Warlight is only the second novel by Michael Ondaatje I’ve ever read.  Like millions of others, I loved The English Patient when it was published in 1992 and remember my appreciation of it being deepened by the Oscar-laden film adaption starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche I saw a few years later. Fulsome reviews led me to his newest book.  It’s set in London in the years immediately following the second world war and is narrated by Nathaniel, a boy who, along with his sister, is abandoned mysteriously by his parents and left in the care of a collection of strange, elusive figures.  The care provided, if care it is, is minimal.  Nathaniel abandons school for a menial job in a London hotel and shady, nighttime dealings on London’s rivers and canals, ferrying undocumented greyhounds to illegal race tracks.  A sudden and violent encounter re-unites him with his mother, now revealed as an important figure in Britain’s secret intelligence operations in post-war Europe.

It was the dreamlike atmosphere of Warlight that stayed with me in the days after I finished reading it, the eeriness of postwar London’s rivers and bombed-out streets.  Something elusive and slippery pervades and dominates and that felt right for a novel that seems to me to be about how and what we remember and how memories, the ones we choose to recall and those we try to forget or ignore, make up so much of who we are.

Fifty years ago, a little boy, uncomfortable in his new shoes and unfamiliar tie, stood in a small village churchyard in West Cork and watched while his favorite uncle posed with his new bride for their wedding pictures.  From where he stood the boy could see clearly the church in which his grandfather and father had been baptized and the school house in which both had studied. The newly-married couple, both more than six feet tall with the black hair and blue eyes common in that place, looked like glamorous giants to the little boy, who blushed and fidgeted under the attention of relatives and family friends he hardly knew.

In the passing half century, the little boy grew, as little boys tend to do.  The much-loved uncle and aunt aged, as uncles and aunts tend to do, acquiring white hair along the way but keeping the clear blue eyes. The school had been extended.  The simple church, unchanged, now the setting for the latest in a long line of family weddings that have been held there since that day fifty years ago.  The bride, tall, black-haired and beautiful – just as her mother had been.  Permanence and change, side by side as they always are.

Names matter here.  Family names – surprisingly few – that root you in a place and connect you to others, the living and the long dead.  Personal names handed down from generation to generation, some – Cornelius and Florence, for instance – surprising to outsiders.  And ancient place names, individual parishes and farms, places of sad departures and longed-for returns.  Dromkeal and Corran, Farranfadda and Derrynakilla. Places marked by no signposts and separated by old stone walls, but distinct nonetheless through centuries of comings and goings, stories and memories.

Weddings here are uncommon reunions of the far-scattered and the local, of those who wouldn’t leave and those who couldn’t return, and celebrations of something more than a couple’s love.  This is clan-gathering, memory-sharing, storytelling time in a place everyone calls home.

In his long writing life it was commonplace for critics to compare William Trevor to Chekhov; that’s how highly he was considered as a writer of short stories.  Although he wrote twenty or so novels – some of them wonderful – the short story was his true métier, the craft at which he excelled and in which, at least in my opinion, he had no equals, not even Chekhov and Alice Munro.

Last Stories is just that: the final collection of ten stories from the master who died in 2016.  Isn’t there a rule somewhere that says the powers of great artists inevitably decline in old age?  If so, William Trevor didn’t get the message because some of these stories are as good as anything he ever wrote and I imagine will make other writers, even those supposedly at their peak, groan with envy.

I gave Last Stories to a friend as a birthday gift and later wondered if I had chosen wisely.  A thick mist of melancholy clings to these stories.  No one reads Trevor for the jokes and there’s no denying that the dignity he saw in the human condition was something hard-won from solitude and often from quiet, unremarked loneliness.  The brilliance of his craft, though never showy, stopped me repeatedly as I read this beautiful collection of miniatures.  What a magnificent storyteller he was.