Irish Fiction, Crimes - Fiction

Miss Gomez and the Brethren

Name: Miss Gomez and the Brethren
Author: William Trevor
ISBN: 9780140252644

by William Trevor

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Overview

Beryl Tuke, whiling time away in the Thistle Arms with gin and cheap romances, and Alban Roche at Bassett's Petstore are among the street's dream-ridden survivors. A new arrival, Miss Gomez, lives for her postal correspondence with the Church of the Brethren of the Way in Jamaica. No one will believe Miss Gomez when she announces her revelation of a hideous sex crime soon to be committed in Crow Street. Until Prudence Tuke disappears, the police arrive, and the newspapers herald a 'Sex Crime Prophecy'...

About the Author, William Trevor

William Trevor

Known for moving, haunting novels such as Felicia's Journey and Fools of Fortune, Irish author William Trevor is also known as a master of the short story genre. As the New York Times Book Review noted, Trevor "moves between the short story and the novel; Irish settings and English; the capitalized Troubles of his native land and the personal lowercase ones of his characters." He does so with unwavering skill.

Biography

"William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence," Brooke Adams once wrote in the New York Times Book Review. Hailed by the New Yorker as "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language," Trevor has also written over a dozen acclaimed novels as well as several plays. His characters are often people whose desires have been unfulfilled, and who come to rely on various forms of self-deception and fantasy to make their lives bearable.

Trevor was born in 1928 to a middle-class, Protestant family in Ireland. After graduating from Trinity College with a degree in history, he attempted to carve out a career as a sculptor. He moved to England in 1954 and exhibited his sculptures there; he also wrote his first novel, A Standard of Behavior, which was published in 1958 but met with little critical success. His second novel, The Old Boys, won the 1964 Hawthornden Prize for Literature and marked the beginning of a long and prolific career as a novelist, short-story writer and playwright.

Three of Trevor's novels have won the prestigious Whitbread Novel of the Year Award: The Children of Dynmouth, Fools of Fortune and Felicia's Journey. Felicia's Journey, about a pregnant Irish girl who goes to England to find the lover who abandoned her, was adapted for the screen in 1999 by director Atom Egoyan. Trevor, who has described himself as a short-story writer who enjoys writing novels, has also written such celebrated short stories as "Three People," in which a woman who murdered her disabled sister harbors an unspoken longing for the man who provided her with an alibi, and "The Mourning," about a young man who is pressed by political activists into planting a bomb (both from The Hill Bachelors).

Some critics have noted a change in Trevor's work over the years: his early stories tend to contain comic sketches of England, while his later ones describe Ireland with the elegiac tone of an expatriate. Trevor, who now lives in Devon, England, has suggested that he has something of an outsider's view of both countries. "I feel a sense of freshness when I come back [to Ireland]," he said in a 2000 Irish radio interview. "If I lived in, say, Dungarvan or Skibbereen, I think I wouldn't notice things."

As it stands, Trevor is clearly a writer who notices things, just as one of his characters notices "the glen and the woods and the seashore, the flat rocks where the shrimp pools were, the room she woke up in, the chatter of the hens in the yard, the gobbling of the turkeys, her footsteps the first marks on the sand when she walked to Kilauran to school" (The Story of Lucy Gault). Yet as Trevor told an interviewer for The Irish Times, "You mustn't write about what you know. You must use your imagination. Fiction is an act of the imagination." Trevor's fertile imagination captures, as Alice McDermott wrote in The Atlantic, "the terrible beauty of Ireland's fate, and the fate of us all -- at the mercy of history, circumstance, and the vicissitudes of time."

Good To Know

When Trevor was growing up, he wanted to be a clerk in the Bank of Ireland -- following in the footsteps of his father, James William Cox. Cox's career as a bank manager took the family all over Ireland, and Trevor attended over a dozen different schools before entering Trinity College in Dublin.

Trevor married his college sweetheart, Jane Ryan, in 1952. After the birth of their first son, Trevor worked for a time as an advertising copywriter in London. He also sculpted and worked as an art teacher, but gave up his sculpting after it became "too abstract."

In addition to the 1999 film Felicia's Journey, two other movies have been based on Trevor's works: Fools of Fortune (1990), directed by Pat O'Connor, and Attracta (1983), directed by Kieran Hickey. According to Trevor's agent, the plays Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria are also being adapted for the screen.

Trevor is also the author of several plays, most of which are not in print in the U.S. Works include Scenes from an Album, Marriages, and Autumn Sunshine.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

First published in England in 1971, a rambling novel of lower- middle-class manners that lacks the distinctive qualities of the mature Trevor (After Rain, 1996, etc.). Despite the tell-tale mordant wit, the narrative slogs through an abundance of observed detail, and casts its panoramic eye so widely that it often loses focus.

At the center of this shaggy story is the strange Jamaican woman Miss Gomez, orphaned when she alone survived a fire as a little girl. She eventually ran away from her orphanage, and stayed in Kingston until she got enough money to go to London. Now grown, the long-legged beauty works there as a cleaner until the promise of more money finds her stripping, then hooking. Her unhappy life changes when she discovers a pamphlet from a group back home: The Church of the Brethren of the Way. Unlike the forbidding religion of her youth, The Way promises nothing but forgiveness. Miss Gomez turns from her sinful life and follows a premonition to Crow Street, a desolate area of London that's being torn down for development. Her divinely inspired mission involves the prevention of a sex crime she's convinced will soon happen. With only two buildings inhabited in the neighborhood, there aren't many candidates for her violent scenario, but they do add up to some comic British types. The Thistle Arms houses the Tuke family—a boozy, mean mother, her dog-obsessed husband, and their sweet and pretty daughter, for whom Miss Gomez foresees a sad end. But Alban Roche, her putative abuser, in fact harbors the best of intentions, not revealed until Miss Gomez's hysterical rants have sent some bumbling bobbies and Fleet Street sleazoids into action. Back in Jamaica, Miss Gomez learns the true nature of the religious faith that has inspired her mania, but still never loses her hard-won belief in the power of prayer and Divine Intervention.

Early work, strictly for fans, who are (justifiably) legion.