“Attracta” combines several now-familiar Trevor subjects: a virginal lifelong spinster, a fixation on the past, an awkward social blow-up, and The Troubles. This is not to say it isn’t good—it’s a quite good story, elegantly structured and told, and manages to combine these pieces in a way that feels new. But taken on their own, these four elements are beginning to feel like well-trodden ground, and so I’d like to focus on a smaller and very effective writing choice that Trevor makes midway through the piece.
First, a synopsis. Attracta is the titular main character, a 61-year-old schoolteacher in a small Irish town. She becomes obsessed with the news story of Penelope Vade, a young English woman whose soldier husband has been murdered and decapitated by IRA soldiers in Belfast. When she receives the head in the mail, Penelope bravely goes to Northern Ireland to join the Women’s Peace Movement, incurring the wrath of the same seven IRA men, who rape her and leave her to commit suicide.
We are learn the story of Attracta’s childhood in a slow reveal. Orphaned at three and never really told what happened, Attracta is raised by her aunt and, tangentially, by a Mr. Devereaux and his housekeeper Geraldine Carey. Mr. Devereaux is gentle and kind to Attracta, a father figure, and she finds out his motivation at age 11 via a Mr. Purce. Mr. Purce is devout and unpleasant, and takes unseemly pleasure in revealing to young Attracta the truth: Mr. Devereaux and Geraldine Carey accidentally murdered her parents with a bomb meant for Black and Tans, British irregulars.
In the third act, we get the classic Trevor “person losing their shit” scene, wherein Attracta tells her pupils the story of her life, and Penelope Vade’s, and wonders whether Penelope Vade’s murderers could become gentle people later in life the way that Mr. Devereaux and Geraldine Carey did. She feels she has wasted her teaching career by not talking about her story, not spreading the word about people’s capacity for forgiveness and grace. Her students sit in quiet discomfort and she is later visited by the Archdeacon, who requests her retirement.
One small element of “Attracta” that struck me was the introduction of the Mr. Purce’s character. He is mentioned early in the second, backstory section:
She grew up assuming [her parents] were no longer alive and when once she voiced this assumption her aunt did not contradict it. It was until later in her childhood, when she was eleven, that she learnt the details of the tragedy from Mr. Purce, a small man in a hard black hat, who was often to be seen on the street of the town. He was one of the people she noticed in her childhood, like the elderly beggar-woman called Limerick Nancy and the wild-looking building’s laborer who could walk a hundred miles without stopping, who never wore a jersey or a coat over his open shirt even on the coldest winter days. There were other people, too…
We do not hear about Mr. Purce for another three pages, most of which are devoted to fond memories of the town and, in particular, to a description of Attracta’s relationship with Mr. Deveraux and Geraldine Carey. This is a strange move to make in the middle of a story, and, I think, effective. It accomplishes two things at once. First, it hooks the reader at the beginning of a long and muted section of exposition. The exposition is necessary, and beautiful, but it would be fair to say that we might read it with a degree less avidity. We’re used to encountering this kind of baited hook at the beginning of a story, but throwing one into the middle is unusual—and a craft idea worth stealing.
The second thing it does, and the reason that it does not come off as overtly manipulative, even irritating, is that it enacts something similar to Attracta’s mind and recall of events. She loves to linger on the details of her youth and the town—we learn that this is, on some level, because of the way the kindness of people in her childhood seems to argue against the brutality of her parents’ death. Mr. Purce is introduced and immediately enveloped into a fog of fond memory. Her memory of him is not, in fact, fond, but it is forgiving, and it is also tempered and relieved by the other characters of her youth, for instance, the beloved Mr. Devereaux, her parents’ murderer.
This is another craft move—more than that, an aesthetic approach—worth stealing. We should strive to write detail so inflected by the main character’s personality, so focalized through their perspective, that it not only speaks to who they are, it embodies them. Ideally, when we look at a section of interior exposition, we are looking at the particular syntax and structure of a mind.
Next up: “A Dream of Butterflies.”
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