Love and Summer: A Novel

Usually books about Ireland and its people are among my favorites. I wasn’t crazy about LOVE AND SUMMER at all. I found it boring, hard to follow and haltingly written. I am clearly in the minority based on the rave reviews others have bestowed, and I’m thinking there must be something wrong with me for not loving this book. Bottom line is I just didn’t get it. The storyline seemed so implausible to me because the author didn’t develop the characters well enough. I didn’t give a hoot what happened to any of them. I have to admit there were some beautifully crafted passages throughout the book, but they didn’t seem to move the story along in any logical manner. Seems they were just thrown in at random while the author decided which way he was going to move his characters next.

It was a relatively short story that didn’t take a huge bite out of my limited summer reading time, so that was a plus. This book may be one of those that if I were to read at a different time in my life, or was in a more pensive state of mind I may have really savored. But right now it isn’t a book that I could, in good faith, recommend to anyone looking for a captivating story about love or summer.
Rating: 2 / 5
Love and Summer: A Novel

It is uncanny–reading this elegiac story, I felt the presence of Pink Floyd’s song, “The Great Gig in the Sky,” but softly, muted, until the very last pages, when the last strains of the song enveloped me fully. One masterpiece informing another. This may not be true for William Trevor, and the postmodern Dark Side of the Moon album is not the story of Love and Summer. However, there it was, that song, accompanying me all the way through this delicately exquisite book. (In retrospect, other songs from the album share chords of ethereal, lyrical beauty with this slim novel.)

Some books demand a quiet, secluded environment to fully engage the reader. This is one of them. I highly recommend that you lower the surrounding stimuli so that this book is the center of the hush all around you. I sat peacefully alone, caressed by a soft wind and the notes of that song in my head. The story, which takes place in the mid-twentieth century, in a provincial town in Ireland, unfolds slowly and gracefully. There is a sublime stillness, as it takes root gradually, almost imperceptibly. As you work your way toward the denouement, it becomes like a magnet that pulls you closer and closer to the ineluctable finish. Your full attention to the subdued elements of the story allows greater poignancy to seep through the cracks of what is present to what the present gives rise to, if that makes any sense. A simple, parochial town appears ordinary and the quotidian events that Trevor writes about aren’t splashy. Nothing much happens. So it seems. But with Trevor’s masterful strokes of juxtaposition and gentle, adroit character development, he turns a snapshot into portraiture.

The opening pages set the sober tone, as you are conveyed to the funeral of the town matriarch, Eileen Connulty. Hidden behind a car, a young and jaunty looking photographer, Florian Kilderry, who had originally come to photograph the burnt out cinema, is covertly snapping pictures. No one but Ellie Dillahan has witnessed him doing this. Ellie, the wife of a man with a tragic past, had been rescued from an orphanage years ago by her now-husband and keeps counsel with her own past hardships. Along with some very colorful characters in the town, the last to leave the procession is an old, seemingly crazy man, Orpen Wren, whose vexatious presence will loom importantly as the story progresses. (As a side note, I suspect that Orpen Wren is an anagram, but I can’t figure out the word(s) that it would be!)

The prose is poetic, polished, seasoned. It felt like a tender current with susurrus, lapping waves. As the taciturn Florian becomes involved with Ellie, however, it upsets the balance of the town and we sense a slipstream in the narrative flow. In the final forty or so bracing pages, I was gripped, astonished, literally clutching myself. I may have let loose a moan as the town of Rathmoye inhabited me quite wholly. Then the final notes of “The Great Gig in the Sky” seeped out of my memory chamber and caterwauled in my heart. The story continues to echo; it is the kind of book that languorously fastens you to it and leaves a permanent print. Love and Summer requires a cultivated, literary patience; for that, you will be deeply rewarded.

Rating: 5 / 5
Love and Summer: A Novel

William Trevor may be “Exhibit A” in support of the case that octogenarians can still produce fine literature. Love and Summer is a polished gem.

The story is set in the Irish provincial area around the fictional town of Rathmoye in the 1950s. It begins with the funeral of Eileen Connulty, a prominent businesswoman in the town, whose middle-aged daughter, “Miss” Connulty, and son, Joseph Paul Connulty, carry on after her. A young man, Florian Kilderry, happens into town at the time and has a chance encounter with a young farm wife, Ellie Dillahan.

After only a few conversations Ellie realizes that she loves Florian, and Florian soon detects that she does. Ellie was an orphan, brought from a foundling home to serve as Dillahan’s housekeeper, becoming his wife after a few years. One can sense right away that there may be painful consequences if her relationship with Florian proceeds. Florian is an un-channeled young man, admirable in certain respects, but sometimes insensitive to the possible repercussions of his actions.

The past imposes. We eventually learn of critical incidents suffered by Dillahan and by Miss Connulty, for example. Another local character that will influence the action, Orpen Wren, lives in a delusional world, built around an appointment he had long ago to catalog a leading family’s library in a home that has long sense decayed. Florian’s once fine home (Shelhangh), where he was content as a child, has become run-down as well and laden with debts, and he has put it up for sale. He disposes of his past as he shuts it down, tossing, giving away, or burning whatever cannot be sold, including accomplished watercolors painted by his deceased parents. He retains his memories of his cousin Isabella, who visited Shelhangh during summers and whom he loved.

Trevor’s narrative is like a musical composition where the pauses and silences are as integral to the effect as the notes themselves. He does not immediately tell us everything that we might want to know, leaving us to make inferences from partial information. Yet he also provides copious details to convey a palpable sense of the time and place, including, for instance, product brand names (items on the shelves of the Cash and Carry, bicycles, and autos, for example), descriptions of the step-by-step tasks involved in certain farm chores, or the menu of meals taken by the guests in the Connulty public house. It is in large part via the Connulty’s that we gain a sense of the provincial social atmosphere.

Trevor’s often very simple descriptions enable us to readily visualize (and at times smell or feel) each scene. The images sometimes have symbolic import for the narrative as well: for instance, when Florian was telling Ellie about his plans to sell his house and to leave Ireland, he “watched a jet plane trailing its ribbon of white against the washed-out paleness of the sky. He watched the white evaporating, the last of its shreds falling apart.” Parts of this novel might have been written by a painter (like Florian’s parents) or a photographer (which Florian tried himself).

Not all readers may be satisfied with the story’s resolution. I was, but I suspect Trevor is aware that many may have preferred a different outcome.
Rating: 5 / 5
Love and Summer: A Novel