William Trevor: The story of Lucy Gault

Reviewed by JENNY JONES

The Guardian described The Story of Lucy Gault as "Possibly the saddest story you'll ever read", but I think that would be true only for readers who like their fiction served as fast food. For those prepared to do the cooking, the sadness label may be irrelevant.

A bullet intended to frighten off some intruders in Ireland during the Troubles in 1921 instead wounds one of them in the shoulder. In fear of retribution, Everard and Heloise Gault decide to abandon Lahardane, the house that has been in Everard's family for generations. Their only child, 9-year-old Lucy, rejects their decision and runs away. Evidence suggests she has drowned. The heartbroken Gaults leave without her.

Some weeks later Lucy is found alive, but by then her parents cannot be located. Lucy waits, psychologically stalled until they return.

Guilt stalks those involved in the sequence of events, while those not involved are quick to blame. It's no accident that the novel is set in a country where these emotions flourish and where the past wields uncompromising power over the present. But this novel is not about the power of the past; nor is it about the inexorability of chance.

Tragedy seems to leap from the page: parents who have lost their child; a child who has lost her parents; a young woman who cannot move out into the world. And that's not counting what happens to the wounded intruder. Throughout, Trevor reminds us of the construction put upon events by neighbours and local townsfolk. Blame, pity, incomprehension. "Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told," says the omniscient narrator.

In fact the individual characters each have their own world and each is in full possession of their emotional reaction.

When Lucy disappears, her mother redefines her happy years of marriage as selfishness. How could she have enjoyed herself so much when this terrible thing was waiting to happen? She insists on severing all links with the past.

Everard's experience in the trenches has trained him to deal with losses. Deprived of his daughter and his home, he shrinks his life down to Heloise and the immediacy of her needs.

Henry and Bridget, left in charge of the property, experience life at an intuitive level that enables them to accept things even when they don't make sense.

No one quite knows how to cope with Lucy, but she never falters in her understanding of who she is and of her path through life. Her tranquillity astonishes those who visit her in the solitude of her later years. She knows the calamity that made her life a tragedy in the eyes of those around her has in reality yielded "a gentle fruit".

The awfulness of the chance events inevitably raises questions about contrivance, but contrivance seems as far away from William Trevor's DNA in this novel as it is in all his books.

What he writes is stamped with truth. His characters are rounded and, above all, themselves. His sentences, though always elegant and often lyrical, do not seek to dramatise; he tells what happened without raising his voice and leaves it to the reader to merge it into a whole.

Though it didn't win the Booker, it's a marvellous novel. And the more I think about it, the less sad it seems.

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.

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