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    The Story of Lucy Gault
    The Story of Lucy Gault
    The Story of Lucy Gault
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Story of Lucy Gault

    Written by William Trevor

    Narrated by Katherine Borowitz

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Author of more than a dozen novels, including Felicia's Journey, Irish author William Trevor is hailed as one of the most extraordinary writers of today. He has a special talent for examining the innermost regions of his characters' hearts. The Story of Lucy Gault traces the repercussions of a child's attempt to remain in her beloved home. Threatened with a move from Ireland to England, 9-year-old Lucy runs away, setting off a series of misunderstandings that will eventually touch each inhabitant of her village.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 5, 2010
    ISBN9781449814625
    The Story of Lucy Gault
    Author

    William Trevor

    William Trevor KBE was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

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    Reviews for The Story of Lucy Gault

    4/5

    33 ratings25 reviews

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    • 5/5
      How fabulous is this book! The writing, the history, the story, the characters--all combined into a well-told book. Add this to any TBR list you have--it's a must!
    • 2/5
      Not my idea of a fascinating book, but a good one nevertheless. It's about sad people sitting still, being sad. That's about it. The plot and tension consists in different people being sad in different places and at different times, in people talking to others or in not talking to them, in people sitting in the corner in silence-- it's a very, very, very, very slow book. It's well written, yeah. But not a hell of a lot happens, because it's a book about people to whom nothing happens, and the sadness is that nothing ever happens.I found it mind-numbingly dull. You might not. But I did.
    • 4/5
      I wasn't blown away by this book. I found the story somewhat predictable. It is a sad story where a family presumes their daughter is drowned and moves away. She is alive, but her parents are unable to be found. It spans close to a century as their lives are always changed by apx 3 weeks of unfortunate events and misunderstandings.
    • 3/5
      A very melacholic and sad book, redolent of a rain-washed Ireland and an increasingly isolated and disempowered British aristocracy. The focal plot turn of Lucy Gault's abandonment is somewhat forced but the sympathetic, poetic and gentle treatment of a life unlived makes the book a quiet gem. One for a rainy day, a window seat, a steamy cup of coffee, a packet of Digestives and a view of meadows preferably with cows, maybe sheep at a pinch.
    • 3/5
      An extraordinarily poignant tale. The eponymous heroine remains remote and inscrutable throughout, enigmatic but not captivating.
    • 4/5
      A touching, melancholy tale with evocative Irish scenery and compelling, if a little infuriating, characters. Lovely.
    • 4/5
      The story opens in Ireland in 1921. The Anglo-Irish Gaults feel under threat, fearing their home will be attacked. One night Captain Gault fires a shot at three lads, wounding one of them - Horahan - in the shoulder. Shortly afterwards the Gaults decide to leave their home but Lucy, the couple's only child, is so determined that she doesn't want to leave that she runs away. Her parents, believing her dead (Lucy cannot be found, and the belief is that she was washed out to sea), leave.Some time later, the child is found by Henry who, together with his wife, looke after the house and its dairy herd. No trace of the parents can be discovered: they deliberately severed all ties with Ireland and the belief is that they are travelling abroad, moving from hotel to hotel.Lucy grows up. She is reclusive, and spends much of her time in the world of books. The first person to enter Lucy's world is Ralph, a young tutor. He quickly falls in love with Lucy, and she with him, but she refuses to marry him - she is keeping a lone vigil until her parents return, until she hears from them that they forgive her. She does not realise that her mother has already died, of flu during wartime.Unable to settle alone, the Captain returns to Ireland and to Lahardane. The reunion between him and his daughter is anticlimactic, lacking in joy. Lucy realises that refusing to marry Ralph was a pointless act, but Ralph has married someone else and has a child.After the Captain dies, Lucy visits her mother's grave in Italy. As the novel ends, it seems that one of Lucy's main activities is to visit Horahan, who is now in an asylum. After one brief burst of love, Lucy's life seems to have fizzled out into something mundane and rather drab. I'm not sure I agree with a cover blurb comment about 'redemptive love'. It seems to me that after her parents have gone, Lucy lives as a ghost, not wholly engaged with life. The reunion with her father is much anticipated but falls flat - Lucy and the Captain remain effectively lost to each other. Lucy also loses Ralph, and perhaps both of them will always wonder what might have been. Horahan is another ghost, never emotionally whole after Lucy's disappearance as a child. An air of profound sadness hangs about the book - of lost opportunities, of love wasted. [Sept 2004]
    • 3/5
      This could have been a fabulous book but the story is so frustrating. Young child runs away. And the parents. thinking she's drowned, leave Ireland. The child turns up and the caretakers of the estate take care of her - but they never tell the owners whe's alive! Beautifully written - lrical and in the language of the 20's but what a boring read!
