Synopses & Reviews
In the early morning of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one, three arsonists — shadows in the night -- arrive at Lahardane, the home of Captain Everard Gault, his wife, Heloise, and daughter, Lucy. The sheepdogs that alarmed the Gaults of previous trespasses had since been poisoned. On this occasion, though, it is a warning shot fired above the silhouetted heads that sends them retreating, saving the estate from being set ablaze. But blood speckles the pebbles of the approach in the dawns light, implying that the Captains single shot wounded one of the intruders.
Everard quickly learns the identity of the wounded -- a boy named Horahan -- and thereafter sets to make amends. His apologies and offers of restitution to the boy and his family are ineffective, however, and the Gaults realize then that further defiance to certain forthcoming attacks is senseless. “The past was the enemy in Ireland,” writes Trevor. Protestant property was the common target in this time of insurrection and civil war, two years after Sinn Fein declared Ireland independent, and the Gaults had obvious British sympathies: Everard, a former British army officer; Heloise, an English wife and mother; Lahardane, an ancestral Irish property since the eighteenth century. It is too dangerous for them to stay. They too must desert Ireland like so many families before them.
Eight-year-old Lucy is never properly explained the danger of staying at Laharadane. It is the only place she has known; a place where the flow of streams around moss-covered stones, the bloom of the apple orchard, the pull of the seas tide, and the fishermen on the shore are the very fabric of her being. So it is then, forlorn and mournful, that Lucy decides to run away on the night before her familys scheduled departure for England. However, when her parents find an article of her clothing on the shore where she frequently went swimming they fear the worst: that she has drowned.
Stricken by grief and remorse, devastated by guilt and blame, Everard and Heloise regard the plans they have made and retreat from Ireland. Windows are boarded, furniture is draped, and Lahardane is left in the care of their servants, Henry and Bridget. But almost as soon as the Gaults have left Henry finds Lucy -- alive, emaciated, her ankle broken and badly swollen -- in an abandoned cottage in the woods. The Gaults, however, have forsaken their intentions to relocate to England and have vanished into Europe. The trail following them is less than cold, their whereabouts critical yet unknown, and for thirty years this remains as they sojourn through France, Switzerland and Italy.
Henry and Bridget resuscitate Lahardane and take up custodial care of Lucy. As she matures, though, she also becomes more reclusive and insular. Children in the village refuse to play with her. She is stared at, spoken of in hushed tones and, over time, exiled. The anguish over her parents fate wanes as the myth of hers similarly grows. She develops into a voracious reader and to a certain degree lives her life vicariously through the characters that populate the novels in her familys extensive library. It is by chance then that at age twenty-four Lucy meets a man -- Ralph.
Ralph, a young Englishman, arrives in Ennisealea to work as a tutor to the bankers sons for the summer. While on a drive, familiarizing himself with the Irish countryside, he happens upon Lahardane. Ralph and Lucy, upon meeting, are immediately enchanted with one another and Ralph, after his departure, cant let a thought pass through his mind that isnt of beautiful Lucy. Properly, he is invited back to Lahardane, as those closest to Lucy hold their breath and privately hope that Ralph will become her future suitor. Sadly, those hopes are dashed. The end of summer nears and so too does Ralphs tenure with the Ryalls, but not before he pronounces his love for Lucy. Lucys self-reproach for the bisecting of her family weighs heavy, though. “She believed she had no right to love until she felt forgiven,” and thusly she rejects Ralphs affection and proposal of marriage. His love unrequited, Ralph returns to his English home and shortly thereafter enters the war.
Guilt-laden, unbeknown to them that their daughter and home persevere, Everard and Heloise live a life in exile on the continent -- an exile both self-imposed and inflicted by Mussolinis war. Its not until Heloise contracts influenza and perishes that Everard resolves to return to Ireland and the home he left behind three decades previous.
Arriving at Lahardane, the Captain is astonished to find the house unsealed and tended. Yet he is more astonished to find Lucy alive; the daughter he thought for deceased now a grown woman. But Everards return to a paternal relationship with Lucy is, logically, strained. Moreover, he feels undeserved of anything greater than the respect Henry and Bridget would extend to that of a stranger, for it is their house now -- as it has been since he entrusted it to their care with his exit in nineteen twenty-one -- and he is a phantasm. Still, Everard makes every effort to atone for his absence, for an adolescence and adulthood choked by his neglect, delinquency and taciturnity.
In the end, the forgiveness that Everard searches for is diminished by his daughters redemption: Lucy has forgiven the arsonist wounded by his single shot. It was the young boy, Horahan, who many, many years ago put the tragic sequence of events in their lives into motion. But it is now the older man, after unrelenting nightmares of successfully setting the Gault estate ablaze, killing Lucy, who is driven to insanity.
