The Story of Lucy Gault

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Summary: Wm Trevor's Lucy Gault
Review: 'The Story of Lucy Gault" may be Trevor's most powerful and affecting work to date. Here is a tragic, heartbreaking story told beautifully, painfully, rewardingly. There are passages here that will, or should, cause an actual physical reaction. This is Literature at its best.
One caution, however: have a light book ready for when you finish this one. You'll need it.

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Summary: A MASTER OF HIS CRAFT AT THE PEAK OF HIS POWERS
Review: A master of his craft at the peak of his powers, William Trevor continues to pen stories that captivate. His spare prose sparkles, and his limning of the human heart inevitably brings a rush of recognition. Such is surely the case with his latest work, The Story of Lucy Gault.

We first meet Lucy when she is nine-years-old, and living a privileged life in 1920s Ireland. Her father's family home is Lahardane, a spacious estate with orchards, woods to explore, and a beach that she especially loves. Captain Gault, her father, is justifiably proud of his family's domain, but feels forced to leave when there is an arson attempt. They will go to England, he decides, to Lucy's mother's home.

As distressed as he is at the thought of leaving, the Captain tries to convince himself that all will eventually be well, "'Oh, all this will fall into place,' he murmured more than once, confident in his reassurance to himself. Leaving, arriving, the furniture one day settled around them again: time and circumstance would arrange their lives, as in exile so many other lives had been arranged."

If Captain Gault and his wife, Heloise, could come to terms with the family's upheaval, Lucy could not. So desperate was she to keep her family at Lahardane that the day before their planned departure she ran away, hoping this will convince her parents to stay.

Her father remembers the flawed reassurances they had offered Lucy, the promises to return that might not be kept. "Disobedience had been a child's defiance," he mused, "deception the coinage they had offered her themselves."

But rather than forcing her parents to remain, Lucy has unintentionally initiated a dreadful series of events, years of loss and recrimination. Upon finding the girl's summer vest snagged on a rock by the shore it is believed that Lucy has drowned herself rather than leave her beloved Lahardane.

Grieved and bereft her parents move on to travel from place to place throughout the world, always seeking the solace of a new beginning, forgetfulness in an unfamiliar place.

Unbeknownst to them Lucy has survived and is taken in by trusted servants, Henry and Bridget, who have no idea how to contact the Gaults. Lucy grows to young womanhood, very much alone until she meets Ralph and falls in love. It is a love that will never be, as Lucy has consigned herself to a life of waiting for her parents' return so that she might be reunited with them and ask their forgiveness.

As young womanhood gives way to middle age Lucy comes into contact with a mentally incompetent man, the same man who had tried to burn her family home so many years ago. In scenes rich with forgiveness she visits him in the home to which he has been assigned.

William Trevor has been called "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language." Words of praise pale beside his wonderfully lyric prose, as he reveals longings shared by all of us and paints luminous word pictures of Ireland.

Read "The Story of Lucy Gault" for pure pleasure; keep it as a treasure of English literature.

- Gail Cooke

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Summary: Left with an empty feeling
Review: A very sad story on many fronts. A little hard to get into, and once the story develops the plot does not get much better. I kept wanted to yell at the parents to get over themselves and get on with life. Losing a loved one - esepcially a child - is tragic, but eventually life has to go on. Frustrating in that the solution to happiness was so close (the parents could have come home, Lucy could have married her dream guy) and yet it seemed the author did not want his characters happy. Even after the reunion, the story leaves the reader feeling incomplete at the end.

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Summary: Longing for forgiveness.
Review: Although the fictional account of Lucy Gault is as implausible as any Thomas Hardy novel, William Trevor triumphs in his sombre study of one woman's life spent longing for forgiveness. Trevor's heartbreaking novel begins with a single gunshot in 1921 that sets forth a chain of events that takes place over the next eighty years. After accidentally wounding a Catholic boy, Captain Everard Gault then decides to flee with his wife, Heloise, and their eight-year-old daughter, Lucy, from their Protestant estate in Lahardane, Ireland for the safety of England. Prefering the "trees and rock pools and footprints on the sand" (p. 118) to her father's plan, Lucy runs away from home on the evening before the Gaults' planned departure. After discovering Lucy's clothing among the rocks and driftwood, Everard and Heloise assume the worst, that their daughter "took her own life" at sea (p. 158). However, Lucy has only injured her ankle on a moss-encrusted rock. Her parents depart Ireland in sadness, unknowingly leaving their daughter behind, and without leaving a forwarding address. Raised by servants and longing for forgiveness, Lucy grows up depriving herself of love and happiness because of the "domestic tragedy" she has caused.

