SOURCE: "Saints of the Ascendancy: William Trevor's Big-House Novels," in Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, edited by Otto Rauchbauer, Lilliput Press, 1992, pp. 257-72.

[In the following essay, Larsen explores shared themes in Trevor's two novels Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden.]

With the spatial awareness of a sometime sculptor, William Trevor has from the start shaped the physical environment in his fictional worlds as the tangible expression of intangible human concerns. In his earlier writings, hotels and boarding houses acquire distinctive symbolic significance as the favored arenas for petty power struggles among petty predators: dingy interiors reflect dingy lives. Trevor's penchant for black humor is particularly at home in houses for the homeless, where lonely paralyzed souls act out illusory relationships and nurture grotesque fixations. In the course of his preoccupation with marital relationships, Trevor has gradually been led from the tragicomic space of boarding-house affairs to the more sombre symbolic space informing his two major Big-House novels: Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence in the Garden (1988). Always fascinated by the frigid intricacies of a passionless marriage. Trevor here exposes the relationship of Irish domestic life to that peculiar species of Irish erotic fervor known as fanatic class violence: indeed, his treatment of marriage in the Big-House novels tends to suggest a political hieros gamos.

     Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
     Cannot bear very much reality.
                                 T.S.Eliot, 1943

Having slain Tybalt to avenge Mercutio's death, Romeo exclaims as he flees into exile, "O I am Fortune's foole!" Young Willie Quinton in Fools of Fortune might have echoed Romeo's sentiments when a violent act of revenge sends this lover, too, into exile. Trevor's novel, like Shakespeare's play, relates the fortunes of two houses whose bonds of marital union are tried by the ancient curse of factional hatred. Reconciliation comes for the families of Romeo and Juliet through their deaths; reunion for Willie and Marianne in the fool's paradise of a reduced idyll. The title of the novel suggests a view of history that is fatalistic, again recalling the "misadventured" love of the rival houses of Verona, but the "fools of fortune" formula attributed to the elder William Quinton expresses none of the passion to be found in Shakespeare's tragic lovers; it is rather the good-humored sigh of a kind man confronted with an unkind world. For Trevor's book is not shaped by the precise ironies of malicious cosmic powers, but is rather controlled, in structure and in diction, by an enveloping sentiment of passive suffering, by an elegiac tone that laments lost wholeness. Fools of Fortune is a novel of sensibility, whose characters instinctively resist the personal communications that could lead to action and renewal.

Some of Trevor's fools do tend to become victims of the inevitable course of historical events, or think of themselves as such, lending the elder Quinton's tag tragic overtones he had not entertained: Marianne becomes increasingly fatalistic and Willie's mother succumbs to despair. There are, however, other kinds of fools abroad, such as those who imagine they are wise while being victims of their own fixations and lusts—namely, the professional teachers: Miss Halliwell, Professor and Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, the Scrotum and Mad Mack. Yet another kind of fool, and a different sort of teacher, is represented by the defrocked priest Father Kilgarriff, whose meek spirit and Christ-like rejection of violence make him a fool in the eyes of Christian Ireland. Finally, that most frightening form of foolishness, insanity itself, emerges ironically triumphant. Just as "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact", so does Imelda tread the lonely path created by the power of her imagination and her love for her unknown father; it is a path that leads through the valley of the shadow of destruction to a place of peace known only to saints and fools—the heart of Kilneagh. The concluding segments of the novel thus develop a kind of fool's paradise regained, in which the old order with its long shadow of carnage has been displaced by ambiguous gifts of the imagination, renewing the link to primal scenes of value.

The prologue to Trevor's tale of two houses suggests that the love story of Marianne and Willie contains an allegorical message about the historical relationship of England and Ireland. In drawing parallels between Woodcombe Park in Devon and Kilneagh in Co. Cork—the one reduced to making a noisy living from selling its past to tourists, the other sunk into economic and cultural silence, its past alive only in the elegiac voices of the narrative—Trevor anticipates the differing histories of the Big House in the two countries. The three-fold pattern of marital alliance connecting the Woodcombes and the Quintons over four generations ironically recapitulates the historic bond joining England and Ireland. The emotional focus of the relationship is provided by Kilneagh, built in 1770 as the seat of the Quinton family estate. Kilneagh is present throughout the book as the primal home or emotional center of being for the three narrative centers of consciousness—Willie Quinton, whose childhood was spent there and who inherits the estate; Marianne Woodcombe, his English cousin, who identifies Kilneagh with Willie and whose love for him holds her there in spite of pressures to leave; Imelda, their daughter, whose life at Kilneagh epitomizes the horror and the glory of its history. The predominantly elegiac tone of the narrative expresses the feeling shared by the three main characters of belonging to a disrupted house. The content of the narrative is, then, an account of three childhoods in which Kilneagh exerted a decisive formative influence.

Willie's share of the narrative is motivated by his wish that his early life might have been shared with Marianne, a wish that is identical with her imagined presence in Kilneagh.

I wish that somehow you might have shared my childhood, for I would love to remember you in the scarlet drawing-room, so fragrant in summer with the scent of roses, warmed in winter by the wood Tim Paddy gathered. Arithmetic and grammar books were laid out every morning on an oval table, red ink in one glass inkwell, black in the other.

