The Story of Lucy Gault
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A missing child and a family's grief
REVIEW BY JENN MCKEE The recent spate of child kidnappings—often involving bright-eyed young girls who hauntingly smile at us from photos shown on television and in newspapers—casts an eerie shadow over Irish writer William Trevor's new novel, The Story of Lucy Gault. Nine-year-old Lucy disappears the night before her family's planned move to England, setting off a sequence of events that add up to fated heartbreak for all involved. Lucy, however, sets her own plot in motion. Unhappy about being forced to leave the home she loves in Ireland, she heads into the hills, where she twists her ankle and finds herself stranded. Her parents, misled by an article of Lucy's clothing near the sea and rocks, can't escape the notion that Lucy has drowned, especially when search efforts turn up nothing. They decide to leave their home, and in shocked grief, they roam around Europe, without any ties or communication with others. When Lucy is later found, nearly dead, her caretakers thus begin a decades-long, fruitless search for the Gaults. Trevor's best moments stem from his empathetic portrayal of Lucy's devastated parents, Heloise and Everard. Their interactions underline how a couple who have lost a child can escape a place, but not each other. For example, while visiting a town in Italy, Heloise and Everard "gave themselves to the unfamiliarity of the place they had arrived in as invalids of distress, to its rocky hills and narrow streets, to a language they learnt as children do, to the simplicities of where they dwelt. In the ways they had devised they used the hours up, of one day and of another and another, until the moment came to open the first bottle of Amarone." Trevor's style and story have strong ties to classical melodrama, echoing the doomed fatalism of Edith Wharton's works, as well as showcasing a Dickensian sense of irony. For the sad truth of The Story of Lucy Gault is that, as a result of innocent misunderstandings, people make choices that circumscribe themselves within a world of their own making—a world of impenetrable loneliness. In this way, Trevor demonstrates our frightening capacity to be our own worst jailer. Jenn McKee is a writer in Berkley, Michigan.
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