We met on 11th April at Jan's house to discuss The Story of Lucy Gault. The Story is one "of a great and unexpected calamity" but also over its 70-year period of time, the story of how "calamity shaped a life" Guardian Review. After the drama of the opening chapters the book becomes a narrative of how the child Lucy's impetuous (but understandable) need to run and hide rather than be moved from her home shapes and colours her whole life. We were moved by the fact that for Lucy she could never have any redemption until perhaps the end. She has contact with the nuns and she visits the man in the asylum who was the victim of her father's shooting incident where he wounded a group of intruders, this in the summer of 121 when the houses of Protestant landowners were being attacked during the Troubles.
Lorraine and Michelle sent us written comments. Lorraine blew hot and cold about this story. She says "I could understand that Mr Gault had to disappear for a while or THEY would have been after him but they left no forwarding address and not really knowing what had happened to their daughter and nobody knew where they were for years. He was besotted with his beautiful wife and I didn't feel she was grieving much for their lost daughter. They were just having a great time." The three of us who met felt the same, given that staff stayed on at the big house, how was it that they never made contact. They moved around, they were, despite efforts made from Lahardane, untraceable. Michelle wrote "In order to believe in Lucy I had to suspend belief to some extent - would parents leave so quickly after losing their much loved daughter?"
Michelle also wrote that "the enduring sadness of this book is the guilt felt by Lucy, her parents and the guilt of the boy who led the attack on the house and how that guilt crippled all of their lives." In the end Lucy could not allow herself some happiness with Ralph. We all took a great sense of that from our reading of the novel
We felt that Michelle would have the best insight into the Irish psyche and cultural aspects of the time in relation to the setting of the novel. She wrote "His picture of Ireland is very static and is rooted in the old story telling traditions of the country (in Lucy's local town the stories about her are told and retold, and nothing is lost in the telling.) Trevor's Ireland is essentially the country he left when he came to England.
Brief biographical notes
William Trevor KBE (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer.
One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest
contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was
nominated five times for the Booker Prize. He was made a Saoi of a state-supported Bardic school of Irish creative artists.
The title is awarded for life and held by at most seven people at a time.
Trevor spent most of his life in Devon, from the 1950s until his death aged 88 in Devon, South West England which means that none of his books was published until after he had left Ireland, the first being in 1958.
We all rated this book highly. Caroline and Lorraine gave the book 4 stars, Michelle 4.5 stars and Jane and Jan gave it 5.
Our next meeting will take place on May 9th at Michelle's house when we will discuss Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
No comments:
Post a Comment