The Children of Dynmouth (1976)

The great William Trevor passed away this week. I have long so admired his writing and he leaves us with some of the most entrancing works in our language. He was widely known for his short stories, surely one of the century's great craftsmen of this genre. His novels are similarly jewels of writing. A short time ago I purchased from one of the remainder websites a set of Penguin reprints of his early novels none of which I had read before except the marvelous novella "Nights at the Alexandra". That work was actually the first of his I read years ago and was completely captivated by his extraordinarily luminous and supple prose.

The "Children of Dynmouth" follows a motif seen in many of his works. Dynmouth is a rather ordinary sea side resort town inhabited by unremarkable people. There is Quentin Featherston, the vicar, and his wife Lavinia. He is struggling with a declining congregation and she from the despondency of a recent miscarriage. Commodore Abigail and his wife live quietly in retirement, having long ago worked out a functional pattern of marital relationship. The Dass's are likewise, he retired from banking and she an invalid. Mr. Plant operates the local pub. Step-siblings Stephen and Kate are twelve-years old who have just come to live together when his widowed father and her divorced mother wed.

Into this fairly placid setting emerges Timothy Gedge. Timothy is fifteen-years old, the son of a mother whose husband abandoned the family and with an older sister. His family pretty much ignores Timothy who is free to roam the town without supervision or question. Timothy is an odd and lonely boy who has gotten the notion that he can become famous by staging a morbid comedy sketch at the upcoming fund raising talent show sponsored by the church. He fantasizes that the host of a national TV show somehow will see his act and propel him to stardom. To put on his performance, he needs certain props that others can provide -- a derelict bathtub, a suit of clothes, a wedding dress and curtains for the stage. Timothy has a manner of cheerfully and unrelentingly attempting to ingratiate himself to others and he uses this to worm his way into the lives of those whose help he needs. They all perceive him as a pest, but Timothy is a snoop who claims awareness of the secrets of others and hints that he will remain discreet if only they will help him get what he needs for his act. While giving the appearance of amiability and good will he torments others in the most vicious and destructive manner conceivable. In modern typology Timothy would clearly be consider sociopathic. The subjects of his manipulations are devastated by his claims to hold their secrets, some of which have a basis in truth and others false.

Without revealing the secrets or the denouement, Timothy's fantasy is not realized, but the others are left permanently affected by his interactions with them. As is often seen in Trevor's stories, beneath the calm and benign surface of people's lives lay angst, turmoil and shame.

William Trevor, you will be greatly missed. ( )

Fifteen year old Tim spies on the people of the small seaside town of Dynmouth, and uses the information to "blackmail" them into giving him what he wants--in this case a tin bath, a wedding dress, and a man's suit. He needs these props to use in a gruesomely inappropriate comedy skit he intends to put on at the town talent show. Tim lives in a fanatasy world, and imagines he will be discovered by a famous talent scout at the show, and become rich and famous.
In Tim, Trevor has created an immensely creepy character, but also a very sad character. Trevor is so skillful, that I was never quite sure whether Tim was totally evil, intelligent and deliberatively manipulative, or whether he was simply dull-witted and clueless (though monomaniacal) about what he was doing. Excellent book. ( )

The children of Dynmouth by William Trevor was originally published in 1976. The atmosphere in the novel is brooding and spooky, and the reader's ideas about the main character, Timothy Gedge, slide from sympathy to disgust.

The setting is a small-sized British town, a community which, while there is still some traditional social cohesion, mainly provided by the church, is disintegrating, and in which the first indications of a rebellious youth culture are emerging. Features of that youth culture would be a lack of respect for the elder generation, though still largely covert, and the urge to take initiative, and experiment with in what ways and how far conventional borders can be crossed.

The character of Timothy is gradually revealed as highly manipulative. His insistence to deliberately irritate and terrorize people to get his way is frightening, and his "creative" ideas, seemingly innocent and funny at first, turn increasingly sinister.

While to most adults Timothy is mainly a major pain in the neck, in the imagination of the children of Dynmouth he is a veritable devil. To them the horror is real.

The children of Dynmouth was reissued by Penguin Books in the last quarter of 2011 in their series "Penguin Decades", as a novel representative of the 70s. ( )