Fools of Fortune

It seems as though it has been an absolute age since I read Fools of Fortune.  In reality it’s been a couple of weeks and I barely remember a thing about it.  If that doesn’t tell you pretty much everything that you need to know about my feelings on William Trevor’s novel, the fact that I only marked one page as being of interest probably will.  I by no means intend to do the book a disservice here, it is not a bad book (the film version I’ve heard rumours of may be another matter), it is a perfectly okay book.  It does not deserve to be on The List.  While I didn’t suffer for reading it, this is clearly a book that I could have gone my whole life without picking up and been no worse off.  It seems like the kind of thing that you get when you let Peter Ackroyd put books on a list.

Trevor’s book tells the life story of Willie Quinton.  It actually starts off really well.  The Black and Tans are around and there’s a murder and intrigue.  Pretty much everything I know about the Black and Tans comes from one viewing of the film version of The Wind That Shakes The Barley when I was sixteen and most of what I remember about it was Cillian Murphy, so the early part of the book was a bit of a learning curve for me.  When an English spy is found dead in the grounds of local mill owners and general rich-os, the Quintons, suspicions are raised.  The natural course for these suspicions is to start a fire, kill most of the family and leave only a soon to be alcoholic matriarch and young Willie.  The small family then move to Cork where Mrs Quinton drinks and Willie is crept over by his new teacher.  For parts of the book, it’s not really clear whether she’s trying to seduce him or adopt him and these are the best bits.  Children in peril are really just my thing.

The problem with Fools of Fortune is that it doesn’t stay good.  Willie meets and impregnates his cousin and then pisses off to Italy for most of the rest of the book, not giving a damn about his child.  This is where I really take issue with it.  The narrative shifts to pregnant Marianne (and later still to incest-child Imelda) but the story is still Willie’s.  While Trevor gives women their own voices, they are still telling the story of a man.  Early parts of Marianne’s narrative are even written in the second person and directed towards the absent Willie and, while the blurb insists that they were in love, I do not see it.  Marianne is left with the consequences of their actions and her story changes entirely because of it.  Willie is still free to live his Italian escape fantasy.  It could be a really interesting concept, but it’s not one that Trevor choses to explore and so it’s hard to care about Willie when he returns.

And that’s it folks.  An okay book.  Writing about it has actually made me appreciate parts of it a bit more.  Pregnant Marianne trailing around Cork after the ghost of Willie and having no-one tell her where the hell he’s sodded off to is actually a pretty sad image.  Mind you, this is one of those books where everything’s a bit sad if you’re a woman, whether it be being pregnant and abandoned, killed in a fire, or drowning in a bottle, Trevor’s women don’t have it easy in Fools of Fortune and yet, it is still the men in the foreground of the book.

Come back next time for The Lover by Marguerite Duras.  Yes; it’s French.