    • 4/5
      So many times in our lives, we can look back at moments of chance or luck that changed everything. These moments can be positive or negative, major or minor: if you hadn't bought that raffle ticket on a whim, you wouldn't have won a vacation. If you had been distracted for a second longer, you would have been involved in a major car accident. What you do after these experiences is entirely up to you - you might go broke buying lottery tickets, convinced you're going to win again; you might drive more slowly; you might decide not to drive again at all. That combination of random event and reaction to it is what molds our lives.Lucy Gault is 8 years old when we meet her at the beginning of the book. Her parents are planning to move the family from their home in Lahardane, Ireland after a couple of incidents making it apparent that their home is no longer a friendly place - their dogs are poisoned, a foiled attempt to burn down their house leaves one of the perpetrators injured. Lucy doesn't want to leave, so she decides to run away. Evidence seems to point to her death, and from there the die is cast on all their lives.The book can best be described as a meditation. It's about the coping mechanisms we have inborn with our personalities, and the ones we learn as life experiences shape us. It's also about the difficulties of forgiveness, and the struggle to feel whole when you've lost so much that's important to you. The book is pretty short, just over 200 pages, but I can't imagine racing through it in one sitting - it's so dense and atmospheric that I think you might suffocate if you stay too long inside its covers. That said, it isn't the type of book that's out of sight, out of mind either. Its themes will play around your mind when you're not reading, and after you've finished. Recommended for: people who read the "missed encounters" ads in free newspapers, anyone who feels lucky that any of a number of bad decisions in their pasts didn't lead to tragedy.Quote: "They lay in one another's arms, they talked, she read out to him something she liked in a book, they were companions on their journeys; and yet on days like this one, she belonged only to herself."
    • 5/5
      Many of the reviews below summarize this novel's plot (often telling a bit too much, I think), so I won't go into much detail. The troubles are brewing in 1921 Ireland, and local flare-ups cause the Anglo-Irish Gault family to decide it's best to leave their beloved home. The night before departure, eight-year old Lucy disappears, and her parents believe that she drowned herself in despair. Too sad to remain or even to keep contact with the caretakers they leave behind, the Gaults wander the continent, searching for peace. Their actions affect not only themselves but many of those left behind.Trevor spins a melancholy story of love, guilt, loyalty, and the hope for redemption that spans roughly 80 years. The writing is beautiful, particularly when he describes the Irish countryside and the characters' love of the land, from the blue hydrangeas to the forest bracken to the rising tide. I've read but didn't care for Trevor's Love and Summer, but The Story of Lucy Gault is definitely a winner, and I plan to read more of his work. Trevor is such a prolific writer that I'm sure I'll find other novels that I admire as much as this one.
    • 4/5
      Break out the kleenex -- you'll definitely need it! How sad -- a novel about what could have been but wasn't and how a woman comes to live with tragedy.Set in Ireland, at the time that it was divided, Captain Gault, his wife and their daughter Lucy all live at the family home of Lahardane. One night, their dog gets poisoned; the Captain fires at a group of young men and hits one. His wife is convinced that because she's English, they have been marked for trouble; he tries to go and talk to the family but nothing helps. He then makes the decision that it's time for the family to leave Ireland. Lucy, who is just a little girl, believes that if she runs off, the parents will have to stay long enough to find her & might possibly change their minds. However, something happens & the parents can't find her -- they think she's drowned & make the decision that they should leave, setting off a number of tragic events that have an effect on everyone in the story. I will leave the rest so as not to spoil, but I will say that this book, as small as it is, is one to be savored and read slowly.Personally, I really liked this book -- it is a sad but sweet story and will capture you from the beginning.
    • 4/5
      It doesn’t beat Yann Martell’s _Life of Pi_ for that year's Booker prize, but it is a marvelous read. It has this dreamy quality to it: prose yet poetry; poetry, yet prose. Aren’t there any Yeats overtones there? It has the same quality as his poetry to it. It also seems that you could make this story into a ballad. Or, if not a ballad, it might be a fairy tale about a little girl locked in a castle by guilt (not only hers), and remorse.
    • 4/5
      On the Whole I rather enjoyed this book , it was quite gripping & compelling to begin with but, the ending I found very dissapointing.
    • 5/5
      Brilliiant heartbreaking book - an allegory of the tragic love-hate connection between the Irish and the Ascendancy Anglo-Irish. Centuries of pain and anger told through the primal destruction of one small family. Not many writers can take on history as well as this. But poignant and deeply touching on a personal level too. Trevor shows how individuals pay the price for events beyond their power and even their own time. An essential text for anyone interested in Ireland.