Kilneagh before the raid embodies the sense of order, security, and harmony that determines Willie's character. The heart of the house is the scarlet drawing-room, warm and fragrant the year round, the room in which he begins to learn the lessons of history. The comfortable aura of a pastoral idyll reinforces his sense of belonging to an intact world in which agricola, his first word of Latin, reminds him of his own place in life ("'Now there's a word for you.'" In particular, the emblematic scene on the brass log-box preoccupies him with its mystery:

On the sides of the brass log-box there were embossed scenes, and the one I liked best was of a farmhouse supper. Men sat around a table while a woman served, one of them reaching behind him to seize her hand. You could tell from the way he had twisted his arm behind him that it was a secret between them.

The intimations of wholeness in the scene—round the board, round the years, the secret love uniting servant and master—express the original indwelling spirit of Kilneagh. It is a humanistic spirit of compassion and social concern that had found its most memorable expression in the efforts of Anna Quinton to help the victims of the Great Famine of 1846, but whose continuing influence upon the history of the house was not altogether commensurate with the aims of the saintly matron Father Kilgarriff venerates so highly.

When Anna Quinton gave her life to alleviate the suffering caused by injustice and greed, her spirit remained at Kilneagh as genius loci, prompting her widower to carry on with her struggle.

When she died of famine fever her dog-faced husband shut himself into Kilneagh for eleven years, not seeing anyone. It was said that she haunted him: looking from his bedroom window one morning he saw her on a distant hill—an apparition like the Virgin Mary. She told him that he must give away the greater part of his estate to those who had suffered loss and deprivation in the famine, and in his continuing love of her he did so.

Anna Quinton had tried to reduce the burden of guilt that membership in the landlord class placed on her family and was accorded a fool by her English relations for her trouble (thus a fool of "fortune" in another sense of the word). Her ghostly instructions to her widower to stop the guilt at its source was a first step in the direction of an ultimate solution to the foolishness of the Ascendancy system of fortune, namely the dissolution of the estate itself. But the curse of property ownership was to make itself felt in a different way in the course of the Troubles. The next English mistress at Kilneagh, Willie's mother, was the daughter of an English army colonel and united in her person the traditional Kilneagh support for Home Rule and Irish independence with a demand for militant action; her admiration for Michael Collins seemed to border on attraction. Even after the murder of her husband and daughters, Eva could not renounce the use of force to resolve conflicts but slowly killed herself with hatred, bitterness, and despair. Her successor at Kilneagh, her niece Marianne, similarly defended the justice of blood revenge and the need for armed violence, while fatalistically maintaining that the "shadow of destruction" was inescapable. As a visible symbol of the power and dominion of the Anglo-Irish landlords, the Big House was a just target for attack by revolutionaries during the Troubles; for a Big House to be burned by the British Black and Tans would have been unusual, in the case of Kilneagh a telling commentary on the dangers of becoming involved in any way with the use of armed force and a sad memorial to the family's betrayal of the spirit of Anna Quinton.

It is fitting that matriarchal dominion should be associated with the history of a Big House, for houses are, in fact, essentially female structures that embody the principles of order, security, and stability and create meaningful space for birth, nourishment, sleep, and death. The household of Kilneagh was directed by its women, beginning to our knowledge with Anna Quinton's dominion over her "dog-faced" husband, who planted a lane of birch trees as a memorial to her and retired in mourning for eleven years following her death. The dominion of Willie's mother over his father seems to have been not less complete. "She presided over the household with untroubled authority, over my father and myself and my sisters…." After the raid, Aunt Fitzeustace assumed authority for the surviving resident household, the constellation of two single elderly sisters and a defunct priest recalling, with Joyce's "The Sisters", the archetypal Irish matriarchy. Marianne's advent strengthened the pattern: lacking a husband, she married a house. Viewed from a higher perspective, Kilneagh appeared quite beautiful to Marianne, but on closer inspection she found the harsh desolation of its ruined parts repellent. Even so, her love for the young man in the distant past remained untroubled by the constant signs of unrepaired destruction impressing themselves on the development of their child. The line of female ascendancy at Kilneagh ends appropriately with the deformed yet dominant life of Imelda, who bears a miraculous power of inner resurgence.

The men of Kilneagh lead quiet lives complaisantly devoted to the wishes of their more dynamic wives; it is Willie's father who moderates his wife's enthusiastic support of Michael Collins and it is the men's role to connect the realm of the house with that of the mill, the latter being their own domain. The story of Willie's childhood shows the boy uneasy in his dual attachment to house and mill, mother and father. In the prepubertal world of unbroken emotional security, Willie identifies positively with both spatial realms, experiencing pleasure in the prospect of one day assuming his father's position in the mill:

I knew that one day I would inherit this mill. I liked the thought of that, of going to work there, of learning what my father had had to learn about grain and the machinery that ground it. I liked the mill itself, its grey stone softened with Virginia creeper, the doors of lofts and stores a reddish brown, paint that over the years had lost its shine due to the sun; in a central gable the green-faced clock was always a minute fast. I loved the smell of the place, the warm dry smell of corn, the cleanness even though there was dust in the air. I enjoyed watching the huge wheel turning in the mill-race, one cog engaging the next. The timber of the chutes was smooth with wear, leather flaps opening and falling back, then opening again. The sacks had Quinton on them, the letters of our name arranged in a circle.

