fiction itself, that his fascination with Irish history, Irish motifs, and his whole Irish heritage did not actually get "used up" but rather went underground for a time, only to manifest itself later as a profoundly important component of his mature work.

Born in 1928 as William Trevor Cox, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Trevor spent his childhood in various towns in the south of Ireland, moving frequently because of his father's work as a bank official. In his RTE interview Trevor speaks at length about his vivid memories of the towns and the countryside in which he grew up and his own youthful activities there: Youghal, Skibbereen, Enniscorthy; the seaside, the fishermen, people being drowned; his going to school for the first time; "the enclosed claustrophobia of small town life" that, he says, permeates so much of his fiction; his going often into Cork to the pictures ("Clark Gable in Too Hot to Handle, then tea at the Savoy"); his wandering off on his own, lost in the usual childhood fantasies; his immersion in books (all of Dickens, Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie). Because of his living as "a migrant inside Ireland" (to use Jack White's phrase), and belonging to a minority religious group (Protestant), Trevor says he early developed the sense of being "outside looking in," so that when he came to be a writer, he took up his role "as a spy." Throughout the interview, however, Trevor gently resists White's tendency (more implicit than stated) to see him as not really rooted in Ireland, perhaps not really Irish. Yes, Trevor agrees, he lived in many separate spots in the south, but they all seemed similar to him; he had a sense of continuity. Yes, "the minority thing" of being a Protestant has stayed with him, but his schooling also included the (Roman Catholic) Christian Brothers. Yes, his early fiction did focus on England and the English, but as a people and a place quite different from his own, as oddities ("I found English people … their rules, laws, and obsessions very interesting"). And, yes, as a matter of fact he does, even now, feel foreign in Devon, yet he experiences no conflict because "the Devon countryside and people are very like the south of Ireland where I grew up." The touchstone is always, ultimately, Ireland.

After a childhood of frequently interrupted and patchwork schooling—with some stability supplied by two years at Sandford Park School and two years at St. Columba's College in Dublin—Trevor attended Trinity College, Dublin (getting to know the city very well, especially, as he told Jack White, its night people), and was awarded a B.A. in history in 1950. His subsequent move to Northern Ireland and then to England (where he taught history and art at various schools between 1951 and 1955) in no way constituted a rejection of Ireland, no Joycean or Beckettian deliberate expatriation. As he explained to me after his reading at the Book Fair at the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, he left quite simply because there were no jobs available for sculptors in Ireland but there were in England.

Of his career as a visual artist Trevor told Jack White that he became seriously interested in sculpting at age 16 while at St. Columba's and remained a sculptor until 1960. He exhibited his work and earned his living as a professional sculptor in England, chiefly with work on churches, using Irish motifs taken from his intense study of the Book of Kells (he carved four saints from the Book of Kells for a church in Rugby, "which is rather nice—a piece of Imperialism I rather like"). His fascination with Irish crosses and other structural and decorative forms in Celtic art, along with his own intense nationalism and "desire for art to reflect the past," led eventually to his decision to give up sculpture because, as he explained in his RTE interview, "my sculpture had become wholly abstract" and "I just didn't like the look of it."

The "humanness" absent from his later sculpture was perhaps, he speculates, rediscovered in his writing. In 1958 he published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour; in 1964 his second novel, The Old Boys, won the Hawthornden Prize. Since 1965 he has lived by his pen, publishing a novel or volume of short stories every year or two and winning most of the significant literary prizes.

The Irish strain in Trevor's artistry may have gone underground during the early part of his writing career but nonetheless remains discernible. Particularly interesting is the fact that Trevor himself finds Irish elements in work that on the surface seems not to be Irish at all. As Trevor talks on videotape with Jack White about characteristics of his use of language, he illustrates its Irish cast by citing one of his English characters (the fey/pathological adolescent nemesis Timothy Gedge, from the entirely English The Children of Dynmouth). Replying to White's question as to whether his work contains echoes of Ireland, Trevor first responds with an emphatic "Oh, yes"; he goes on to indicate that not only does he have a number of short stories with Irish characters or settings, as well as a novel that is "wholly Irish," but even his English, French, and American characters "speak in an Irish way." He amplifies this assertion by stating that he inevitably writes "Irish patterns of speech" and notes that there is something characteristic about "the way the Irish decorate a phrase, make it slightly funnier than does the more down-to-earth English person." Such language patterns are "a technical thing," he says, but not something he does for special effect; quite simply, "It's the only way I can write." Although Trevor has mitigated this "Irish speech" somewhat, even here in this mid-1970s interview he affirms that his use of the English language has a specifically Irish form to it. This, he says, accounts for some critics finding his characters' speech eccentric or odd, not realizing the Irish cast he has inevitably given to his non-Irish characters.