    • 3/5
      Lucy Gault’s family are planning to leave troubled Ireland behind them; their estate and their lives are at risk while they remain; however, it is in leaving that the true rift occurs and the consequences are played out with an emphasis on pathos, but also on forgiveness and healing.I do not generally do well with ‘redemptive’ tales if there is no particular ‘happy’ or ‘tragic’ ending to hang one’s final feelings for a book on. Lucy Gault’s story was engagingly written and the plight of the characters very real, but if a book frustrates my need for things to be definitively resolved at the end (in other words, if the characters’ journeys have amounted to even the smallest revelation, a change of circumstance or moral / ethical consequence) then I cannot put the book aside with any sense that I am better off for having read it; and is in the ending that The Story of Lucy Gault seem weak (particularly when compared to the strength of the book’s beginning).It might be a flaw in my reading as much as in William Trevor’s writing; regardless, my impression is that I could have happily stopped reading three quarters of the way in to The Story of Lucy Gault and been more pleased with it than I was when I actually reached the end.
    • 5/5
      This is a book of stories within stories. The title character, Lucy Gault, is at the center of these stories, but the genesis of the novel goes back in history for centuries. It is that long that the Gault family has been in Ireland, yet their British origins haunt them to the current day and when uprisings erupt throughout the countryside in the years immediately following WWI, the Gaults (like most Protestant landlords) found themselves in real peril of their lives. When they decide to leave after an attack on their home at Lahardane their plans are disrupted by nine-year-old Lucy who, refusing to go, runs away. When she is found missing the story takes a further turn and the life of Lucy and her parents is literally turned upside down. The remainder of the novel is suspenseful as the story of Lucy develops apart from that of her parents. Lucy lives a life guided by "her obedience to an intention that was entirely her own"(p 209). It is this that both gives her strength to continue to make a home for herself at Lahardane, but it also leads her to make some unwise decisions. These decisions raise the melancholy of her life story to tragedy, or at least semi-tragedy. She demonstrates perseverence that is fueled by a certain strength of character. She delights in the natural surroundings at Lahardane but also the life of her own mind. Lucy loves to read from a young age and she has access to a well-stocked library at Lahardane. During the course of her story the narrator mentions her reading several times, but the title of one book she read seemed an appropriate metaphor for her life, The Diary of a Nobody by by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith (p 94). The irony of the title is doubled by the comic content of Grossmiths' short novel. Trevor sets her story against the backdrop of Irish life and history, with the parallels between them never deep below the surface. The result is an exquisite novel that was a joy to read.
    • 4/5
      Nine year old Lucy Gault loves Lahardane, her Irish country home. When her parents decide to leave the country for awhile, Lucy flees into the woods. After a tragic misunderstanding, Lucy is thought to have died and her family relocates and when Lucy returns, she finds herself all alone.This short novel packs quite a punch, and is told in simple yet lilting prose. There is a sadness that lingers over these words and the reader continuously yearns for some kind of reconciliation. This is my first Trevor experience and I am looking forward to exploring his story collections.
    • 5/5
      Exquisite story of family and personal tragedy, representative of the larger picture of Ireland's history of the early 20th century.
    • 4/5
      The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor is a novel with such a strong sense of place that it is hard not read it with a consciously-applied west of Ireland accent. The sounds seem to fit so perfectly.The book is the story of Lucy, her immediate family and their acquaintances. At the start Lucy is barely past the toddler stage, but she is a headstrong and independently-minded young girl who does not want to leave Lahardane, where she and her family seem to belong. Lahardane is a house an farm near Enniseala in Ireland. The problem is that her parents, Captain Everard and Heloise, have foreign, even English connections. The story begins in nineteen twenty-one, a time of revolution and change in Ireland and there are some who now are not as welcoming as they once were. There has already been an incident when Captain Everard shot and wounded a young man, believing that he and his friends had come to the house with an intention to do harm beyond petty theft. The time is right to leave the place, the couple conclude.But Lucy is of this place. She has known nowhere else. She cannot contemplate such a change. But she is young. She will soon learn, soon forget, no matter how strongly she feels that her very existence is entwined with this place, this country, the sea, this community and its people she knows so well.What separates Lucy from her parents might stretch the imagination of some readers, but it remains both possible and