In addition to Willie's sensuous attachment to his patrimony, the deep love between father and son has another objective correlative in their walks together from house to mill, in which two poles of significance, separated by a hill, are joined in an emotionally charged ritual act. Willie's innocent wish to perpetuate the unity of house and mill in his own person is disturbed by the prospect that he must first be sent off to boarding school: to assume the mantle of the father, he must pass through the puberty rites of his class. As it turns out, the time Willie spends at the boarding school strengthens his ties to his dead father: he resolves to renew the pattern of his father's life, to rebuild Kilneagh, and to take up his hereditary position at the mill. His love for Marianne, which flourishes together with his discovery of his father's school years, is the central emotional expression of his fledgling renewal of his father's truncated life. Both developments are interrupted when the innate rivalry between father and mother in Willie's sense of self comes to a climactic confrontation. Repressed bitterness towards his mother's self-willed decline explodes in a denunciation that is the negative emotional corollary to his constructive plans for Kilneagh and Marianne. His father had exemplified the conciliatory nature of kindness, capable of understanding the "difficult position" of a man like Doyle; his mother was more absolute in her judgments and demands. Her final act of suicide, perhaps partly motivated by her son's open abuse, was her most effective act of retribution, impelling Willie to commit the deed of vengeance she had so long yearned for. Willie construes his mother's suicide as a silent commission to complete a pattern: Doyle's tongue was cut out, his mother cut her wrists with a razor blade, and so Rudkin must be slaughtered with a butcher knife. Throwing over the years of preparation for the rebuilding of Kilneagh in his father's stead, turning his back on Kilneagh and Marianne, Willie follows his mother's example. To the curse of guilt and exile, he adds the self-imposed punishment of silence, cutting himself off, inwardly renouncing all ties to Kilneagh and the living connection to his own fatherhood.

Like Anna and Eva before her, Marianne initiates significant change in the life of a male Quinton—she makes a father of Willie, coming to him with a lamp in his night of despair, offering him the comfort of a light leading out of the long shadows of destruction. Thus, at the crossroads of maturity Willie is confronted with two paths and two rival goddesses—he must choose between the young messenger of new life and the dead messenger of destruction, the virgin's sacrifice for love and the mother's sacrifice for hate; forced to choose between sonship and fatherhood, Willie claims the former and rejects the latter. For her part, Marianne holds the ruins of Kilneagh in trust for Willie, and raises their daughter there in conjugal commitment as the truncated hope of their truncated heritage. The mother's razor or the lover's lamp? The former provokes the slaughter of revenge and the curse of exile, the latter engenders the inward light and final blessing of peace in the ancestral home.

The murder of Rudkin is the one active deed in a life otherwise distinguished by passivity and shyness, fearful of its own passions and constantly withdrawing into reserve and silence. So, too, Willie's love for Marianne consists of the poignant memory of an unspoiled past; it is told for the melancholy pleasure of the telling, after being repressed for some fifty years until old age has reduced it to fading echoes. Significantly, Willie's first return to Ireland and Co. Cork in 1972 does not include a visit to Kilneagh; the dying servant from his childhood is more important than his own daughter and her mother. The trip to take leave of Josephine, his mother's last companion, is an act of homage to his mother and to the painful memory of the distant past—paradisiacal and desecrated.

A large part of Foots of Fortune is devoted to the place of schools and teachers in the lives of the protagonists. The scenes at institutions of learning—especially the pretentious boarding schools in the hills of Dublin and Lausanne—are peopled with seedy hypocrites and petty rogues reminiscent of Trevor's early grotesque novels. Here the audacious school escapades in the middle section of the book provide comic relief from the sombre elegy of the main plot, underscoring along the way Kilneagh's more serious reality by means of numerous bathetic parallels: Willie's loving thoughts for Marianne are segmentally juxtaposed with his school friends' mockery of love; when lecherous Professor Gibb-Bachelor lectures to the girls he would like to seduce about the literary significance of landscapes, Kilneagh's despoiled space provides a tacit counterexample of erotic and poetic desolation; when a disgraced teacher takes revenge on Mad Mack by urinating on him in his sleep, the act is called a "slash", anticipating Willie's murderous slashing of Rudkin.

The schools are grotesque because they fail to initiate the three young protagonists into the strange and terrible reality in which they must live. Miss Halliwell's erotically oppressive pity for Willie is counterproductive, the nuns' professional pity for Imelda ineffectual. In a novel of education, conventional schools are a foil for the existential encounters that matter. As Marianne writes, admitting in her old age the truth of Father Kilgarriff's wisdom:

He was right when he said that there's not much left in a life when murder has been committed. That moment when I guessed the truth in Mr Lanigan's office; that moment when she opened the secret drawer; that moment when he stood at his mother's bedroom door and saw her dead. After each brief moment there was as little chance for any one of us as there was for Kilneagh after the soldiers' wrath. Truncated lives, creatures of the shadows. Fools of fortune, as his father would have said; ghosts we became.

