Those who love literature will be sad to hear of the recent death of the great Irish novelist and short-story writer William Trevor. The Guardian has a warm obituary written by the late Peter Porter .
William Trevor was one of the greats of our time. His book Felicia’s Journey (1994), which won the Whitbread Prize, is an astonishing story shot through with piercing insight, about an Irish girl’s journeying to England, which lays bare the state of Thatcher’s Britain better than anyone else has ever done either before or since. It is not as such a political novel, but rather an existential one, revealing the bleakness of British life, its coldness and alienating quality, set, for the most part, in the Midlands. Setting and characterisation are two things at which Trevor excelled. I read the novel when it first came out, and I can still remember the description of one of the characters who has “pigeon-coloured hair” and lived in a house full of “elaborately framed portraits of strangers.”
