After recently reading Trevor's Collected Stories, I was impressed again at how good a writer he is. Understated, and understanding of the subtleties of Irish village life, this is a wonderful novel that traces what can happen when outside events occur to change ways of life that have existed for generations.

As the story opens, nine-year-old Lucy Gault and her English parents are living in Ireland in 1921. A violent incident occurs in which Captain Gault wounds a would-be arsonist. This event leads to a fearful existence, so they decide to leave Ireland. Lucy has never known another home and wants to stay. Lucy makes a fateful decision, resulting in tragedy. Her story becomes local legend.

It is a story of bad timing and missed opportunities. It is also a story representative of Ireland’s history. Themes include forgiveness and redemption. This is my first book by William Trevor. I found it beautifully written and will definitely be reading more of his works.
( )

I have had conversations IRL and here on GR about not liking to feel manipulated by writers. I hate being told how I am supposed to feel. Sometimes people do not seem to understand what I am talking about. For those people I will say that William Trevor is the sine qua non of non-manipulative writers. I am awed both by Trevor's facility and economy with words. A reader needs to really pay attention when reading Trevor because it is easy to completely miss shattering events. The loss of home, life, children, dignity, peace happen in the course of a few sentences, and those events are conveyed with no more fanfare than is given a description of a tea towel laid upon a bush to dry. One example "For a moment that night he was glad they had tidied up the graves. Later he was aware of pain. It did not wake him." That is it, the whole death scene . (Not a spoiler, the story takes place over the course of 70 years so people die, that is just one of them). Do with it what you will. For me, I had all sorts of feeling about that death, complicated conflicting feelings, and every feeling was mine and came from the relationship Trevor built between me and the character.

I have read many of Trevor's short stories, but this is my first of his novels. Though this is wonderful and you should read it, I have liked Trevor's short stories a good deal more than I liked this. I tried to identify why I like the short stories more, and I have two theories. The first is that it is not a matter of form, but rather of Trevor being an old man when he wrote this. His standard feeling of melancholy, which has pervaded all the work I have read, is notched up from melancholy to frustration at his obsolescence and the obsolescence of his characters. My second theory is that it is not Trevor's frustration but my own that is invading the reading experience. What comes off as characters' equanimity in the stories I have read feels like the characters' plodding inertia in this novel. Is that because the increased length means I am reading about a litany of incomprehensibly terrible choices and non-choices rather than just a couple? Is this because the characters in this book just work harder to avoid conflict (thereby creating conflict) than those on earlier works? Damned if I know. Whatever the reason I was realllllly frustrated by people not doing anything, of running from understanding or resolution as fast as they could. That is why this is a 4-star rather than a 5-star for me. When people talk the language is peppered with "I can't not" and other phrases that imply an intense desire to not act, to not feel. I don't want to spoil the book so I won't say more, but I will say the central event in the book could have been resolved simply through letting anyone in the world know where characters were living. This is something that pretty much anyone with any connections (and these people had connections), even people with depression and/or PTSD, would do. A large property is left in the care of caretakers, and yet for a lifetime the property owners do not contact the caretakers or even provide their contact information in case of emergency. There is a passing reference at the very end of the book to this now old person seeing people walk down the streets with their phones, and to her hearing about the internet and having no idea what that meant, and maybe that is my problem here. Having lived so long in this age I cannot get my mind around people disappearing -- disappearing is something that is pretty hard to do these days. Maybe this frustration is entirely my fault. In any event, it does not at all ruin the read, it just changes it.

One more note, when I read this the song Delta Dawn kept playing in my head. While I really like music, I have never been much of a Helen Reddy fangirl, but that totally came up. This vision of a girl, then a woman, caught up by the regrets of rejecting love and spending her days waiting for something unattainable while wearing the old abandoned dresses of her old abandoning mother just got me there. I need to start reading more books that make me think of action like Party in the USA or Hot in Here, or even Lust for Life. ( )

What a beautiful novel is Trevor’s paean to loss, regret and life itself. I can’t tell you how it cleansed the palate after the first three books of Updike’s Rabbit series. It restored my faith in the novel as a vehicle for the expression of human sensitivity.

Lucy is young when her parents, fearful of the turning political tide, make plans to leave the only home she has known on the beautiful Irish coast. But tragedy strikes, and the novel enters a period of mourning, separation and loss which William Trevor’s prose paints perfectly.

