A man of immense technical experience in writing suggested to me the other day that authors frequently get flat because, in the desire to be industrious, they go on with their work after the divine (or devilish) afflatus has weakened through inspirational fatigue. I think this is true. A good rule for novelists is forcibly to stop the day's work while the impulse to proceed is still powerful. If this rule were observed we should have shorter and more concentrated books, and better books.
A writer who may already have adopted this approach is the Anglo-Irishman William Trevor. Two of his short novels have come my way and I read both, with pleasure, in three days. "The Old Boys" which I understand to be Trevor's first novel is almost a comic novel. It deals with the memories and machinations of a committee of elderly old boys of a minor public school. My favourite character, who has all the best lines, is the wife of the prospective new chairman. "The Silence in the Garden" is set in Ireland, having to do with the decline of a landed family and their island estate, set against the background of Irish civil war and independence. Both novels are to do with loss, the unreliability of memory, failed ambition, and uncertain motivation. Each requires the reader to involve himself in the characters in order to piece together the "real" story. Trevor is enviably good at managing a large cast of characters. He is best known for his short stories, and these two novels are more or less expanded short stories but no worse for that. I for one, was sorry to get to the end, especially of "The Silence in the Garden".I have on my desk as I write a copy of Mrs. Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". You cannot keep your end up at a London dinner-party in these weeks unless you have read it; my end has decidedly not been kept up. I have succeeded for nearly a fortnight in not reading it - partly from obstinacy, partly from a sense of foreboding, and mainly from a natural desire for altercation at table about what ought to be read. However I undertake to read it this week and shall report thereon in my next column.
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