Reminiscient of Thomas Hardy's novels, LUCY GAULT is a haunting story, written by a novelist and short story writer at the heighths of his talent. And much like Hardy's unforgettable characters, Tess and Jude, Lucy Gault spends her entire life making amends for the sins of her society.

G. Merritt

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Summary: The Best of Trevor
Review: As in other Trevor stories, "The Story of Lucy Gault" demonstrates the cost of political turmoil in human terms. It is the time of "The Troubles" in Ireland and the Gaults are Protestants in a mainly Catholic country. But to summarize Lucy's story merely will diminish your experience of this exquisitely told somber tale of a series of ill-fated actions: by reckless and impetuous youth and by the well-intentioned. William Trevor, a long-time resident of England but born, bred and forever an Irishman, has described himself as "a God-botherer." "Most of my fiction," he said, "seems to do that. I'm definitely on the side of Christians, but I don't mind where I go to church, whether it's a Catholic church or a Protestant church." This sort of ecumenism pays off here where he plumbs the depths of both Catholic and Protestant characters. "The Story of Lucy Gault", which made the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist, is probably Trevor's finest achievement.

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Summary: incredulity reigns
Review: As many others have said, I too love William Trevor's sparse, elegant style, and the heartache in the first third of the book left a profound impression on me. As the years in the plot passed, however, its utter unreality started to depress me. Real people don't behave in such ways (you don't check up on the old homestead or its loyal retainers, etc., FOR THIRTY YEARS??!!). Did the Gaults never have to pay taxes? Apply for a new passport? Come on. One can see that Trevor tries to address this essential problem by having Captain Gault say he wrote letters home many times but never sent them. He and his wife just live their lives of quiet desperation, so novelistic it becomes self-indulgent bathos. And poor Lucy? To use the parlance of the young, her life sucks, and then it sucks some more. End of novel. I'm sorry, but no matter how beautifully something is written (which this is), it ultimately has to add up to a credible story containing human actions the reader believes are plausible, even in the fictive world created by the author. Lucy's "redemption" in the end doesn't even feel deserved because she never did anything for which to be redeemed in the first place. A childish whim went awry. No one would blame a child for such a thing, yet her suffering becomes a way of life for her, gaining mythic proportions. One supposes Trevor intended just this sort of irrationality, but that doesn't make the book a satisfying work of art.

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Summary: A masterpiece
Review: As the first novel I have read by William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault has me hungering for more by this incredible writer. Trevor's prose is so flawless, so poetic, so captivating that it was impossible for me to put this novel at rest. At its conclusion, I felt for Lucy: incredible feeling and emotion. When you feel for a character, when you're haunted after the last page of the novel, you know the writing is timeless.

When you read this book, not only watch what the characters do, but also focus on what they DON'T do. Those decisions are as vital to the story as what occurs. You will not be disappointed.

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Summary: Couldn't make myself finish ...
Review: Boring, boring, boring. It was a struggle to read the two-thirds I managed to finish and I finally had to give up because I just didn't care. I very rarely give up on a book but this one was just unbearable.

Rating:
Summary: Too sketchy to be satisfactory.
Review: Fearing for the family's safety at the turn of the 1920's, Captain Gault decides to evacuate from hostile Ireland to the friendlier England, his wife came from. But their daughter, Lucy, has other ideas, becoming the victim of her failed plan to delay the family's departure and a possible change of heart. The years that follow leave Lucy guilt ridden about her parents' departure without her, they thinking she has perished at sea, etc.

The most attractive quality of this book is William Trevor's cool and efficient prose when it comes to describing scenes, he always choosing the right word to convey the attributes about what he is describing. Unfortunately, he applies this brevity to the story as a whole, which, allied to an omniscient and mixed viewpoint style, robs the characters of any substance beyond idle chit-chat dialogue.

The bulk of Lucy's story could have been more effectively rooted in Lucy's point-of-view, with the bulk of it being conveyed as compressed back-story. This would have made more sense. The Captain and his wife's details after leaving Ireland could have been expressed as dialogue between the Captain and Lucy and the Captain and Mr Sullivan, etc. on the Captain's return, for all there really was of it.

In other words, the objective story was too schematically presented to hold one's attention particularly well, and the subjective story was even more so, to the point of being risible.

William Trevor is a skilful prose-writer, but the structural execution of what he has to tell, is sadly lacking in 'The Story of Lucy Gault'.

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Summary: Even and Dreamy
Review: For some reason, the review of this book in the New York Times put me in a real frenzy to read it. I think because it reminded me of Atonement by Ian McEwan, a book from 2002 that I really loved. Although I have read and enjoyed many of Trevor's short stories, I just couldn't get into this book. It was too even. There is a dramatic event at the center of this story but it is too buried by the passage of time to be a driving force.