Reactions to existential encounters may not be as deterministic as Marianne came to believe. The heart of learning, at least for Willie, took place in the heart of Kilneagh, in the scarlet drawing-room. It was here that gentle Father Kilgarriff introduced the boy to pacific precepts; it was here that his mother challenged those precepts with stories embodying heroic ideals; and it was here that his father demonstrated his quietist response to the teachings of books and dangerous current affairs. Like Doyle and like Willie, his father was "in a difficult position", worried that Father Kilgarriff was not teaching his son enough, yet uncomfortable himself with the substance of what his son was supposed to be learning. In the end, the crucial learning experience, the crucible in which all preliminary learning is tried, is the personal experience of deadly sin. That "strange reality" Marianne refers to is entered into by breaking taboos—here committing murder. The changed state of consciousness following the epiphanies Marianne mentions imbues the space of Kilneagh with its peculiar significance.

Imelda's fate reproduces the fate of Kilneagh. Like Willie she is raised with the contending philosophies of life that have shaped the fortunes of the estate: Father Kilgarriff's Christlike compassion and Marianne's fatalistic justification of heroic violence. While her mother keeps Imelda's curiosity and expectations about her father alive (feelings tantamount to belonging to Kilneagh), Father Kilgarriff tries to protect Imelda from participating in the cursed history of the Big House. Gifted with extraordinary powers of imagination. Imelda pursues the reality of her father embodied in Kilneagh. Literally fascinated by intimations about the traumatic events connected with her own birth, Imelda burrows into the secret compartments of Kilneagh's past, ferreting out details that she experiences with uncanny intensity and empathy. As obsessive fantasies take control of her consciousness, she withdraws completely from the outside world and suffers without respite the horrors of ceaseless slaughter. Fortunately, the career of her madness moves beyond the incessant scenes of terror, coming to rest at the serene heart of the Big House. The harmonious world of the scarlet drawing-room, with its fragrant surrounding gardens and its enigmatic secret lovers forever turning and touching, grants Imelda a beatific vision of Paradise Regained. Her peace is construed by the Catholic populace as a sign of divine favor, a token of her saintly namesake, with whom she is explicitly compared. For Imelda had longed for her father's homecoming, and she was granted it in visions of his life's horrors and of his life's Edenic origins—the Sacred Host of her miraculous communion with Kilneagh. Her beatific vision is equally inspired by W. B. Yeats's idyllic lyric "The Lake Isle of Innis-free", which Trevor has elsewhere glossed as follows: "Heartache was soothed in Sligo, the world's weeping held at a distance by its waters and its wild, evenings were full of the linnet's wings." In Imelda the family's guilt is resolved through the combined power of mythic patterns: the quest for the father, the homecoming of the lord, and the peace of the blessed fool.

This positive interpretation of Imelda's final regression is anticipated, and perhaps implanted in her soul, by Father Kilgarriff's efforts to help her fly a kite on her ninth birthday. What she considers the happiest experience of her life is an exhilarating feeling of high flight and of shrinking to a point in the sky. The flying kite is an emotionally constructive symbol, ultimately triumphant, for Imelda's emotionally destructive urge toward personal reduction, repeatedly imaged by insects.

Imelda did not speak. She watched a fly on the wax fruit in the centre of the table. How disappointing it would be, she thought, when it discovered that the fruit had no juice…. 'That lady thought I shouldn't have been given life.'

The wax fruit Imelda here associates with a cruel denial of life is, in the novel's affirmative closing image, displaced by a burgeoning harvest of mulberries. In the end, the mulberry orchard planted by Anna Quinton as a reminder of her English home is the only vital symbolic agency left intact in Kilneagh, just as the orchard wing was the only part of the building to survive the fateful raid. The mill being defunct (perhaps the loss of income was one reason for Willie's homecoming, so strangely lacking in ardor), the fruitfulness of Kilneagh has attained a purely spiritual state; here landscape has become literature, whereas in Woodcombe it has become a source of museum income. Like Imelda's visions of the scarlet drawing-room and the poetic peace dropping from linnet's wings, the fruit of the mulberry orchard embodies the quiet beauty of the primal ancestral spirit, now purged of the pain and guilt inflicted by the historical logic of violence. The last of the Quinton-Woodcombe families are happily dependent on the good graces of their neighbors, taking their meals in the kitchen as their servants had done years before. A special kind of salvation seems to be granted to the beggar and the suffering servant, as indeed the most admirable figures in the book are the servants—brave Tim Paddy, who saved Willie's life; saintly Josephine, her life consumed with selfless prayers for consolation; despised Father Kilgarriff, the true servant of God; the wise butler Fukes, the most competent councilor at the boarding school; and Anna Quinton herself, the paradigm of the mistress as suffering servant. If the remnant family at Kilneagh are by grace or good fortune permitted to enjoy their last days in peaceful communion with an ideal past, a harvest of mulberries (Gk. moros) is fitting praise for these blissful fools (morias encomion).

