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.
I think it’s his finest book too. It was the first I’d read by Trevor, and it made me a lifelong fan.
Tragic without being maudlin.
Good to know you shared my response, Lisa. I probably need to reread it some time to savour it differently
I remember reading this when I was on a Trevor binge back in the early 1990s. Once I’d read the first one I wanted to read them all. I considered a reread of this one (not long after Simon at stuckinabook reviewed it) but I still remembered it was a very sad one and it wasn’t the right time for me to feel I wanted that.
Thanks for the reminder of a work of a wonderful author.
Glad to have jogged happy reading memories, Sarah. It is indeed a sad story, but strangely uplifting as well, I found.
Lovely review Simon and a welcome reminder to me of William Trevor’s greatness! How he avoided winning the Booker has always been a mystery to me. I know that conventional wisdom would probably attribute this to Trevor’s focus on the short story format but — really? I frankly think his writing was too nuanced and elegant, and his subjects (for the most part) too “quiet” for judges looking for something more showy and topical.
For all my Trevor enthusiasm I still have a few early novels and lots of the stories to read (so very, very many books, many now stacked in piles on my floor). I did read Lucy Gault ages ago and liked it almost as much as you did (my own personal favorite Trevor novel, however, is Felicia’s Journey. What a dark thriller that is, and so skillfully done. The guy can write anything). My favorite individual story collection is After Rain, particularly the story of the young Protestant boy with his religious vision, which ultimately leads to his murder by his own family (“Lost Ground”?). I thought about that one for days after I first encountered it. And then, there’s “Reading Turgenev”. What a masterpiece! (I think I may have actually written about this one on my blog). Well, one could rattle on and on about favorites! Really, I wonder sometimes why I spend (waste?) time on so much contemporary fiction, when there’s so much of Trevor’s writing that I’ve yet to explore. Claire Keegan actually reminds me of Trevor a bit.
I also loved the novels you mention, and have a lovely 2-volume edition of the complete stories that I must read, having read and admired some of the collections as they came out. I agree, he was a master.