Books: When death descends on hearth and Home

Patricia Craig discovers a very modern tragedy unfolding deep in the shady byways of Esse

Death in Summer

by William Trevor

Viking, pounds 15.99, 224pp

LOSS AND dereliction, the presiding elements of Felicia's Journey in 1994, continue to animate William Trevor's fiction. is no exception, for all its temperate ironies and near-comic conversations. The plot is deceptively simple. In the flatlands of Essex stands a house named Quincnunx. Built in 1896, and recently restored with money acquired through marriage, it is the property of Thaddeus Davenant, a middle-aged man of reticent temperament, whose life is about to undergo some annihilating changes.

First comes the death of Thaddeus's wife Letitia after a footling accident in an Essex lane. Their daughter Georgina, six months old, is left on Thaddeus's unpractised hands. In response to an advertisement, four young women apply for the post of nanny, before Letitia's mother steps into the breach.

The last would-be nanny, and the most ineligible of the lot, succumbs to an idee fixe involving her hoped-for employer. Disaster follows.

Within this narrow framework, Trevor stage-manages a narrative of extraordinary resonance, rich in implications. The encroachment of social ills and abuses, including child abuse, figures in the story, with a home named the Morning Star, now defunct, opposed to Victorian Quincnunx, the solid family home (albeit with its own deprivations). If Thaddeus seems, in a sense, to belong to the past - the decorous Englishman with a taste for faintly comic sexual entanglements - he is surrounded by enough contemporary darkness to keep him from looking altogether anachronistic.

Life, even country-house life, contains new horrors in plenty to oust the sedate homicides of the old- fashioned detective novels favoured by baby Georgina's grandmother.

This is a novel about the destructive power of fantasy, on one level; and on another, about the foundling as a literary trope denuded of its Victorian connotations - the foundling and its opposite, the stolen child. The stolen child has another counterpart in the stolen childhood, of which we get several versions. The rejected nanny, a bespectacled shoplifter going by the name of Pettie, and her friend and protector Albert Luffe, a boy of almost ludicrous goodness, if not quite the full shilling: these two are one-time inmates of the Morning Star Home, and survivors of a crushing regime. In Trevor's hands, they are endowed with wholly individual voices and aspirations - as are even the most minor characters.

Written with all the resources of a sympathetic understanding, eschews moral judgements while engaging to the full in the novelist's business of precipitating a crisis, or series of crises.

It is constructed to ensure that several crucial wheels of plot come full circle, as the first death - Letitia's - is followed by a second, and third. Like its prdecessor, Felicia's Journey, the book goes part of the way along the path of the thriller before veering off into an astringency and virtuosity of its own.

"Compassionate" is the word most frequently used to describe William Trevor's attitude to the world - the world, as Derek Mahon quoted in a poem, being "everything that is the case". Compassion is indeed an ingredient here, along with clear-sightedness and an elegance of diction that is approaching ever more closely to the elegiac.