     O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
                                     Dylan Thomas, 1934

Trevor's most ambitious Big-House novel, The Silence in the Garden, describes the decline and fall of a prominent family of Anglo-Irish landlords and their island estate off the coast of Co. Cork. Where the central love story in Fools of Fortune focuses on the suffering caused by the intrusion of political violence into an idyllic Ascendancy world, the latter novel uses a constellation of paralyzed love relationships to suggest a more extensive range of social, even mythic implication. Its chief concern is no longer stoically endured suffering, but rather self-inflicted suffering. The Silence in the Garden thus moves beyond the largely sentimental appeal of Fools of Fortune and develops with its texture of symbolic realism a more complex picture of the mystery of human guilt.

The narrator informs us that Carriglas, which means "green rock", is "a deceiving name, as the island was very fertile." It is the deceptive quality of the island and of the Rolleston estate lodged upon it which provides the novel with its primary source of suspense. We learn early on that there are bats in the cellar of the grand old house, and there are repeated allusions to a terrible secret hidden in its past, a family sin that mysteriously paralyzes the last generation of a once proud and powerful dynasty. If the text uses traditional Gothic elements to create narrative suspense, it exploits their inherent thematic tensions as well, for the book is ultimately about the intransigent paradox in the name Carriglas.

The island bears silent signs of its former lords, various stones recalling layers of the past. The oldest markers are the standing stones located at the summit wilderness, remnants of a pre-Christian culture that had made the island a burial ground for their kings. Then there are the ruins of a medieval abbey located near the remains of a saint's cell, where a holy well containing moist clay and a stone the saint had once used as a pillow are the objects of occasional pilgrimage and veneration. Finally, the stones of Rolleston manor itself were taken from the castle ruins of earlier overlords. The Big House of Carriglas is thus planted in a context of monuments to former tenants, spiritual and temporal, and the final phase in its history is tacitly traced against the background of sacred significance the island had possessed in the distant past. Inexorably, the silent stones of the past point to the silent garden of the future and the inevitable end of human affairs. After years of unbearable tension, after the crazed tumult of the human comedy and its frantic fleeting concerns, the paradoxical "green rock" of Carriglas signifies a return to the only peace possible—nature freed from human ambitions and vanities. Paradise is a bit of wilderness, not a residence.

As the Anglo-Irish heirs of Carriglas, the three Rolleston children have distinctly different areas of emotional attachment to their ancestral island. John James, the elder son, shows no particular feelings at all for the space of his home and consumes himself in vague and pretentious posturings towards the Irish mainland. The younger brother Lionel, on the other hand, is most at home working the land itself and puttering in the sheds; no Abraham, his life is a pastoral idyll spoiled by the shyness that prevents his union with Sarah.

Their sister Villana, by contrast, is the natural mistress of Carriglas: beautiful, clever, and willful, she had clearly been the dominant child and assumed a position of leadership over her two brothers. Thus it is Villana who habitually visits the ancient standing stones at the summit of the island, her affinity for them suggesting both her own regal nature and her need to comfort herself with the inevitable loss of every mortal sovereignty.

In the crucial year 1931, which marks a visible turning point in the history of Carriglas and to which the bulk of the novel is devoted, Rolleston manor is in a state of reduced splendor, the opulently appointed sitting room no longer representative of the economically deflated estate. The formative spirit of the House of Rolleston is nonetheless represented by the evergreen trees standing at either side of the main entrance way. Like emblematic badges for the genius loci, the strawberry trees and the monkey puzzle suggest that the family history is determined by the combined forces of compassion (the strawberry tree has red heart-shaped fruit, traditionally the token of martyrs and Christ's blood) and entanglement (the monkey puzzle has intricately entwined branches and stiff, sharp-pointed leaves). As we learn from the knowledgeable amateur historian Finnamore Balt, the family's economic decline began with its exercise of compassion in the years following the Great Famine: "'The Famine Rollestons were widely renowned for their compassion. A most remarkable generation, but alas disastrous in terms of the effect on the family fortunes.'" Finnamore Balt does not, however, realize that the puzzling refusal of the family he marries into to oppose their own ruin is likewise rooted in a kind of compassion: secret guilt and shame demand their self-denial in a life-long act of expiation. The emblematic trees remind us that compassion as well as cruelty lead to the downfall of the estate and its ordered world. If the strawberry trees and the monkey puzzle are outward signs for the fate of the Rolleston family—their ineluctable entrapment in compunction—the two tree species might equally suggest the poetic workings of the novel itself, whose appeal derives largely from the combined effects of sentiment and suspense.

