When I saw that Kim and Cathy announced that they were running a year of reading William Trevor, I was keen to join in. While I hadn’t read any of his books, he had long been on my peripheries – I thought of him as a short story writer, but turns out he was quite prolific at the novel too. Throughout 2023, Kim and Cathy will be covering many of his books (you can see the schedule at either of those links above), but I think they’re happy for anybody to join in with any Trevor at any point. So I went for the only one I had on my shelves at the time (though I have subsequently bought The Boarding House) – and that is The Story of Lucy Gault from 2002. Here is the opening paragraph:
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.
We are in Ireland in (as that quote says) 1921, one of the peaks in the long history of antagonism between the Irish and English – and anybody who sympathises with either side. Captain Gault lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter Lucy in a large house surrounded by beautiful woods and sea. Lucy loves the countryside and the sea, often sneaking out to the sea against her parents’ knowledge and command. Against this backdrop of natural idyll is a tense current of violence. It is Captain Gault wielding a gun in that opening paragraph – but the men who are trespassing on his land had already poisoned his dogs, and intended to burn down the house.
Not wanting to cause any further ill feeling, though, Captain Gault goes to apologise to the young man and his parents. As he explains, the warning shot wasn’t meant to hit home. But they refuse to accept his apology, and the situation has become unmanageable. Knowing that he and his family could be murdered any day or any night, Captain Gault makes the decision to leave the country.
On the day they are meant to leave, though, Lucy is nowhere to be found. And then her clothes are discovered on the shoreline.
Desperate in grief, her parents make the difficult decision to leave the house and all the memories of her – escaping to safety, but broken.
Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn’t been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried them with a century’s weight?
“Oh, my darling!” Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. “Oh, my darling, forgive me.”
Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers, though this does happen quite early in the novel. There is twist that is both glorious and tragic. Lucy is not drowned: she had been hiding in the woods, hoping that they would have to stay in their home if she went missing. She is soon found, dehydrated and injured from a fall but otherwise ok, but there is no way to get in touch with her parents. They are travelling in Europe, away from all contact. And so she continues to live in her Irish home – while they, still believing her dead, start a new life for themselves far away.
We skip forward in time and see Lucy as a young adult, but I shan’t spoil anything else that happens in the novel. There is a melancholy to the whole thing, and something that feels peculiarly Irish in the tone, though that is difficult to pinpoint.
Am I a Trevor convert, then? Well, I’m sorry to say that I’m not sure. I found individual sentences and paragraphs beautiful – the one I quoted above is mesmerising – but there was something about the whole that left me a little ambivalent. I certainly didn’t dislike The Story of Lucy Gault, but I felt a bit underwhelmed by the experience.
Perhaps this is my well-documented lack of affinity with historical fiction – I have found novels written during the Troubles much more vivid than those written about it much later – or perhaps I just haven’t quite clicked with Trevor for one of those undefinable reasons that can oddly distance us from a novelist that we should like, in theory. I’m certainly not giving up on him and I look forward to trying The Boarding House, but I have to admit to being left a bit cold by Lucy and her sad life.
Really interesting to read your review. I was thinking about rereading this book when you first posted about it but even though I was quite tempted after reading the first couple of pages, then vague memories resurfaced and I decided not to; whilst remembering I admired William Trevor I did not actually enjoy his stories. I will be interested to hear how you get on with others. I also find I don’t tend to get on with historical fiction.
We always seem to be on the same page! I might try and read Boarding House while the Trevor celebrations are continuing, but we all know about good intentions.
There seems to be a general consensus that his earlier novels are still worth trying even if Lucy Gault doesn’t appeal. I have looked through my stock of Trevor books and am pleased to see I have several that look more tempting for a reread (The children of Dynmouth and Elizabeth Alone amongst others). Might try and find a copy of The Boarding House too.
I sometimes read another book by the same author though the one I read wasn’t something I thoroughly enjoyed. Hoping that the next one would be better. How’s your experience with that? Are most of them worth the second chance?
Yes, sometimes it definitely pays off to persevere, doesn’t it? I try to give authors I think I COULD like two or three tries, and sometimes they end up becoming my favourites – like Muriel Spark, I wasn’t too bothered by the first two books of hers I read, but now I adore her. And, in fact, those first two books too.
I’ve not read any Trevor, although he is gets so much love on blogs I follow. But you’re right about how fickle that love of an author or book can be – I’ve found too that I haven’t always gelled with books which technically speaking I should love. You can end up admiring a book or author yet not loving it, and I really don’t know why that is!!
I feel this most controversially about Barbara Pym! I quite like her, but not as much as I’d expect to.
Ahem. I have that feeling too – have read and enjoyed several of her books but found they were merging together and I was a bit burned out with her. Which is not to say she isn’t good but I didn’t *love* her…
Thanks for taking part, Simon.
This was my first Trevor and I read it years and years ago, so my memory of it is quite vague. Given you weren’t completely sold on this one, I think you will like his earlier novels much more. I am reading his books in chronological order — filling in the gaps between books I have already read — and his early books are a delight! They are black comedies in the vein of Ealing Comedies, mostly set in London, featuring casts of eccentric characters, but with a dark undercurrent running below it all. I’m noticing that the dark undercurrent becomes darker and darker as his career progresses, and I’m waiting to see which book is the real turning point.
Thanks for running it! Really interesting to read in order – and gosh, those early books seem a world away from this and perhaps more up my street, so I shall certainly try more.
I also predict you’ll like The Boarding-House, and I hope you’ll try some of his short stories. They are glorious.
Good to know, thanks Grier! I’m glad I’ve got Boarding House on my shelves.
Try The Ballroom of Romance – so quietly heartbreaking – Reading Turgenev from Two Lives.
Thank you for the recommendation!