A Terrible Beauty

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor Viking, 288 pp., $24.95 WILLIAM TREVOR'S latest novel is more than a tale of colonialism and dispossession. Spanning some seventy years, from the old Ireland of the 1920s to the new Ireland of the 1990s, "The Story of Lucy Gault" begins when Lucy is "still eight but almost nine" and follows her from the paradise of her childhood through tragedy and loss into old age. Shaped by "a great and unexpected calamity," Lucy's life has become--the narrator explains--the subject of many stories told about the time of the Troubles, a legend "waiting to pass into myth." But the true story is a quieter, more complex one that transcends tragedy and history. "The Story of Lucy Gault" is a haunting novel of great beauty and Trevor's most poetic work. Born in County Cork in 1928, Trevor has lived in England since 1953, but he returns repeatedly to Ireland in his fiction. Because of the peripatetic nature of his father's job as a bank manager, Trevor grew up in small towns all over Ireland, living the life of a "middle-class gypsy." Not surprisingly he has an unerring eye and ear for things Irish. Ireland's history and its continuing effect on lives, both private and public, is a recurring theme in his work. Yet, Trevor does not have designs on his readers: "I wrote about the North because I actually am very fond of it," he once explained. "My mother came from County Armagh, and I lived there for a little while, and there was something very sad about what suddenly happened, and again I wanted to know more about it and I began to write. I wrote short stories about the North first of all. But I wasn't doing it to say anything about it. I was doing it because I thought of these stories. I thought of a story called 'Beyond the Pale' about a group of English tourists who happen to find themselves in Northern Ireland. They see what I saw as I wrote it, and they see the misunderstandings that outsiders do." Trevor is, by his own admission, primarily a writer of short stories, and he brings to his novels a short story's intensity and poetic unity. His first novel, "A Standard of Behaviour," was barely noticed when it was published in 1958. Much has changed in the years since. Trevor is now widely acclaimed as perhaps the greatest living writer in English, and he has garnered numerous awards both in Europe and America. English bookmakers have made his latest the odds-on favorite to win this year's prestigious Booker Prize--as is appropriate, for "The Story of Lucy Gault" is not a regional novel of merely historical interest. Trevor understands that while history may touch lives and change them, what people everywhere remember and tell stories about are the "births and marriages and deaths, domestic incidents, changes and additions to this room or that, occasions of anger or reconciliation." The novel unfolds like a musical composition through six movements. It opens with a gunshot on Midsummer's Night in 1921, during the time of the Troubles, when some Anglo-Irish landowners were being forced by radical republicans to leave their homes and return to the England that had not been their home for some two or three hundred years. Trevor focuses on one of these families, the Gaults. Centuries before, they had come from Norfolk to settle in East Cork, near the sea, in a big house called Lahardane. It was their home--or so they thought, until some local boys, fed on stories about past atrocities and the glory of dying for Ireland, attempt to set fire to the house. In self-defense, Captain Gault shoots and slightly wounds one of them, a boy called Horahan. Hardly of moment in the official history of the times, this incident sets in motion a train of events that radically change life at Lahardane and shape the story of young Lucy, the last of the Gault line. THE GAULTS, however, are not mere victims of history. Trevor's characters never are; though living in a world of happenstance, they define themselves by the choices they make. The accidental shooting becomes pivotal because it affects the deep bond the Gaults have with this place they call home. Lucy's father, Everard, belongs nowhere else: "All this--the house and the remnants of the pasture land, the seashore below the pale clay cliffs, the walk along it to the fishing village of Kilauran, the avenue over which the high branches of the chestnut trees now met--was as much part of Everard Gault as the features of his face were." He sees his destiny as lying in this place, but the shooting leads him to another choice and another destiny--for even greater than his love for Lahardane is Everard's love for his wife, Heloise. Trevor's choice of names underlines the centrality of this love. Heloise is an Englishwoman whose sense of belonging in Ireland is rather fragile. When