posted on 03 Apr 2023

Love and Summer and The Story of Lucy Gault: two late novels by William Trevor

When William Trevor died in 2016 at the age of eighty-eight he left nearly twenty novels, two or three novellas, a memoir, two children’s books, eight plays and more than a dozen collections of short stories. Invariably modest and self-effacing, he once remarked of this extraordinary lifetime of writing: ‘My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.’ 

But my initial impression of his novels – as opposed to his short stories – was not all that favourable. In the early works he still seems wedded to a rather dated comedy of manners style. They are not ‘apprentice works’ by any stretch of the imagination but they don’t have the sureness of touch, the scale of ambition nor the gravitas of the novels he published in roughly the last twenty years of his life. These are extraordinary works. Their prose is subtle and infinitely flexible and they have a deeply and profoundly imagined sense of place, character and history, frequently rooted in Ireland’s troubled colonial past, especially the early-1920s, the years of the War of Independence, the Civil War and the campaign of ‘big house’ burnings intended to force out those seen as supporting the English oppressors – the Anglo-Irish landed gentry. They are novels of great emotional depth. I recently read two of them. 

Love and Summer (2009) is a relatively short novel, light in tone and rather enigmatic. It concerns a brief and doomed love affair between a young man, a member of a faded landed gentry family, and a farmer’s young wife, a foundling raised by nuns. The setting is rural Ireland in the 1950s, the fictional town of Rathmoye. It opens with the funeral of a local woman whose family are well-known in the town for their business interests – a bar, a lumberyard, a bed-and-breakfast. But just when you think that it must be this family that will be the focus of the novel Trevor seems to draw back, his gaze taking in not just this prosperous but unhappy family, but the whole town – and the lightness of touch with which he brings this rural backwater to life in all its richness still strikes me as an extraordinary feat. 

He excels at capturing personal as well as historical tragedy, and the long shadows such circumstances may cast down the generations. But typically the melancholy note is not unrelieved: Trevor’s characters are often also great stoics, able to find human warmth and solace in the smallest and most commonplace events – the turning of the seasons, the quiet glass of porter with a friend or long-familiar tradesman in a local bar, the routine of farm work, memories of the long-past love affair that might have changed the whole course of a life, but didn’t. Love and Summer is an exceptionally beautiful novel.

The earlier The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) is in many ways an even greater achievement. The story opens in the very early 1920s on the country estate of a ‘big house’ in rural Ireland belonging to the Gault family, a retired Captain Gault, his wife Heloise and their young daughter of seven or eight, Lucy. The fortunes of the Gault family have long since faded – there was a disastrous spell of gambling in the nineteenth century that lost much of the family’s land – and in any case they now have other worries: Anglo-Irish landowning families like themselves are being burnt out of their homes in the night by republican militiamen. 

The Gaults know that they too will be a target and and on the night the house is attacked Captain Gault shoots and wounds one of the attackers. This will never be forgotten or forgiven; they must leave or spend every night prepared for further attacks. But young Lucy is determined that she won’t leave the house, the landscape or the local people she loves and has grown up with – including the remaining staff employed by the Gaults. This is the crux of the story and a dreadful misunderstanding will result in tragedy that will shape the family’s life for the next seventy years and more. 

Writing in an interview with Trevor in The Guardian in 2009 Lisa Allardice identified the following as ‘hallmarks’ of William Trevor’s writing: ‘past shame; secrets; sacrifice; and, finally, redemption – or consolation, at least’. She is right. His novels and stories often involve quiet tragedy – and yet they are rarely without consolation. What a wealth of reading and rereading he left for us.

 

Alun Severn

April 2023

 

William Trevor elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

Fools of Fortune by William Trevor

 

The Old Boys by William Trevor

 

Rereading The Ballroom of Romance & Other Stories by William Trevor

 

Reading Turgenev by William Trevor