Ancient Mrs Rolleston is the living embodiment of the conscience of Carriglas. Quietly, with irresistible moral authority, she compels her grandchildren to live out the consequences of their past deeds and to recompense the surviving victim as best they can. Despite her revulsion at what she thinks is Villana's emotional exploitation of Finnamore Balt, despite her suspicion about the legitimacy of Kathleen Quigley's requests for money, despite her anguish about the circumstantial nature of her family's guilt and victimization, Mrs Rolleston is committed to a moral order of humanitarian justice. If Mrs Rolleston speaks for the spirit of Carriglas, her last wish that the myrtle and hebes be protected in the garden suggests an unbroken desire for marriage and children that is thwarted by Villana's farcical marriage. Similarly, Mrs Rolleston's opponent at Villana's wedding, the Bishop of Killaloe, speaks as the voice of the bridge (the sight of which prompts him to "ponti-ficate", which is the symbol of sterile union, victorious over the fertile garden of Mrs Rolleston's desire. And yet, the logical end of her efforts will be the revision of the estate to the laboring native Irish and the reduction of the house to its working core:

Alone in the kitchen's spaciousness, she would admire the windows and wallcupboards that so gracefully accommodated the faint concavity of the walls. The range and the long, scrubbed table formed a trinity with the dresser, the range the kitchen's heart, as the kitchen was the household's.

As Mrs Rolleston is the heart of the family, so is the kitchen the heart of the Big House: it contains the primal trinity of natural life that will survive the passing of the foolish "trinity" of the Children of Carriglas.

Mrs Rolleston's terse judgment about the key event of the novel, the wedding of Villana and Finnamore Balt, aptly describes the overriding theme of the novel as a whole: "This wedding is an occasion of farce." As a record of various thwarted, stunted, and frustrated marriages between individuals and between classes, The Silence in the Garden describes not one, but many farcical weddings. Mrs Rolleston deplores Villana's decision to marry Finnamore Balt because the union fails to fulfill the usual criteria for marriage: Villana does not love the man, who is old enough to be her father, erotically; she makes it clear to him from the start that they are to have no children; far from marrying for money—as most townspeople suppose—she suppresses his efforts to recover lost lands for the Rolleston family estate. Villana's union with Finnamore is not the act of cruelty Mrs Rolleston suspects, but rather an act of regressive self-comfort: the trustworthy companionship Villana expects from Finnamore is for her an escape into her early untroubled childhood. The space sacred to her passionate love of Hugh, the ice house, has become an empty temple of memories; but her nursery can be resurrected in its innocence as a nuptial bedroom. Together with her natural mate, Hugh, Villana sacrifices love and mutual fertility to atone for ill-fated childish cruelty; together with her marital companion, Finnamore Balt, Villana covenants a life of mutual care in a childless nursery. Theirs will be the kindness of a long death watch, repeating the pattern of Villana's care for an ailing speckled hen in the same room; one is led to suspect a mysterious blend of care and cruelty in her handling of both relationships.

For the inhabitants of Carriglas, 1931 is memorable as the year of Villana's wedding and the year of Cornelius Dowley's bridge. The coincidence of these two acts of union significantly reflects their common origin in Villana's fateful feral games. As a child she had taken the lead with Hugh and her brothers in hunting a poor native boy across the island like a rabbit, thus acting out a children's version of the great historical game of Ascendancy rule in Ireland. Villana's antagonist, the red-headed boy Cornelius Dowley, grows up to take revenge on his tormentors and, uniting in his person political and private terrorism, helps to initiate with revolutionary acts of violence the later union of Carriglas and the mainland. Villana's sadistic hunting game is a courtship ritual for a wedding of violence that is consummated by a bombing and then officially sanctified by the dedication of the bridge bearing the bridegroom's name. In the eyes of Catholic revolutionaries the bridge might symbolize the annexation of Anglo-Irish dominions by native Irish culture, but from the narrator's perspective the bridge has the character of an ugly shotgun wedding, justly reversing the pattern of Villana's cruel shotgun courtship. Aesthetically, the symbol for the marriage of two social worlds through violence, indeed, the very celebration of that uniting violence, is a sordid affair: the Cornelius Dowley Bridge is depicted as a callous violation of the landscape, the tall steel supports an ugly mockery of the inscrutable standing stones crowning the island. In the last chapter of the novel, the bridge has become a static part of a drab, bleak landscape, recalling in contrast the personally conducted movements of the discarded ferry boat with its humanly responsive rhythms and positive emotional aura.

