Thaddeus is hopeless: well-bred, vague and certainly ineffectual until a late marriage to money provides him with the backing to sustain his graceful if shabby old childhood home, Quincunx House. No one could possibly spare too much sympathy for this non-person. Even after becoming a widower father of a small infant, his Old World privilege impresses only a young girl. Few writers are as in control of subtle cruelty as William Trevor. His new novel, Death in Summer (Viking, £15.99 in UK), may seem to be more of the same, but therein lies the undisputed genius of an imagination which has consistently returned to familiar themes only to twist them ever so slightly into a new shape.
This new novel opens after the funeral of a wife described as "good", "the word he himself gave to a clergyman he has known all his life". Thaddeus is introduced as remote and remains so. "Inheritor of a property set in the flatlands of Essex, he has been solitary even in marriage." It is obvious the union was not passionate; Trevor refers to Thaddeus cultivating "hellebores people would come to see if they knew about them". The dead wife, Letitia, "a person of almost wayward generosity", lived most of her life at a remove. Following her father's departure for a nursing home, Letitia and her mother settled into a quiet routine in a spacious Regent's Park flat. She "did not think much about marriage, since there had never been a reason to until Thaddeus came into her life".
Social class is their common bond - that, and money: he needs it, she can supply it. Letitia, a determined collector of lost causes, is so impossibly good she argues with her husband because of his reluctance to send some money to a former lady friend of his. The clash is overheard by the house servants, a childless couple who do not so much live together as co-exist, abiding by their respective codes of behaviour. Zenobia listens to private conversations, while her grim-faced spouse reads his master's post.
Tragedy enters this claustrophobic world when Letitia is hit by a car while riding her bike down a country lane. Far more pressing for Thaddeus than the loss of the wife he didn't love is the need to find a nanny to tend the infant Letitia left behind. Watched by a mother-in-law who never greatly approved of him, Thaddeus sets out to interview prospective employees. The grandmother takes over. None of the applicants is suitable, so it is decided she will tend her dead daughter's baby. All of this seems very straightforward. Set against the backdrop of an old house and its history - "There have been thirty-one births and nineteen deaths in the house, swathed infants carried for christening to the church of St Nicholas, the dead conveyed for burial by black-plumed horse, and motor-hearses later" - the story displays Trevor's deftness as he handles the tensions between Thaddeus and his mother-in-law.
To one of the young girls in need of a job this tense household is paradise. Each detail, even the picture painted on the floor of the nursery, represents a romantic paradise to her. Much of the narrative is written in an urgent present tense. Clues are presented, discoveries are made. Juxtaposed against the world of genteel wealth prevailing in Quincunx House is the poverty and grim past of young Pettie, who arrives for her job interview with forged references. Her story is told through two perspectives, the way it was and the way she would have liked it to be. Fantasy is her preferred existence; Pettie has had a hard life and her delusions are dangerous.
It seems the most unlikely of narratives to draw on the devices of the detective novel, yet it does - indeed, one of the characters reads detective novels. Trevor himself pays immense attention to detail; characters are minutely described, the most irrelevant item is carefully observed. In Felicia's Journey (1994) he entered an underworld of small crime. Pettie and her pal Albert are not criminals, they are victims of their childhoods. Yet whereas Albert, a natural worrier, has battled to better himself - and eventually achieves his ambition of joining the Salvation Army - Pettie only finds happiness in a dream world of romance. This has led her through a series of bizarre, onesided fantasies featuring singularly unsuitable men.
Flashbacks, careful nuances and vivid set-pieces dominate Trevor's approach to his narrative, which is cryptic and episodic. The worlds described in it are vastly contrasting. While Pettie is fascinated by Thaddeus's life, he can barely understand even the language she uses. He is polite to her but baffled. His mother-in-law is more direct: she does not want to know anything about such people.
Pettie's response to not getting the job is a gesture of revenge which is true to logic as she sees it. The contrasts which slowly take over the book are as much a weakness as a strength. Trevor proves that he can handle suspense, yet the frequent linguistic gear shifts between the stiff formal language of the big house, undercut by the snobbery of the servants, and the bitterly wistful street argot of Albert and Pettie, at times leave the book feeling slightly disjointed - a sensation which is intended.
Nothing is left to chance here. It is no coincidence that Thaddeus's seedy early romance led him into the very world he now seems so distant from.
Trevor has fashioned a small book out of a large collection of details. There is no doubt he is a natural short-story writer who happens to write novels, rather than a novelist who enjoys short stories. Each of the characters in Death in Summer, even Mrs Ferry, has a story to tell. The randomness of life itself and the large role played by the incidental has been cleverly recruited here. Time and again, William Trevor's quiet mastery leaves one wondering at the level of skill with which he examines human nature. He is unique, consistently making the ordinary and familiar new and shocking. In this novel of victims and misfits no one earns our sympathy. That is not unusual. Trevor's characters rarely prove sympathetic. The genius lies in the shrewd observation, the relentless wisdom and the brutal sadness.
