After recently reading Trevor's Collected Stories, I was impressed again at how good a writer he is. Understated, and understanding of the subtleties of Irish village life, this is a wonderful novel that traces what can happen when outside events occur to change ways of life that have existed for generations.

Es el verano de 1921 y Lucy Gault, de ocho años, se queda cerca de las cañadas y los bosques sobre Lahardane, la casa tan querida que su familia se ve obligada a abandonar. Sabe que el peligro amenaza y que los Gault ya no son bienvenidos en Irlanda. Lucy, sin embargo, es testaruda y decide que alguien debe obligar a sus parientes a quedarse. Pero el camino profundo que ella elige termina en un desastre.

As the story opens, nine-year-old Lucy Gault and her English parents are living in Ireland in 1921. A violent incident occurs in which Captain Gault wounds a would-be arsonist. This event leads to a fearful existence, so they decide to leave Ireland. Lucy has never known another home and wants to stay. Lucy makes a fateful decision, resulting in tragedy. Her story becomes local legend.

It is a story of bad timing and missed opportunities. It is also a story representative of Ireland’s history. Themes include forgiveness and redemption. This is my first book by William Trevor. I found it beautifully written and will definitely be reading more of his works.
( )

Det gik voldsomt for sig, da Irland blev selvstændigt efter flere hundrede års engelsk dominans. Som bekendt er Nordirland stadig en del af det forenede kongerige, og i den irske republik var spændingerne også voldsomme. Historien tager sin begyndelse lige efter uafhængigheden i 1921, hvor nationerne stadig var filtret ind i hinanden.

Everard Gault er ud af en familie med tætte forbindelse til den britiske hær, og efter at være blevet såret i første verdenskrig er han vendt tilbage til familiens lille herregård i det sydvestlige Irland. Her bor han med konen Heloise, datteren Lucy og et par tjenestefolk. En nat bliver deres fårehunde forgivet, og nogle dage senere dukker tre drenge op for at brænde huset af. Everard holder vagt og vil skræmme dem væk med et varselsskud, men rammer en af drengene ved et uheld. Efterfølgende prøver de at få bilagt striden, men det er forgæves, og af frygt for familiens sikkerhed beslutter de at flytte til England.

Det vil Lucy ikke. Hun er ni år og elsker området omkring Lahardane, som hun udforsker på egen hånd. Da rejsen er planlagt, stikker hun af hjemmefra for at vise dem, hvor meget de tager fejl og som et sidste desperat forsøg på at få lov til at blive i hjemmet. Det går bare helt galt: Lucy falder og brækker anklen i skoven, mens forældrene finder noget af hendes gamle tøj ved stranden og sender eftersøgningen i den retning. Overbevist om, at Lucy er død, rejser forældrene fra Irland, og da Lucy bliver fundet levende i skoven flere uger senere, er de allerede rejst videre til kontinentet. Det der skulle have været en påtvungen men dog alligevel frivillig flytning til bekendte omgivelser, bliver til en flugt fra alt det kendte.

Mens forældrene finder en base i Italien vokser Lucy op i Lahardane, hvor Henry og Bridget, der skulle have passet gårdens køer og boet i ledvogterhuset oppe ved vejen, tager sig af hende. Lucy bliver et indelukket og ensomt barn, der konstant er plaget af dårlig samvittighed. Hun giver sig selv skylden for ulykken og forældrenes forsvinden, og da hun bliver voksen og kærligheden banker på hendes dør, ender hun alligevel med at afvise den. Hun føler, at det er hendes pligt at blive på Lahardane indtil forældrene vender hjem igen.

Romanen starter stærkt ud. Det fungerer godt at skildre det anspændte miljø efter uafhængigheden og med en truende borgerkrig gennem familien Gault, der måske nok er engelske, men som har været en del af lokalsamfundet i generationer. Trevor har også et skarpt blik for barnets perspektiv, og man forstår Lucys fortvivlelse og hendes desperate plan for at få lov til at blive i sit hjem. Jeg havde bare svært ved at købe bogens præmis om en adskilt familie, for selvom Everard og Heloise er ulykkelige, og selvom de ikke havde meget tætte forbindelser til deres familier, så virker det alligevel usandsynligt, at de slet ikke på noget tidspunkt sætter sig i forbindelse med hjemegnen. Ved siden af den irritation mister romanen også pusten i den sidste tredjedel. Det er som om, det dramatiske stof er brugt op før tid. ( )

I have had conversations IRL and here on GR about not liking to feel manipulated by writers. I hate being told how I am supposed to feel. Sometimes people do not seem to understand what I am talking about. For those people I will say that William Trevor is the sine qua non of non-manipulative writers. I am awed both by Trevor's facility and economy with words. A reader needs to really pay attention when reading Trevor because it is easy to completely miss shattering events. The loss of home, life, children, dignity, peace happen in the course of a few sentences, and those events are conveyed with no more fanfare than is given a description of a tea towel laid upon a bush to dry. One example "For a moment that night he was glad they had tidied up the graves. Later he was aware of pain. It did not wake him." That is it, the whole death scene . (Not a spoiler, the story takes place over the course of 70 years so people die, that is just one of them). Do with it what you will. For me, I had all sorts of feeling about that death, complicated conflicting feelings, and every feeling was mine and came from the relationship Trevor built between me and the character.

I have read many of Trevor's short stories, but this is my first of his novels. Though this is wonderful and you should read it, I have liked Trevor's short stories a good deal more than I liked this. I tried to identify why I like the short stories more, and I have two theories. The first is that it is not a matter of form, but rather of Trevor being an old man when he wrote this. His standard feeling of melancholy, which has pervaded all the work I have read, is notched up from melancholy to frustration at his obsolescence and the obsolescence of his characters. My second theory is that it is not Trevor's frustration but my own that is invading the reading experience. What comes off as characters' equanimity in the stories I have read feels like the characters' plodding inertia in this novel. Is that because the increased length means I am reading about a litany of incomprehensibly terrible choices and non-choices rather than just a couple? Is this because the characters in this book just work harder to avoid conflict (thereby creating conflict) than those on earlier works? Damned if I know. Whatever the reason I was realllllly frustrated by people not doing anything, of running from understanding or resolution as fast as they could. That is why this is a 4-star rather than a 5-star for me. When people talk the language is peppered with "I can't not" and other phrases that imply an intense desire to not act, to not feel. I don't want to spoil the book so I won't say more, but I will say the central event in the book could have been resolved simply through letting anyone in the world know where characters were living. This is something that pretty much anyone with any connections (and these people had connections), even people with depression and/or PTSD, would do. A large property is left in the care of caretakers, and yet for a lifetime the property owners do not contact the caretakers or even provide their contact information in case of emergency. There is a passing reference at the very end of the book to this now old person seeing people walk down the streets with their phones, and to her hearing about the internet and having no idea what that meant, and maybe that is my problem here. Having lived so long in this age I cannot get my mind around people disappearing -- disappearing is something that is pretty hard to do these days. Maybe this frustration is entirely my fault. In any event, it does not at all ruin the read, it just changes it.

One more note, when I read this the song Delta Dawn kept playing in my head. While I really like music, I have never been much of a Helen Reddy fangirl, but that totally came up. This vision of a girl, then a woman, caught up by the regrets of rejecting love and spending her days waiting for something unattainable while wearing the old abandoned dresses of her old abandoning mother just got me there. I need to start reading more books that make me think of action like Party in the USA or Hot in Here, or even Lust for Life. ( )