the house is attacked, she is convinced that she is the cause: "All this has happened because I'm here. Because I am an English wife at Lahardane." She insists on leaving Lahardane and Ireland, afraid for the future and for their young child, Lucy. Caught up in their own concerns, the parents do not realize the extent of eight-year-old Lucy's anguish. She too loves this place and doesn't want to leave; in an attempt to force her parents to stay, she runs away. Many years later Lucy acknowledges that when she ran away, she was in love "with trees and rock pools and footprints in the sand." Other characters too comment on this deep connection she had with the place: "There isn't a shell on the strand she doesn't have affection for. It is how she is. . . . Always was." Place defines the characters' actions and lives and is a crucial actor in the story that unfolds. A sequence of chance events worthy of Thomas Hardy's universe ensures that Lucy is not found after she runs away while her parents are preparing their departure from Ireland. Concluding that she has drowned, her devastated parents leave Lahardane, hoping that "time and circumstance would arrange their lives as in exile so many other lives had been arranged." Together, Everard and Heloise, like lost lovers, wander through Europe, settling for many years in Italy, finding some consolation in its art and music. Everard, though anxious about Lahardane and Ireland, remains ever the faithful husband, all other loves subsumed into pleasing his wife. Heloise resolutely refuses contact with the place that has robbed her of her child and peace of mind. And so they live, unaware that their daughter has been found alive. Their whereabouts remain a mystery, and all efforts to contact them fail. Lucy grows up in Lahardane, a lonely girl cared for by the ever-faithful servants, Bridget and Henry, blaming herself for what has happened. Another chance event opens up the possibility of happiness for Lucy when a young man comes to the door having lost his way. Ralph, who is a tutor to some neighboring children for the summer, becomes a frequent visitor and falls in love with her. Lucy, however, doesn't consider herself to be worthy of love, cannot put her past to rest until her parents return and forgive her. As in his great novella "Reading Turgenev," Trevor here evokes all the sadness of love lost. In a scene resonating with a loss that will reverberate throughout later moments of her life, Lucy says goodbye to Ralph, and that avenue into another kind of future closes. With the passing of time, Lucy grows ever more reclusive, becoming the lady in white whose tragic story is told and retold in the village. For much of the central section of the novel, she is seen by outsiders embroidering, "stilled, arrested in the drama there had been," like an Irish Miss Havisham. But the times are changing. The old hatreds that divided the Irish weaken, her mother dies abroad, her father returns to Lahardane. His return doesn't spell any release for Lucy and no great reconciliation takes place. Too much has been lost and Lucy remains petrified in her own self, having lost the ability to love. In this central section, the novel seems motionless, a familiar trait of Trevor's art. CHANGE COMES, however, as Lucy moves through time and loss out of the hell of her own self, and comes to understand who she is and her place in the world. For in the world of William Trevor, redemption is still possible. It comes for Lucy, like the initial calamity, almost by chance and unbidden the day Horahan--the boy whom the father had wounded years before--comes to visit. His story unfolds in tandem with Lucy's, but in a minor key. His life too has been shaped by the shooting, but guilt has destroyed his sanity. Looking at him, Lucy sees that "no meaning dignified his return; no order patterned, as perhaps it might have, past and present; no sense was made of anything." At this point of nothingness, she says "yes" to life--and the story of blighted lives becomes the story of Lucy Gault, the stuff of legend and myth. She accepts the past and begins the slow journey towards love and redemption, culminating in her decision to begin visiting Horahan in the mental hospital where he is now confined. For seventeen years she visits him until he dies. The story ends with that forgiveness rippling out beyond the edges of Lucy's world: Two nuns from the nearby town--younger, Irish, Catholic, seemingly completely other to Lucy--come to visit her, drawn by her tranquillity and her heroic act of forgiveness. Crime and punishment are motifs throughout, the sins and follies of individuals as well as those of a nation. Lucy's story is caught up in the story of Ireland. Trevor, as he has in so many of his short stories and notably in "Beyond the Pale," maps the conjunction of