Cressida Connolly
Keeping Silence and Losing Faith
Cheating at Canasta
By William Trevor (Viking 232pp £16.99)

If there is a theme running through William Trevor's brilliant new collection, it is reticence. Again and again, lives are altered, or ruined - or, less often, saved - by things that are left unsaid. Such silence goes against the grain of a culture obsessed by disclosure and personal revelation, but that is not to say that Trevor is old-fashioned, much less squeamish. Within these twelve stories are many crimes: the murder of a prostitute, a child hit by a car whose driver does not stop, a youth beaten to death in a suburban garden. Terrible things happen, or threaten to happen. Two nine-year-old boys push a dog out to sea on a lilo; a paedophile takes a young girl - 'her bare, pale legs were like twigs stripped of their bark' - for a walk by a canal; a tramp blackmails an innocent priest.

I was reminded of Werner Herzog's gruelling masterpiece Grizzly Man, a documentary about an eccentric wildlife cameraman who was torn to death by bears. Towards the end of the film, Herzog puts on a pair of headphones and listens to the actual soundtrack of the man's death; the cinema audience are obliged to look on, watching him listening to this terrible thing, without the sound. Many were shocked by the film's violence, even though they had neither seen nor heard anything more violent than footage of bears gambolling in a Canadian stream. Defending the work, Herzog said: 'The artist must not avert his gaze.' In other words, it is only if the artist does not look away from the abyss that the audience (or viewer, or reader) receives an authentic experience.

William Trevor is doing something similar here. He does not flinch from horror and darkness, yet nor does he sensationalise these things. Evil may be inadvertent, or clumsy: it is never elegant or just; or even, of itself, very interesting. Its purpose, in his stories, is to test the moral limits of his characters. What is of interest to him is not the crimes themselves but the way in which they affect, change and damage people. He gives no easy answers. Redemption is not the point; a sort of desperate, unspoken atonement is more likely. Only love is noble, but it lacks the power to save a life. A husband plays cards with his wife, who is in a home, with Alzheimer's: tenderly, he cheats in order to let her win; it is her one remaining pleasure.

In some of these stories, love makes people silent. What you don't know can't hurt you: an elderly wife does not tell her ailing husband that his beloved farm is to be turned into a golf course, in a story which begins, characteristically: '"Well, at least don't tell him", their mother begged. "At least do nothing until he's gone."' In another, a clergyman withholds his crisis of belief from his sister, so that she can die in peace. Elsewhere, silence must be paid for: a priest must pay his tormentor not to broadcast an invented, long-past abuse, so as to protect the reputation of the wider church; a longed-for marriage cannot take place because the groom, a widower, has a child who is unable to articulate her grief for her dead mother.

All of the stories in this book are good, but two of them are outstanding. These are the first story, 'The Dressmaker's Child', and the last one, 'Folie à Deux'. Even if you do not as a rule enjoy short stories, I beg you to read these. Again, they are concerned with terrible acts and their consequences; with keeping silence and losing faith. The final tale, in particular, is a work of perfect control and balance, moving back and forth across almost forty years, from rural Ireland ('when secrets became deception') to the empty streets of Paris in the early morning. This is the twelfth story in Trevor's twelfth collection: an almost magical number for what could be his most mesmerising and haunting story.

William Trevor is the greatest living exponent of the form, able to conjure from a few pages an entire world of desire and loss and pain. His work is seldom cheerful, but that scarcely registers, for he is writing about things that matter; about the deepest and most secret crevices of the human soul.