credible. In an era where individuals stay permanently connected as they roam, it might be hard to imagine an age when people are not just off the radar – partly because that had not even been invented then! – when they remain both impossible to locate and impossible to contact. If one separated party did not know the other’s whereabouts, then the same was true the other way round. And if someone decided to cut with the past and start afresh, then they were separated from their former life for good, as long as they wanted to stay that way. But not in this novel…Everard and Heloise are clearly quite wealthy people. They can do their own thing, virtually wherever they want. In the first half of the twentieth century, their desire to wander did not entertain anything outside of Europe, but that provided sufficient scope to satisfy their needs. Thus they meander into new lives, pursued by a sense of bereavement.Lucy, on the other hand, got her way and stayed at Lahardane. She picked up an illness and an injury along the way, but one was quite soon cured and the other – well, the other became less significant as time passed, as did other considerations that were initially pressing. She grew up, loved a man, but dare not act on her feelings, since they were usually located elsewhere. She saw a war come and go, and perhaps did much the same with a life.What happens to Lucy and her parents is fundamental to this book. But the main reason for reading it, and the main impression it creates, is its portrayal of west of Ireland life. Here are the conflicts, the supports, the tensions and the loyalties that characterised relations that remained, at the time, essentially colonial. There are issues of social class and the sustainability of livelihoods. Religion, of course, is never far from the agenda. But underpinning everything is a determination to survive, as individuals and as a community, to carry on despite everything that life and fate throw at you. Lucy does carry on, but in other ways her life stops when separation is understood, its overbearing reality never being accepted. She surely wants to realise her desires, but what are those desires? Does she allow herself the mental space to acknowledge them?The Story of Lucy Gault is a hauntingly beautiful book. The writing is poetic, as well as crystal clear. The subject matter is murky, however, because this is a book about people who love one another, in their own, albeit detached ways.
    • 4/5
      The sad story of a young girl who loves her home so much she runs away into the woods rather than leave the country, when local uprisings threaten the safety of the family. Her actions, like that of many other characters in the novel, lead to an ongoing chain of sad events, dooming her to a solitary life where the only love she does retain is her home.
    • 4/5
      A quietly sad story about a woman who has put her life on hold because of a choice she made as a child. Trevor describes the way this choice affects all who were involved throughout the rest of their lives. The descriptions of coastal Ireland are very atmospheric - it also made me realize how little I know about Irish history. A melancholy novel about sacrifice, patience, forgiveness, and the passage of time - it was perfect fall reading. Four stars.
    • 5/5
      This review contains spoilers.This is a wonderful, evocative novel tracing the life of the Gault family beginning during The Troubles in the twenties. Fearing reprisals against Irish nationalists and a previous attempt to burn down their family estate, Lahardane, the Captain Everard Gault and his wife Helene consider fleeing for the Continent. Lucy, their daughter, overhears them talking about moving, but wants to do anything but move from her home on the Irish seaside, the only place she has ever known. In an act of lapsarian rebellion, Lucy runs off into the woods abutting Lahardane just as the Gaults are getting ready to leave, and they end up having to leave without her. Later, the servants (a husband and wife named Henry and Bridget) that are left behind to tend the house stumble on Lucy, and decide to stay behind and raise her there. She leads a reclusive life, socialized by only an old local canon, a solicitor charged with looking after the house – a displaced child in a world of adults - and the library of books her parents left behind. She meets and is dutifully courted by a young, earnest boy named Ralph who has been invited to be the tutor of a couple of local boys, and while she very much returns his affection, her sense of abandonment lingers, and whenever Ralph shows his romantic interest, she coolly refuses him. He leaves at the end of the summer, and much later Lucy sees in the newspaper that he has married another woman.Very occasionally, we get flits of the life that Everard and Helene are leading in Europe. Her heart is understandably broken, but she can’t stand of returning to Lahardane even though Lucy is still there. She dies of influenza before she can ever see her daughter again. However, as an old man Captain Gault eventually makes his way back to Lahardane to see Henry, Bridget, and Lucy. While the servants understandably expect Lucy to be thrilled with his return, her relationship with him seems just as inadequate as her relationship with Ralph. Long silences and short, terse replies from Lucy dominate their conversations, even as her father tries to engage her meaningfully, and we immediately know that this is not the silence of rejection, but rather one of a young girl who was forced into an exile all her own, though not a physical one. While he is at Lahardane, one of