Climaxing this relatively long portion of the interview with his single specific example, Trevor points out that Timothy Gedge in The Children of Dynmouth "speaks with the ring of a Cork boy." Whether or not Timothy's unusually frequent use of personal names in direct address ("D' you ever go to funerals, Kate?" / "Funerals?" / "When a person dies, Kate"); whether or not his repetitions of key nouns ("I'm looking for a wedding-dress. I have an act planned with a wedding-dress") and his building his paragraphs incrementally using such repetitions, with key words often placed oddly in the phrase ("You didn't mind me looking in at the window, Stephen? Only I was passing at the time. Your dad was packing his gear up. He took the wedding-dress out of the trunk and put it back again. A faded kind of trunk, Stephen. Green it would be in its day"); whether or not that "only" and "green it would be" are distinctively or exclusively "Irish" is not the point: what is important is that Trevor hears Timothy Gedge speaking with the ring of a Cork boy, despite his English surname, origin, and milieu. Elsewhere in the interview, responding to the question as to which novel is his favorite, Trevor states, "I'm very fond of my Dublin book, Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel," which White agrees "has a strong smell of Dublin about it." Persistently, the strong smell, the ringing echo of Ireland—these permeate Trevor's sense of his work and his working.

Just as Trevor first wrote about England from the vantage point of an outsider, so later he began to write more and more about Ireland only after the years spent in England, Switzerland, and Italy had provided necessary distance, allowing him "to look back from someplace else." The word back is important in that assertion, indicating as it does an affirmation of his sense of continuity with his homeland (and not foreignness, such as he feels with England). The linguistic link was always there. Then, later, that abiding fascination with Irish history began to surface once again, prompted perhaps by the renewed Troubles in Northern Ireland from 1968 on. Certainly Trevor's increasingly frequent use of Irish settings, characters, and political issues dates from about that time, culminating in his masterpieces of the 1980s, Fools of Fortune, "The News from Ireland," and The Silence in the Garden.

The gardens featured in Trevor's latest novels provide important images for all his work and function as the chief recurrent metaphor, at once a lost Eden and a possible Paradise, a whole flourishing and blighted world. And very often that garden is Ireland. By a conceptual "system of correspondences," frequently expressed through a rhetorical strategy of "significant simultaneity," this metaphoric equation of Ireland and garden, with all its attendant images and related themes, shapes Trevor's entire body of fiction into a remarkable coherence. That polished coherence with its interesting complexity is the subject of this book. Through careful examination of Trevor's fiction, through close reading of the published texts, this study discovers the various elements of complexity and artistry that make Trevor's work such an elegant whole, centered on the metaphor of the garden and the important ethical question of whether that postlapsarian garden is essentially waste or can be reclaimed.

The intellectual framework of all Trevor's fiction is provided by his "system of correspondences." According to the concept that dominates his work, past and present are actually the same moment; apparently separate realms (the public and the private, the political and the domestic) inevitably overlap. The various elements of space and time are intrinsically interrelated, together constituting an elaborate and powerful set of relationships, a system of correspondences, that shapes his world. This conceptual system—with its chief recurrent metaphor, the garden—is well illustrated by an important short story, "The News from Ireland," and by one of his most powerful novels, Fools of Fortune.

Trevor's system of correspondences raises a significant question: What is the origin of evil in such a world and how does it operate? Trevor invokes an ancient theory (that Adam's sin in the primal garden, Eden, taints all his descendants) but transforms it by the way his characters participate in their own wounding. In Trevor's account of the genealogy of evil, sin originates not only in the past but also continuously in the present, each man his own Adam, inheriting Original Sin and contributing to it capriciously, even unwittingly. Children are particularly interesting to him, simultaneously both victims and victimizers, making evil a game they are unwilling to relinquish, playing it into adulthood and old age. A variety of short stories and novels, spread across the whole of Trevor's career, illustrate these points, showing how personal, domestic, public, and political realms are mutually affected by any given act of cruelty or violence, however trivial.