The physical union of island and mainland is one objective correlative for social and political marriage, the physical union of John James and Mrs Moledy is another. The illicit love affair of the heir of Carriglas and the proprietress of the rose of Tralee boarding house is at once a realistic comedy of manners and a grotesque allegory illustrating the uneasy and sterile intercourse between two key segments of Irish society. John James's entanglement with Mrs Moledy is a counterpart to Villana's entanglement with Cornelius Dowley, and both relationships characterize the bedeviled entanglement of Anglo-Irish landlords with the Catholic Irish tenancy. John James is, at 35, a retired officer with a minor limp and no accomplishments. His identity is defined by his condescending relationship to his motherly mistress, an affectionately accommodating Catholic widow, and by his daunting relationship to his dead father, of whom John James feels that he is himself a lamentable parody. Like his father before him, John James is remarkably tall, an attribute suggesting nobility (again the regal standing stones of Carriglas) and virility. Mrs Moledy admires both qualities in her "soldier boy". Their sexual relationship is an extended metaphor for the political relationship of their respective classes before the revolution. Mrs Moledy explicitly refers to John James's "genitals" as her "king" (the "castle" he enters being hers, and it is the gentleman's genitals that are meant when he stands before her naked "on his honour", for John James has the honor of primogeniture to bestow. The genital king does not, however, generate new life in Mrs Moledy, suggesting little future for the social union they represent. Like all Anglo-Irish landlords, John James wants to enjoy the vital substance of the native Catholic mother, but certainly not to unite their flesh in marriage. Sweet as the Rose of Tralee, the great Irish mother gives her body and her money to her proud lover, not in servility, but in the knowledge of her own superior strength. Benignly supportive of the Ascendancy, Mrs Moledy is a rather vigorous specimen of the Old Woman of Ireland, who gladly shares with her adored king the warm bulk of her canny flesh and presses him to use her savings to purchase a motorcar. Periodically the exclusive island had paid a visit to the common mainland; but now the connecting bridge has eliminated the privileged condition of the island and has, moreover, made the continuation of the gentleman's visits dependent on the financial help of the woman of the mainland. The ancient castle still desires the comforting glamor of its habitual lord and is willing to pay the price. Mrs Moledy puts down John James's attempt to resist the implication that he is prostituting himself by sitting up in bed and declaring there is no interest to be paid on her money—the real interest being paid is exposed in the falling of the bedclothes from her upper-body. Mrs Moledy's burlesque wedding with John James is a financial union consummated at the garden party and confirmed on the altar of her bed:

The apologies that had been written down poured again from her lips. She would kneel before him if he required it…. He attempted to count the banknotes into her hands, so that there could be no argument afterwards. He tried to be exact and businesslike, but the notes dropped to the floor and he was obliged to go down on his hands and knees to retrieve them…. She sprinkled eau de Cologne on to her sheets, telling him not to be silly when he shook his head.

Sex, money, and politics—the triumvirate of power blend happily in the fruitless mutual bondage of John James and Mrs Moledy. Finally, Mrs Moledy's visit to the garden party—a Trollopean farce—is yet another counterpart to the erection of the bridge and to Cornelius Dowley's return visit to Carriglas: the uninvited wedding guest brings money to support her Ascendancy lover; the heroic ambusher brings a bomb to destroy his Ascendancy suitor. The connections of murder and of marriage equally wreak havoc in the social body of the ruling class.

The deeper issue informing the dominant wedding motif is the act of touching. The central figure of the novel is a boy who learns to eschew marriage and whose learning experience embodies the controlling issue of the book. Tom is taught by the Catholic establishment that he, born tragically out of wedlock, is a marginal member of society, even of the human race. Holy Mullihan repeatedly instructs Tom about the evils of carnal lust and makes Tom feel that he is the morally blighted fruit of deadly sin. Tom experiences his peculiar innate guilt primarily in terms of touching; most of the Catholic community are afraid to touch the boy, as if his flesh were contaminated with the heinous sin of his origin. When Tom happens to observe what he believes to be a near counterpart to his own conception, he adds another aspect to his understanding of the taboo of sexual touching—he sees that it includes an element of torment, even violence.

'God, you'd torment a man!' Briscoe, the bank porter, was there with the girl from Renehan's who'd told Tom she said prayers for him. They were lying on the grass by one of the tumbled-down walls, Briscoe with his jacket off…. All the time he was continuing to pull at her skirt and she was trying to stop him, even though she had one arm round his neck…. 'God, you have the fine legs,' he said, his voice thickly slurred, like Drunk Paddy's when he was shouting at the seagulls. 'God, you're great!'… She covered herself. She sat up on the grass, buttoning her blouse…. 'You're a right bitch,' Briscoe shouted at the girl…. 'A right little convent whore!' Briscoe's voice shouted, and in the same rough voice he swore at the girl, calling her names Tom thought only the boys at the Christian Brothers' used.

Briscoe's unconscious deification of the sexual tormentor passes without comment in Tom's thoughts. The inherent sadism in sexual relationships is less explicitly presented to the boy's emotional imagination in the performance of the Zodiacs. The overt thrill of the act is the titillation of playing with death, but the thrill of ritual violence is equally sexual, as the man blindly outlines the female figure with knives that must not touch her flesh. The knife-throwing act of the Zodiacs is a grim entertainment that mimes the force of destiny. Outlining the body of his wife with twelve knives, the husband performs a symbolic act of sacrifice (recalling Hugh's sacrifice of Villana) which torments without touching. Similarly, Briscoe and the girl from Renehan's torment each other sexually by not consummating their touching, and Ireland's social classes torment each other with the struggle for power and guilt; sexually and politically, everyone is tormented by contingencies. The act of touching in all its forms assumes in the political and religious world of 1931 ominous implications. For the guilt of union, whether sexual or political, stems from the inevitable violence attending it and the consequent violence it engenders. The long train of carnage in Ireland is alike a long train of carnal corruption. Touching is most often the prelude to suffering, whether as sexual torment, political violence, or the burden of ownership—and fertility itself seems to be the vanity of vanities.