the boys, named Horahan, who tried to burn down the estate decades earlier shows up and tells of his part in the attempted arson, and he expressed his deep, heart-felt anguish and regret at what he has done. One night, Captain Gault quietly passes away in his sleep.In her later years, she visits Horahan in an asylum where he has been driven to the verge of madness from his guilt, comforting and talking to him. It is finally in Horahan, who has riven the Gault family into pieces, whom Lucy finally finds her redemption. The end of the final sees Lucy passing the days as an elderly woman. On the radio, she hears “If you’re not on the Internet, you’re not at the races.” The sudden mention of the Internet in a story that started some seventy years before is a jarring reminder of the impersonality of history, and the relentlessness of its march.Some reviews have found this book depressing, sad, or pessimistic. All is not sweetness and light in the lives of the Gaults, but Trevor injects the comforts of consolation and possible salvation through meaningful human relationships. Compared with the work of John McGahern whose work is downright bleak, Trevor doesn’t see the vagaries as time as wholly malevolent. As Lucy later realized, “What happens simply did.” This novel is superior in both the expansiveness of its themes – of love, sin, regret, meditation on history, and the possibilities of reconciliation – and the tight, sharp elegance of Trevor’s prose. Above all, as a first-time reader of his work, I was struck by the poignancy that never devolved into mawkish sentimentality, and the honesty that never lowered itself to bare confession. By the time I was halfway done with “The Story of Lucy Gault,” I was already enjoying it so much I had already ordered another William Trevor novel. Trevor has also published about as many volumes of short stories as novels, which may very well tempt me out of my continued disinterest in the form. If they are anywhere near as beautifully done as “The Story of Lucy Gault,” they will be nothing short of endlessly rewarding.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written story of the intersection of chance and fate and those who's lives are altered by both. A young Irish girl, nine year old Lucy Gault does not want to leave her beloved family home though her parents feel forced to leave for reasons that are valid. She hopes to convince her parents to stay and makes a fateful decision that changes all their lives forever. A child's impulsive action, like all things cannot be altered after the consequences are understood. So begins the story of their lives "after" the fateful choice, as well as the lives of all who knew them, or knew of them. The pace of the story, carefully told calls to mind simpler times, quiet pleasures, and self imposed isolation. So many themes are dealt with in this story. How does one come to acceptance, forgiveness of others, even of ones self? How does one allay the weight of guilt over unintentional consequences caused by oneself? How does one find a way to love when one believes ones self unworthy of love? Lucy does find her own way, over many years, through devastating disappointment and it is walking by her side, observing her as her two loyal house servants do caring for her, that you come to understand how this is accomplished. A lovely, sad, bitter sweet story that I'm very glad I didn't miss!
    • 3/5
      This is a quiet understated book. A tragedy transforms the destiny of a family in Ireland. However, the tragedy seemed so far-fetched to me that I was a little disengaged as I read the rest of the novel.
    • 5/5
      “…how a stoicism had developed in her as a child when those same years failed her, how faith had still been kept, love shattered.” (page 165)First, there is the writing – at times spare and at other times quite dense, but never needlessly so. Without a story or plot or dialogue, it would be a pleasure to read William Trevor’s words. But then there is the story: of family and love and pain and grief and forgiveness and redemption and finding peace with one’s life.I don’t want to summarize the plot because too much will be given away; suffice it to say this story unfolds over many decades and at its center is Lahardane, an old Irish house on the cliffs above the sea. Departures from Lahardane, lives lived fully there, and homecomings provide the bones of the story. Trevor creates such a distinct sense of place and sense of belonging there among his characters that when they venture away, it seems almost an unmooring.I read much of this book with a lump in my throat and a burning behind my eyes. Trevor writes of loss and dislocation so beautifully and evokes so perfectly that ache that tells us we once had something good and true which now is lost. I loved this book and relished every moment spent reading it, despite the heartache. ”Her tranquility is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told, and is the reason for its being: is what they know, besides, the gentle fruit of such misfortune’s harvest? …They did not witness for themselves, but others did, the journey made to bring redemption; they only wonder why it was made, so faithfully and for so long. Why was the past belittled? Where did mercy come from when there should have been none left? …She should have died a child; she knows that but has never said it to the nuns, has never included in the story of herself the days that felt like years when she lay among the fallen stones. It would have lowered their spirits, although it lifts her own because instead of nothing there is what there is.” (page 224-227)