Nationality and the violence it occasions are an important aspect of the political issues Trevor's later work regularly addresses. The linkage between political violence and personal cruelties develops gradually throughout Trevor's work, emerging finally as a concatenation of suffering that binds together all persons from all times and all places. Only in the last half of his writing career do nationality and national allegiance become an explicit issue, focused sharply on Ireland. The earliest fiction of this Anglo-Irish writer is set almost entirely in England with English characters; most of these novels and stories of the 1960s are comic in manner, grotesque in characterization and plotting, and generally apolitical. From the 1970s on, humor is softened by pathos; more Irish characters and settings are used; and political and domestic problems interconnect. In the 1980s and early 1990s all but one of the novels and most of the stories are Irish in setting, characterization, and subject matter; events and manner of presentation are usually serious, the tone often despairing. The earlier work shows Trevor perfecting his craft and developing those distinctive techniques and configurations of thought which ultimately lead to Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden, an odyssey that moves through the city back to the garden, back home to Ireland, from a comic view of life to a much darker one in which the mutual correspondences between public and private realms are seen as some of the chief conduits of evil.

The philosophical problem of evil and specific political evils associated with nationality are joined in Trevor's fiction in a shocking metaphor: child murder used as an emblem of colonial exploitation. To highlight Trevor's treatment of this difficult subject, it is useful to juxtapose The Silence in the Garden (1988) with two other novels containing similar material, one by an American of very different background, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and the other by a fellow Corkonian, Mary Leland's The Killeen (1985). Though child abuse and murder have occasionally been mentioned in fiction, they are rarely described in any detail; by contrast, these three novels, written within a few years of one another, are surprisingly horrifying in their explicitness. Beloved is, however, ultimately optimistic, while the two Irish novels significantly show a much more diffuse stain of guilt and responsibility, a more negative view of the future as a place necessarily scarred by present evils.

Summary statements about Trevor's often shocking subject matter and the interconnected evils he depicts can make his work seem sensational. But Trevor's writing is, to the contrary, subtle and finely crafted; he makes skillful use of a variety of rhetorical strategies to establish the workings of his system of correspondences and its chain of evil. Among the more important strategies are his persistent visual images, implied puns, literalized metaphors, incremental references, and significant names. Persistent visual images serve to show personal and political worlds mirroring each other, as illustrated in the story "Attracta," with its parallels between the peaceful schoolteacher in County Cork and her former pupil murdered in Belfast. Implied puns supply a single word that ramifies from its obvious denotation in context to the analogous meanings it suggests throughout the rest of the text, as in the story "Beyond the Pale," where deceptions in the plot are mirrored by deceptions in language. Literalized metaphors function in Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel, for example, to indicate the reciprocal power and folly of both words and images. Incremental references—repeated items, such as trees, orchards, and fields—take on additional weight and meaning as they recur throughout Trevor's work, beginning initially as isolated references and then, through repetition and association, gradually acquiring the density and resonance of a symbol, suggesting various points of correspondence to other elements in Trevor's world and supporting his major metaphor of the garden. Finally, names and naming constitute profound indicators of identity, everything from obvious tags to inner sources of power, showing the extent to which even language participates in the sense of linked relationships that pervades Trevor's fiction.

Genre too is made to serve Trevor's system of correspondences. Trevor alters the traditional Bildungsroman to make it a political novel as well: the protagonist's process of maturation in both Fools of Fortune and Nights at the Alexandra is affected by political events that shift his quest away from the traditional goal of social integration and toward discovery of and reconciliation with his deepest self. Novels by John Banville and Brian Moore provide useful contrasting examples of contemporary Bildungsroman with similar concerns.

The question inevitably arises as to whether Trevor's view in his fictional world is optimistic because of his frequent comic elements or is pessimistic because of his focus on what seems an endlessly multiplying series of evil events—or, to put it another way, using Trevor's own metaphor, whether or not the garden can be redeemed, reclaimed. I conclude this book by considering the extent to which Trevor's work provides resolution for the intricate evil it explores originating in the Garden of Eden and permeating the many gardens found in his short stories and novels. From the beginning of his fiction to his latest stories, such as "Lost Ground," Trevor has included three kinds of persons—some comic, some tragic—who in various ways both manifest evil and transcend it: children, celibates, and holy fools. In the 1976 novel The Children of Dynmouth the paradoxicality of Trevor's response to the problem of evil is most explicitly presented: apparent monsters are not outside the community but part of it, just as the snake was part of Eden; at every point goods and evils touch and mirror each other; loss may be gain; the same earth is both garden and wilderness. Placing this work against another contemporary Irish novel—Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin (1977), set in Belfast and dealing with specific, recognizable political violence—helps highlight the paradoxicality of Trevor's view, a view that itself can provide redemption for that wilderness/garden of Ireland with which his work is preoccupied.