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The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended)
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Moving William Trevor’s new novel, The Story of Lucy Gault, contains 235 tightly written pages of some of the best craftsmanship I’ve read this year. Trevor’s plot, imagery, characters and subtlety of exposition combine to create a moving story about love, loss, forgiveness and guilt. Everard Gault brought his English bride, Heloise, to the family home at Lahardone in Ireland. We don’t know about their early years there, but in 1921, after Colonel Gault left the English army, some of his neighbors made it clear that they’d like the Gaults to leave town. Nine-year-old Lucy wants to stay at Lahardone, so a few days prior to their departure, she runs away from home, hoping that her parents will be forced to stay. Instead, Lucy is assumed to have drowned, and her parents leave Ireland for good. Caretakers find Lucy, and try to contact her parents, but can’t. The bulk of the book presents Lucy’s life thereafter, one full of guilt and lost love, and that of her parents, one of guilt, depression and melancholy. Trevor mines the relationship between Everard and Heloise with precision, and helps readers understand motivation, action, and inaction. Eventually, there is forgiveness, when characters and readers have been brought to that point by Trevor’s skills. Here’s an excerpt of what to expect (p. 32), from early in the book when Lucy is missing and her parents have been searching for her in vain: “As the surface of the seashore rocks was pitted by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distress brought by the sea, so silence did at Lahardane. Captain Gault no longer spent his nights at an upstairs window but stood alone on the cliffs, staring out at the dark, calm sea, cursing the ancestors who in their prosperity had built a house in this place. Sometimes the O’Reillys’ nameless dog plucked up courage and came to stand beside him, its head hunched down as if it sensed a melancholy and offered a sympathy of its own. The Captain did not turn it away. 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 with them a century’s weight? ‘O my darling!’ Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. ‘Oh, my darling, forgive me.’” The pages of The Story of Lucy Gault are full of passages like this one: deep, rich, prose, full of descriptive settings and emotions. Treat yourself to the enjoyable time you’ll spend reading The Story of Lucy Gault. Steve Hopkins, October 23, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November 2002issue of Executive Times For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com