The marital garden falls silent with the deaths of the three fruitless children of Carriglas, but in the long preceding generations the unsilent garden has been the scene of human intercourse fallen from grace, the living space of suffering impingement. Mrs Rolleston's dream reveals this deeper reality when she sees the multiple identity of the red-haired boy who is frantically chased across the island:

'That boy was killed at Passchendaele,' Finnamore Balt said, but she contradicted that, reminding him that it was Villana's father who had been killed at Passchendaele. 'Then he was killed on your avenue,' Finnamore Balt said, but she knew that was wrong also. 'Mr Balt asked me to marry him,' Brigid said, looking up from the bread she was making, her face delighted in the kitchen.

In the garden of Carriglas the players in the human comedy are interchangeable, finally identical all modes of interhuman connection—killing and marrying, crossing and touching, amount to the same breach of silence, the same suffering entanglement marked by the emblematic trees of the Irish Big House.

The central theme of touching acquires additional focus and intensity through the stylistic prominence of the word cross (as verb, adjective, noun) and its derivatives in the diction of the novel. The crossing motif embraces a multitude of meanings, all of which reinforce a core element in Trevor's vision of the human condition. Some examples: The expression for being angry or annoyed is invariably "cross", as when Mrs Moledy urges John James not to be "a crosspatch" or when she accuses him of being "cross about that bridge." The bridge itself is described as a "criss-cross of girders"—thus resembling the monkey puzzle—and the most illustrious exploit of the man it is named after was the ambush at Lahane crossroads. In her last moment alone before beginning married life, Villana crosses her legs while sitting on her bed, suggesting that her personal cross is to be a fruitless marriage. Throughout the novel the overall effect of the blended implications of crossing—transition, confusion, thwartedness, anger, piety, suffering, and crucifixion—is to suggest a world in need of purgation, a world in the throes of self-punishment. Tom learns from Holy Mullihan that his very existence is an act of blasphemy, as if his mother had walked up to "the Cross" and spit on the Savior. If, in consequence, people "cross a street" to avoid coming near him, Tom "crosses" to Mrs Rolleston's bedside and receives her kiss. Tom's crossed life in Catholic society, his status as an "untouchable" among his own people, is redeemed by the Rolleston cross of responsible self-sacrifice: Mrs Rolleston's kiss of moral adoption betokens Tom's inheritance of the estate.

John James's dominion over Carriglas thus devolves upon the servant king Tom. Like the Old Adam, John James has fallen from his first estate, having traded his birthright for the itinerant kingship of the Rose of Tralee. But Carriglas will be redeemed and transfigured through the humility of the New Adam, the Suffering Servant. Often called "the gate-lodge boy" by the Rollestons, Tom's life represents the space of ritual passage, the sacred space of birth and death for the Big House. Tom suffers for the guilt of the House and of the country, and, gentle as a Iamb, his life puts an end to the thread of carnage and carnality. Tom's story is the quest of an innocent to understand the prejudice directed against him. With a character free from resentment, bitterness, and hatred toward his tormentors, his path is a pilgrim's progress to secular hermitage; drawing more than Catholic piety from touching the holy clay of the hermit's well, Tom there communes with the symbol of his own deeper self and his own destiny. Only the passive humility of the atoning hero, who knows neither rebellion nor self-pity, can ultimately overcome the fanatic influence of the populist hero, Cornelius Dowley, whose fame is forged of cruelty, bitterness, and vengeance. For Tom it is enough to be pleased that "Lashaway", the horse he placed his money on, wins when he knew it would; the amount of the win is as unimportant as the bronze plate, dulled by time, honoring his violent antagonist.

The safest route of escape from the damning contingencies of power and sexuality is that of abstinence. Tom and the three Rolleston children choose to live in sterile relationships that lead away from the multiplication of contingencies and back to the garden that is silent. Rejection of estates, powers, and dominions—with their attendant guilt—also leads to the withdrawal of man from nature; the island that is shaped like a snail outlasts the passing gardens on its back, perhaps in time devouring them. The alternative to sinful touching that Tom finds most attractive is not the holy sacrament of matrimony but rather the safe haven of the confirmed bachelor.

'I'll tell you one thing,' the ferryman was saying on the ferry when. Tom climbed on to it. 'Ireland was always famous for its bachelors.'

All celibates, religious and secular, prefer ferries to bridges, prefer living in a silent garden. Tom's spiritual exercises at the well and his forced education in the taboo of touching lead him to reject the prospect of wedding fertile Esmeralda Coyne (one of eleven daughters) and to affirm his own kind of no-touch "marriage" with Patty: Tom saves Carriglas from meretricious resurrection as a hotel and confirms the silencing of all sorrows' source, the peaceful end of all touching and all crossing. Having been constantly enjoined by a concerned Catholic community to touch the holy clay, Tom unites himself with the "green rock" of Ireland in a kind of contemplative hermitage that rejects commercial renewal and allows instead the garden wilderness to renew its primal silence. For Tom's "bewilderment" at the awesome self-inflicted punishment of the House of Rolleston is the soul's counterpart for the literal be-wild-erment of Carriglas, that deceptively named "green rock" of Ireland, for which fertility must be a miracle of grace, given the crossed nature of man. In his humility, the Suffering Servant is exalted by the divine paradox of grace—like "the green rock".