From Joyce to William Trevor : Elegies for Ireland

Of course the influence of Joyce is everywhere in William Trevor's "Selected Stories," probably most pervasive in Of the Cloth, a story about a Protestant minister who's visited by two Catholic priests after the funeral. Unlike most of Trevor's stories, this one does not turn on a single dramatic incident - an accident, a crime, a a fateful decision - but is more atmospheric and contemplative, developing around an event - a story of mood and reflection, and an elegy for a way of life gone or soon to go: we see in the Protestant minister that his church had faded from relevance (he took over his father's ministry but he has no children) and we see that despite the historic antagonism between the two churches that the men "of the cloth" have more in common with one another than with their parishioners - each has chosen a life that is in the public but strangely private and isolating - and we also see the shadow of scandal over the Catholic church - the unmentioned arrest of a pedophile priest that haunts this visit. Any reader will hear the echoes of The Dead, with its famous conclusion about the snow falling all across Ireland, covering the living and the dead - Trevor evokes this same mood of time passing and people reflecting on the futility of life.