William Trevor

Next week we will mark William Trevor Cox's 80th birthday with a tour and talk (Monday 19th, from 7pm, full details here).

Meanwhile, VI former Lewis Mathews, who will shortly be tackling his Leaving Certificate, has written an essay on two of Trevor's books based on schools : the early novel The Old Boys, and the Old School Ties, a 1970s collection of fictional and autobiographical pieces (now out of print) :-

I enormously enjoyed reading The Old Boys. Although one could use words such as mordant, gruesome or disturbing to describe the novel I found myself at times hysterical, driven to laughter by Trevor’s black humour. Whatever you say about this book, it is funny, albeit in the darkest of ways. As in the Ivy Compton-Burnett novels that Trevor is alleged to have perused when writing The Old Boys, a large amount of the humour comes from the characters talking to each other with exaggerated formality in hilarious dialogues.

Read Lewis's full essay here.