The Silence of Forgiveness

MRS. ECKDORF IN O'NEILL'S HOTEL by William Trevor. 304 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Novelists, like photographers, may be divided between those who put sharp edges on life and those who prefer the soft focus. William (The Old Boys) Trevor belongs with the best of the impressionists--those who view the world as if through the haze of a slightly sad and baffling dream.

A County Cork man himself, Trevor has spread an eery Irish mist over the shabby Dublin back street where O'Neill's Hotel stands in bewitched semi-ruin. On the top floor lives the proprietor, Mrs. Sinnott, at 91 a legendary personage. Half-Irish, half-Venetian and a deaf-mute, Mrs. Sinnott is an almost mystical presence. The members of her family and the orphans she has collected about her over the years--mostly the lost and the losers--make their pilgrimages to her room and scribble confessions into the red exercise books through which she communicates.

Trevor has animated a whole Irish repertory company of drinkers and fantasists. While Mrs. Sinnott's son Eugene sips sherry and gambles, he allows the hotel to degenerate into a part-time brothel. But he has a vocation of sorts: to narrate proudly, compulsively, his latest nightful of dreams. And dreams of one kind or another are what get written down in Mrs. Sinnott's notebooks.

O'Shea, the old porter, shines his buttons and dreams of the day when O'Neill's Hotel will be restored to glory. Agnes Quin, who started out to be a nun and ended up a whore, daydreams that her life--which largely consists of fat, grunting men and soiled sheets--has been magically turned into an old Olivia de Havilland movie.

Unfuzzy Truth. Into this soft-focus world Trevor introduces an antagonist, Mrs. Eckdorf, a cold-eyed photographer from Munich, with her efficient camera. She is a producer of coffee-table books --still-life documentaries of an atheistic priest and his parish, of the trail of a murderer in Colorado. She intends to photograph O'Neill's Hotel with pitiless clarity on the occasion of Mrs. Sinnott's 92nd birthday party. She wants to bring out all the unfuzzy truth about present and past, including why, almost 30 years before, Mrs. Sinnott's daughter and daughter-in-law had fled the hotel after an earlier birthday party.

Fanatically grubbing indecent exposures and hard sensory facts, Mrs. Eckdorf stands no chance against Trevor's Irish mist. In the end, she too longs to make her confessions to Mrs. Sinnott. Haplessly disoriented, she goes mad and finds at last the gift of dreaming.

Here, clearly, is Trevor's sardonic back-of-the-hand to the non-Celtic Mrs. Eckdorfs of this world. But he is too Celtic himself to lift more than an edge of the mist that he has spread. What is Trevor's answer? What, for that matter, is his question? His novel remains an entrancing but disturbing sketch of human weaknesses--among them man's, willingness to live with fantasies he can explain only to an old lady at the top of the stairs, who, in turn, can neither hear nor respond. What she offers is merely the silence of forgiveness.

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