In fact, it is a testament to Trevor’s skill as a writer that the novel does not descend into utter melodrama, such is the tragedy you are faced with. I’m not sure anyone but an Irish writer could have portrayed such depth of loss with such subtle prose. It’s enchanting.

I’ll admit that there are a couple of contrivancies in the plot to make the story work as it does, but you’re so enthralled, you really don’t notice them. Like a Bronte fan reading Jane Eyre, you’re willing to forgive the author at least this much.

According to Wikipedia, Trevor’s characters are "Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat."

Lucy Gault perfectly fits this mould and finds the world that she creates cannot sustain the penetration of the realities of those who love her. There is a tremendous sadness in these episodes, and it makes you yearn to comfort her.

Lucy’s life is a lesson to those of us who fear fear itself. It can be a big bad world out there, but it can also be wonderful, and to fear the former is a surefire way to ensure you never make it far enough to see the latter.

As all good novels, it makes you wonder who around you embodies the non-fiction version of the fiction you’ve read. How many Lucy Gaults do we know who long for love but cannot receive it for fear it will disturb their safety? Trevor’s novel has raised my awareness and, hopefully, helped me to trust that to love and be loved is worth the risk. Let me never say, like Lucy, "I am not somebody to love." ( )

"Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so."

This novel spans some 70 years and looks at how the future is shaped by "the sins of the past". Yet in reality the 'sins' are minor compared with the punishment that they engender.

The story begins in the summer of 1921, in County Cork, when local Protestant landowners were subject to attacks by members of the IRA in their battle against the British Army as they sought independence. Isolated farmhouses owned by Anglo-Irish families were set on fire in an attempt to drive their owners out of their homes and Ireland altogether.

Captain Everard Gault, a veteran of WWI, lives a simple life at Lahardane with his wife and young daughter when one night he shoots at a group of intruders, intent on burning their house down, wounding one of them. Everard hadn't actually intended to injure anyone merely to warn them off. He knows the family of the youth he shot, a boy called Horahan, and feeling remorseful attempts to apologise and offer recompense to the boy's family but meets intransigence and refusal.

Fearful of another attack Everard and his wife Heloise decide to abandon Lahardane to the care of Henry and Bridget, a pair of loyal retainers. However, in trying to shield eight-year-old Lucy from the real reasons for their departure from the home she loves she in turn she decides to run away rather than leave her home. By a series of awful chances, Lucy is thought to have drowned and grief stricken her parents reluctantly leave Ireland without her.

Sometime afterwards Lucy is found alive and attempts are made in trying to track down her parents. Racked with grief and remorse Lucy and her parents begin to live parallel lives. Whilst her parents live a nomadic life around Europe, Lucy lives an almost Sleeping Beauty like existence, living in an isolated house, looked after by Henry and Bridget rather than seven dwarfs, cut off from ordinary outside village life, reading old novels and wearing her mother's dresses,she awaits her parents return and forgiveness. Adults and child are unable to reconcile past events and are imprisoned by "what must not be spoken of". When Lucy falls in love, she refuses happiness until she is forgiven but when Heloise dies and Everard returns to Lahardane but is too late to save Lucy's happiness. Instead they must each settle for companionship rather than love.

Meanwhile, the boy Horahan, plagued by vivid dreams in which he actually burnt the house down thus killing Lucy, is gradually losing his mind racked with remorse.

On the whole I found this a really well written novel but in particular I found the middle section, which deals with Lucy's love scenes with Ralph, very poignant. Every sentence they speak has a "not" or a "never" in it: "I never want to go." "I could never not love you." When Ralph marries, he never tells his wife about Lucy, and when her father returns, they don't talk of her loss. As a child, Lucy learns deaf-and-dumb language from a fisherman, and that's what these characters speak in.

This is a novel that centres around guilt, both personal and political. How decisions and policies can have unforeseen ramifications. Both Horahan and the Gaults are victims of Ireland's 'Troubles', the Irish boy brought up to become a revolutionary and the Protestant family who were the intended victims, each then become metaphors for colonialism.

As the years pass by Lucy's tale slips into local myth and folklore with her regarded almost as a Protestant saint. Time on one hand is a destroyer, "The past was the enemy." but as the years pass by, Lucy in particular becomes much more sanguine about past events: "What happened simply did". This then is a story of memory as well as history. ( )