Monthly Archives: June 2026

William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

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William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault, Penguin 2017; first published 2002, pb 228 pp.

Ireland in 1921: the war of independence was nearing an end, and the partition of the island was about to be agreed – but that didn’t end the armed struggle, as has been recorded in so many novels, poems and films. It’s against this background of guerrilla warfare and internal strife that William Trevor’s superb novel begins.

It’s not possible to say much about the plot without giving away spoilers. The novel opens like this:

Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming above the trespassers’ heads in the darkness, he fired the single shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.

They had come to ‘fire the house’, intending either to drive these hated Anglo-Irish landowners out of their country, or to kill them. Everard and his wife decide to follow the lead of so many others in that country in a similar position of peril and leave for a safer place. They pass the news of this decision on to their eight-year-old daughter Lucy. She’s heartbroken at the prospect of abandoning the place she loves.

What follows is a desperately tender and poignant story of a family’s lives blighted by loss, guilt, and lifelong struggles for understanding, redemption and forgiveness.

Meanwhile Trevor also follows the life of the young man who’d been wounded that fateful night. His connection with the Gault family doesn’t end on that June night.

It’s a wonderful novel, beautifully written. I find it hard to describe Trevor’s capacity for writing prose that’s lucid and spare but also full of subtle cadences and poetic touches that resonate long after the sentence just read. I had to keep stopping and taking a breath to allow these resonances and effects to sink in. It’s all profoundly moving without ostentatiously striving for dramatic impact, or becoming morbid or depressing.

I’ve read much of Trevor’s fictional output over the years and always considered him one of the finest writers of his generation; this novel is by far the best I’ve read so far.

Iris Murdoch, The Flight From the Enchanter

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Iris Murdoch, The Flight From the Enchanter, Penguin pb, 1962; first published 1956. 287 pp.

Just back last week from a three-week trip to Canada and Alaska, which was wonderful. That’s why there’s be nothing posted here for a while. Still haven’t recovered fully from jet lag, so this may be a bit less coherent than usual.

The first book I finished while travelling was this strange novel by Iris Murdoch – the first of hers that I’ve read (I think – might have forgotten one from years ago). I enjoyed it as it went along, but it left me at the end thinking, so what?

As days went by afterwards, I reflected some more, and it began to reassemble itself, in a way, in my thinking, and I became less dismissive. I’ll try and explain, but it’s difficult.

The plot and characters are borderline surreal or magical-realist. Different threads develop seemingly unconnected. Some seem to go nowhere, signify nothing. But afterwards a kind of fuzzy coherence becomes apparent.

A young woman leaves her posh finishing school and celebrates by swinging on the chandelier in the staffroom. She’s determined to learn in the ‘school of life’ – but what follows seems to teach her little. Her resistance to the conventions of the system, her quest for fulfilment and freedom, is celebrated, if not her rather immature character and privileged background.

If there’s a central storyline it’s the attempt by a shady, possibly east European press magnate called Mischa Fox (apt name), to buy out a failing literary-political magazine founded by suffragettes. Its current owner-editor, Hunter (all the names are apt), resists this attempt, appalled by the personality and reputation of Fox and his ruthlessly amoral fixer, Calvin Blick – who blackmails him into compliance.

He does this by taking compromising photos of Hunter’s sister Rosa, who’s engaged in a bizarre love triangle with two Polish brothers who work in the same factory as her (why is a nice middle-class girl of the 1950s working there? It’s one of many weird details that drift by.) She, and several of the other female characters, all succumb to the seductive charms of Fox.

That’s sort of it. Summarising the plot doesn’t begin to do justice to the strange incandescence of this unusual novel. It hints at all kinds of symbolic significance (I think). There’s also a scholar engaged in a noble but quixotic quest to decode a set of ancient texts written in a kind of cuneiform or hieroglyphic script – does he represent the futility of aimless research, or the purity and integrity of the seeker after truth and clarity? What, after all, is truth?

A civil servant vegetates in a pointless bureaucratic system, resentful of the rise of the young women who increasingly challenge complacent dinosaurs like him: there’s quite a lot of this kind of thing, celebrating the struggle of women to liberate themselves from submission to the patriarchy – hence that magazine founded by suffragettes; btw, that’s the word IM uses, rather than ‘suffragists’. The magazine takeover is resisted by an ageing group of the women who helped found it.

Other themes, related in part to the above, include other kinds of struggle for freedom, as so many people live a life of deprivation, confinement, restriction of opportunity, and even oppression. The flight from the titular enchanter, Fox, represents a variation on that theme. A surprisingly contemporary corollary of this is the depiction of immigrants, possibly illegal, terrified by the prospect of deportation. One such character takes the most extreme way out.

There are some aspects of the novel that show some dated attitudes, including a rather nasty sexual assault on a young woman. Fox himself shows an attitude to the women who find him (unaccountably, it seems to me) irresistible that’s not a million miles away from some of the high-profile sexual predators who have come to public attention in the last few years.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note. Murdoch’s writing is elegant, witty and satisfyingly rich and full of layers of significance, as I hope I’ve (not too clearly) suggested. Although some parts of it haven’t dated well, it’s one of the most unusual, original and cerebral novels I’ve read in a while.