The Light of Day, My House in Umbria and A Game of Hide and Seek

Although "The Light of Day" takes place "over the course of a single day" (as suggested by the back cover of my paperback), it is in fact actually about another day that is told in hindsight. In fact the many glimpses of the past are expertly and satisfyingly written. The prose is easy to read and flows from the page. Sometimes obtuse, it is always engaging. I love those short sentences starting on the first page:
"She's here before me, of course. When isn't she? She doesn't sleep these days, she says. "These days" have lasted years. Always awake at dawn, so why not? Always something to be done. And I pitch up after her. Boss's privilege".

Two separate passages describe the following of a car - Lillie Road, Fulham Palace Road take me back to my childhood, and the Hammersmith roundabout to my first ever driving lesson. What a place to start! I was waiting for a big reveal at the end, but it is so delicately written, I almost missed it.      

     

A short novel from one of my favourite authors, but at the same time delicate and devastating. Written by William Trevor nearly thirty years ago, Mrs Delahunty is haunted both by her traumatic past and even more traumatic recent event. In middle age she tells us about the repercussions of the latter but only dips into her early life which would make an even better story.
It is her house in Umbria that takes in a small number of tourists before the outrage and survivors afterwards. We have huge sympathy for her, but as the story progresses, we find her attitude harder to accept. Trevor pulls no punches in his beautiful prose. It is the writing that saves a tragic tale.         

 I didn't enjoy this book as much as I had some others from Elizabeth Taylor. I still loved her dialogue, and she can get right to the heart of her characters. However some of her writing, whilst not entirely obscure, is sometimes too elaborate, even though this is her style. Early on when Harriet and Vesey are still young:

"His personality had long influenced hers, as the moon influences the sea, with an unremitting, inescapable control. Her mother had seen that influence and thought it not always for good." And later together:
"She wished that they might never stop; believed that they might not; for time, with it's dwindling, filching ways, seemed triumphed-over. They were suspended in some magic which caught up also, meaninglessly, gilt baskets of azaleas, some paper streamers and a great chandelier like a shower of grubby acid-drops. Remotely, the figures of other people drifted at the perimeter of their enchanted space of floor. They dictated their own music."

It was worth sticking with the slow parts of the book as threequarters through Vesey and Harriet meet again after many years and for one brilliant chapter they remember moments from their youth. It was just that some judicial editing might have made this book exceptional.