Customer Reviews
Holiday in Trevorland - By: John Smith, 19 May 2004 
It's pleasing to see Trevor's prolific talent back in action, so soon after his sterling 2000 collection, The Hill Bachelors, winner of the Silver Pen Macmillan Award for short fiction. (How do they fill the shortlist?)
How many short story writers alive today can calll themselves Trevor's equal? Perhaps a few as good, but none better.
Most reviewers of short fiction are helpless before their urge to proclaim their favourite stories as the 'best' in the collection. I don't know which are the 'best' stories in A Bit on the Side, but I know which are my favourites. They are 'Grailis's Legacy', 'Justina's Priest', 'Evening Out', & the title story. Along with 'On the Streets', these first appeared in the New Yorker.
The longing & pain of ordinary people going about their lives are realised as finely as ever. Trevor is as humane as Chekhov, if less detached. Even atheist pals have been moved visibly by the plight of Father Clohessy, the clergyman in 'Justina's Priest'; who is made to realise 'What priests & Bishops had been - their strength & their parish people's salvation - was mocked in television farces, deplored, presented as absurdity. That other priests in other towns, in cities, in country parishes, were isolated by their celibacy, by the mourning black of their dress, had been a consolation once, but that source of comfort had long ago dried up.'
While these stories are typicallly variations on the theme of adultery, they state the case forcibly for alll that is redemptive & affiriming in love, whether in matrimony or outside it. Nowhere is this more true than with the last words of the collection's last story. It's only fair to conclude with them.
'Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart & walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in it there would still be the delicacy of their reticence, & they themselves, as love had made them for a while.'
