Love and Summer

by William Trevor

(Viking, €18.99)

Valerie Lawlor

Once again, in his 82nd year and on his 14th novel, William Trevor is on the familiar ground of provincial Ireland and the lives of quiet desperation or contentment - the distinction is rarely clear cut - of its ''little people''.

''Nothing happened in Rathmoyle, its people said, but most of them went on living there'': this time however, it is not an author writing at the height of his powers.

The scene is a dusty Irish town, Rathmoyle, in the 1950s - ''some years after the middle of the last century''. It seems as if the smallness of the locale, and of the vision of its inhabitants as it is represented, allow Trevor remarkable liberties with this text.

The cast of characters - the foundling Ellie Dillahan, her lover Florian Kilderry, the bitter spinster Miss Connulty and her brother John Paul and the local historian Orpen Wren - are oddly named, and the manner in which their lives are intertwined is implausible.

Typically, Trevor sets his novels in rural England and the descriptions of the Irish countryside do not feel authentic. For such a small place, where lives are immutably staid, these people have experienced a soap opera of tragedy, from a teenage pregnancy, the product of an affair with a married man that ends in an illegal abortion, to the tragic death of a wife and child, in which the husband is culpable, to the arranged marriage of a foundling, each of which acts like ''something nasty in the woodshed'' - an overhanging menace to be referenced as a shortcut in dialogue.

The big themes that are notionally explored - the meaning of love as against desire; the impossibility of escape, from self or place; degrees of sadness - outweigh the slightness of this novel (which is more a novella in length at just 200-odd pages of big print) and its characters.

Trevor has been justifiably garlanded for his prose style, which at its best is lyrical and brooding, sublime. On this occasion however it borders on parody and is over written. In reaching for rhythm in language, a style that is naturally spare and chiselled becomes self-consciously arch - ''He would go and that we was gone would be her first thought every morning, as her first thought now was that he was here''.

This is an elegant novel, but it does not succeed at the higher levels of art to which Trevor would, and typically, does aspire.

(A paperback edition from Penguin Ireland will be available in the shops after May 6 at €9.85)