the personal and the political. Everard Gault asks if his own personal tragedy isn't "punishment inflicted for those sins of the past to which his family might have contributed? Had it been greed that the Gaults had held their ground too long? While penal laws were passed there had been parties at Lahardane, prayers said in Church for King and Empire, the aspirations of the dispossessed ignored." As it's told and retold in the villages and townlands around, the story of Lucy Gault becomes one of many stories about the Troubles, "an archetypal story of distant crime and punishment." Both she and Horahan are victims of Ireland's history. And yet, "The Story of Lucy Gault" is more than a tale of the tragedies of history, more than an allegory of settlers and dispossessed, Protestants and Catholics, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic-Irish. Trevor insists on the particularity of his story. It is one woman's triumph over calamity in a very particular place at a very particular time. Trevor captures all that particularity exactly. Against the distant drums of time--from the Troubles down to the arrival of tourists and the Internet in the new Ireland--perfectly drawn characters live out their lives. We meet Canon Crosbie, the twinkling and concerned clergyman; Aloysius Sullivan, the anxious solicitor; Sister Mary Bartholomew, with a hair curling out of a mole on her chin; and Henry with the inexpressive face--"More goes on in a ham," as the locals say of him. Each speaks in a distinctive voice and in accents that Trevor weaves into his prose with just the right cadences and intonations. Placenames ring through the book: Lahardane, Kilauran, Enniseala, and further away Dungarvan, Mitchelstown, Fermoy, and still further London, Montemarmoreo, Bellinzona. Four--and only four--precise dates mark the passage of time, not the significant dates of history, but those of Lucy's own story: June 21, 1921 (the day the house was attacked), September 22, 1921 (the day her parents left Ireland), August 5, 1936 (the day she invited Ralph to Lahardane), and March 10, 1949 (the day she learned Ralph was to marry another). This attention to the geography and history of the heart is a mark of that deep human sympathy that is Trevor's most abiding characteristic. But the wider boundaries are of time itself, which hovers over the book. Trevor weaves this sense of time passing into the fabric of his prose. The summer of happiness with Ralph, thinks Lucy even as she is enjoying it, "will fade and turn into shadows, and voices will be murmurs you cannot hear." Time's different tones are picked up fugue-like throughout. Motifs appear and reappear, as the past echoes through the present leaving memories that time will turn into figments. Time is fickle, ever slipping out of people's grasp. It destroys and repairs: "Time has settled our hash for us," Everard says to Horahan towards the end of the novel. PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE are placed in a kind of palimpsest--as when, on a hot summer's day in a museum in Italy, Everard Gault sees through Bellini's "marble columns and trees in leaf, blue and green and scarlet robes" to another place and time with "teacups on a rosewood table, and misty window-panes, coal blazing in a fireplace." The dominant chord is autumnal, underlined by such songs as "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The Londonderry Air." Trevor captures all the poignancy of human beings moving through time. Still, "The Story of Lucy Gault" is not a novel only about loss and sorrow. Trevor looks beyond to forgiveness, redemption, and affirmation. Lucy survives all that happens to her and all her own choices, foolish and wise. "She should have died as a child," she thinks to herself at the end of the novel, but is glad she didn't; the story of her early life is now a source of joy "because instead of nothing there is what there is." What is the source of this affirmation? "Where did mercy come from when there should have been none left?" is the central question of this book. The nuns who visit Lucy at the end think it's part of God's mystery, while Lucy thinks it's mere chance. But Trevor himself never says. This a novel that joins the line of Shakespeare's "King Lear," Keats's ode "To Autumn," Frost's "After Apple-Picking," and Joyce's "The Dead" as a moving acceptance of love gained and lost, opportunities missed, foolish choices, time passing, completion, endings--all that life brings. In his final image of Lucy, now an old woman, touching familiar objects, musing about what has been and what will be and watching the falling of the day, Trevor affirms the music of what is: This is the way it is, it's the way she was, what happened simply did. A native of Ireland, Maria Desmond is a writer and translator living in Belgium.