Tales of Lovers and Haters

FOOLS OF FORTUNE by William Trevor; Viking; 239 pages; $13.95 THE STORIES OF WILLIAM TREVOR; Penguin; 799 pages; $12.95

The winners celebrate the past as history; the losers mourn it as fate. Anglo-Irish Author William Trevor is familiar with both perspectives, although he understands as well as any contemporary writer that the defeated, the shelved and the slightly batty make better fiction: the lonely duffers in The Old Boys (1964); the washed-up crew of residents in The Boarding House (1965); Lady Dolores, the antiadultery crusader of The Love Department (1966). Trevor's characters are not underdogs in any social or political sense. They can be obtuse, thoughtless, silly and casually cruel. His style, fully displayed in this complete collection of his short stories and a new novel, is formal and astringent, though never arch.

Trevor, 55, was born and raised in Ireland, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and currently lives in Devonshire in southwest England. He is a close observer of the unexceptional: businessmen of Cork, aging maidens from the provinces, London office workers and suburban matrons. They are mostly people who are meeting or avoiding their responsibilities with only an occasional glimpse of their destinies. Trevor has a soft spot for the elderly, like the dapper old soldier in The General's Day who attempts to pick up a younger woman only to learn, at the moment his hand brushes her knee, that he never was a serious contender.

There is an honor in the general's ailed sortie that cannot be found in the easy conquests of Angels at the Ritz, a tale exploring the limits of suburban society and marital entropy. A husband returns o a spouse-swapping party after taking his wife home. Her subdued reaction con-ains the author's gloomy assessment of the situation, if not of the entire age of affluence and permissiveness. "The outer suburb was what it was, so was the shell of middle age; she didn't complain because it would be silly to complain when you were fed and clothed and comfortable, when your children were cared for and warm, when you were loved and respected."

Trevor has not missed the comic side of the sexual revolution. Lovers of Their Time finds a travel-agency clerk and a shop girl meeting daily in an unused hall bathroom of a commercial hotel. It is an ample facility where the couple picnic, frolic in the tub and plan their future before catching the train home: she to her mother, he to a randy wife. Tristram and Isolde as commuters in a tiled cave of love is an entertaining conception. Trevor does more; he dignifies the lovers with a deep understanding of their passions and the mundane force that must inevitably cool them.

A far darker side of his art lies just beneath the manners, habits of class and self-conscious respectability that provide the surface tension for most of his stories. Generally, what is amusing in the author's England can turn ugly in Ireland (both north and south), where bitter years and an unfinished present conspire to drive people mad. The elderly schoolteacher in Attracta cannot help sharing with her pupils the goriest details of the latest Belfast atrocity: I.R.A. terrorists mailed the head of a British officer to his wife, who joined the Women's Peace Movement and was later raped by the men who had killed her husband. The children in the class are more confused than appalled; the teacher's superior politely suggests that she has reached the age of retirement. In a similar tale, a woman refuses to keep silent about another Protestant-Catholic bloodletting. Her embarrassed companions believe she is overwrought and exaggerating.

The curse of Cassandra--to speak terrible truths but not to be believed--is a burden of Fools of Fortune. Trevor's ninth and most despairing novel covers half a century of Irish troubles. One of the characters even loses the gift of speech. She is the daughter of an Irish father and an English mother whose forced separation suggests the rift between their closely related countries. The child, Imelda, is even more symbolic of the price exacted by violence and hatred. Rendered mute and autistic by horror, she is a pathetic representative of the past, present and future. Says her father, Willie Quinton: "It happens sometimes that the insane are taken to be saints of a kind. Legends in Ireland are born almost every day."

The power of these legends is inescapable in Trevor's novel. Michael Collins, the semimythic leader of the Sinn Fein, appears as an occasional guest at the Quinton house, which the Black and Tans burn in 1918 after massacring Willie's father and sisters. The boy grows up to nurse an alcoholic mother, love an English cousin, avenge his father's murder and flee Ire-and. Characteristically, Trevor's women remain home to bear fevered witness and carry the seeds of further disaster.

Fools of Fortune unfolds with the inevitability of Attic drama. The elegiac chapters and the grieving mood are expertly drawn, though dolefully unchanging. Similarly, the characters have perfect tragic pitch but limited range. They are, as Trevor obviously intended, ghostly creations speaking beyond pasion and hope. --By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Water dripped beside her, --and Imelda watched it falling on to stones and plaster. She searched in her mind for the poetry but she could not remember the order of the words. She closed her eyes and in the room above the vegetable shop blood spurted in a torrent, splashing on to the wallpaper that was torn and hung loosely down. The blood was sticky, running over the backs of her hands and splashing on to her hair. It soaked through her clothes, warm when it reached her skin.

Imelda pressed her face into the nettles and did not feel their stinging. She pressed her fists into her ears. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could.

But nothing went away." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.