William Trevor's characters would be perfectly content to lead decorous, uneventful lives. They work in shops or offices, attend bridge socials and lawn parties, quietly raise quiet families in London or the Irish countryside. Yet calm eludes them. Unbidden and inevitable as physics or original sin, the past catches them up, impartial History tracing out consequences. Each of the dozen stories in Beyond the Pale, Trevor's fifth collection, gauges some repercussion of past on present. Small ones, mostly—remembered indiscretions, hints of family secrets—or larger ones muffled by distance, specifically the continuing war in Ireland. As brute facts intrude, Trevor's characters struggle to stay unruffled, because in their daily round civility equals sanity. They're forced to shift their internal balance of acceptance, forgetfulness, apology, and rationalization. Trevor at his best neither glorifies nor minimizes the struggle; without judging, he illuminates it life-sized.

The stories register flickers of emotion an EKG would miss: tacit pressures, unstated private bargains, suppressed passions. The best story, "Downstairs at Fitzgerald's," shows Cecilia turning 13 and starting to sort out the fallibility of adults. Her divorced, remarried mother fascinates Cecilia's schoolmates…. [One of them] suggests to Cecilia that she actually resembles her stepfather, and at a post-birthday lunch she begins to realize that her father has become a horseplayer since the divorce. With matter-of-fact tenderness, Trevor captures puberty's disconnection and disillusion: "It would be ridiculous, now, ever to look after him in his flat."

Trevor's female characters are more vivid than his males, perhaps mirroring a culture in which women feel while men act. "Mulvihill's Memorial," set in an old-line ad agency, winds up with a flippant O. Henry twist that chokes off empathy. More telling, and more open-ended, are "Paradise Lounge," in which an aged spinster and a young adulteress envy each other, and "Being Stolen From," in which Bridget, whose husband has left her, is asked to return the child she'd adopted to its now-married mother. Eventually, "weeping without making a noise," Bridget accepts the prospect. "She belonged with her accumulated odds and ends, as Betty belonged with her mother, and Liam with the woman he loved." Trevor's elegiac understatement makes the smallest actions revelatory.

Reticence serves Trevor well; his least dramatic stories are his most convincing. Oddly, he overshoots in "Beyond the Pale" itself. At a gracious Irish hotel far from the "troubles," an English foursome—R. B. and Cynthia Strafe, R. B.'s school chum Dekko, and R. B.'s secret mistress Milly—are taking their yearly vacation. A lone man shows up and kills himself, after confiding to Cynthia, a history buff given to melodrama, that he'd just murdered an ex-girlfriend who had been making IRA bombs in London. Cynthia then shakes up the hotel by speechifying about atrocities and publicly denouncing her companions. Trevor's themes—decorum as necessary hypocrisy, history taking its toll, unquiet Ireland—are hammered home but cheapened by overstatement. In fact, while none of the other stories in Beyond the Pale is quite so strident, the collection as a whole is diminished because Trevor uses death so frequently as a clarifier. (Lovers of Their Time makes a better introduction to Trevor's short stories.) Individually, however, stories in Beyond the Pale can stand with the finest, and most finely tuned, domestic chronicles in print. (pp. 54-5)