About the Author
William Trevor knows the Ireland he writes of well, a country he frequently visits but hasnt resided in for over a half-century. Born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, his childhood was a tour of small provincial towns requiring his fathers authority as a minor official in the Bank of Ireland. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin -- where he met his wife of now fifty-one years, Jane Ryan -- he left for England. He and his wife now live in an 18th-century thatched cottage in Devon but his birth-country still serves as the setting for many of his stories. Paradoxically, Trevor has said, “I couldnt write about Ireland if I was living there. I would be much too close.”
Dubbed as the Chekhov of contemporary fiction, self-described as “a short story writer who likes to write novels,” Wiliam Trevor is captivated by the human condition and what poisons relationships -- adversity, dark ambitions, miscommunication, vindictiveness, implications and insinuations, to name a few. “ A lot of people make easy mistakes and they can lead you into the most appalling tragedy,” he once said in a rare interview with The Globe and Mail. “Thats the territory I like -- where somebody does something which is small, slight, but has multiple consequences.”
Now age seventy-five, Trevor says he writes every day to stave off melancholy: the consequence of a writing obsession. Fortunately, the product of his obsession has been thirteen novels -- four of which have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize -- and a catalogue of novellas, short stories, essays, plays and memoirs, for which he has often been acclaimed the greatest writer in the English language today.
Much of his work has been adapted into film and televsion dramas, including “The Ballroom of Romance,” Fools of Fortune, My House in Umbria, and Felicias Journey, which was directed by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. An acquaintance of bestseller lists, Trevor has also been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, The Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award -- twice -- and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and an appointed honorary Commander of the British Empire in recognition of his services to literature.
Reading Group Guide
In the early morning of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one, three arsonists — shadows in the night -- arrive at Lahardane, the home of Captain Everard Gault, his wife, Heloise, and daughter, Lucy. The sheepdogs that alarmed the Gaults of previous trespasses had since been poisoned. On this occasion, though, it is a warning shot fired above the silhouetted heads that sends them retreating, saving the estate from being set ablaze. But blood speckles the pebbles of the approach in the dawn’s light, implying that the Captain’s single shot wounded one of the intruders.
Everard quickly learns the identity of the wounded -- a boy named Horahan -- and thereafter sets to make amends. His apologies and offers of restitution to the boy and his family are ineffective, however, and the Gaults realize then that further defiance to certain forthcoming attacks is senseless. “The past was the enemy in Ireland,” writes Trevor. Protestant property was the common target in this time of insurrection and civil war, two years after Sinn Fein declared Ireland independent, and the Gaults had obvious British sympathies: Everard, a former British army officer; Heloise, an English wife and mother; Lahardane, an ancestral Irish property since the eighteenth century. It is too dangerous for them to stay. They too must desert Ireland like so many families before them.
Eight-year-old Lucy is never properly explained the danger of staying at Laharadane. It is the only place she has known; a place where the flow of streams around moss-covered stones, the bloom of the apple orchard, the pull of the sea’s tide, and the fishermen on the shore are the very fabric of her being. So it is then, forlorn and mournful, that Lucy decides to run away on the night before her family’s scheduled departure for England. However, when her parents find an article of her clothing on the shore where she frequently went swimming they fear the worst: that she has drowned.
Stricken by grief and remorse, devastated by guilt and blame, Everard and Heloise regard the plans they have made and retreat from Ireland. Windows are boarded, furniture is draped, and Lahardane is left in the care of their servants, Henry and Bridget. But almost as soon as the Gaults have left Henry finds Lucy -- alive, emaciated, her ankle broken and badly swollen -- in an abandoned cottage in the woods. The Gaults, however, have forsaken their intentions to relocate to England and have vanished into Europe. The trail following them is less than cold, their whereabouts critical yet unknown, and for thirty years this remains as they sojourn through France, Switzerland and Italy.
Henry and Bridget resuscitate Lahardane and take up custodial care of Lucy. As she matures, though, she also becomes more reclusive and insular. Children in the village refuse to play with her. She is stared at, spoken of in hushed tones and, over time, exiled. The anguish over her parents’ fate wanes as the myth of hers similarly grows. She develops into a voracious reader and to a certain degree lives her life vicariously through the characters that populate the novels in her family’s extensive library. It is by chance then that at age twenty-four Lucy meets a man -- Ralph.
Ralph, a young Englishman, arrives in Ennisealea to work as a tutor to the banker’s sons for the summer. While on a drive, familiarizing himself with the Irish countryside, he happens upon Lahardane. Ralph and Lucy, upon meeting, are immediately enchanted with one another and Ralph, after his departure, can’t let a thought pass through his mind that isn’t of beautiful Lucy. Properly, he is invited back to Lahardane, as those closest to Lucy hold their breath and privately hope that Ralph will become her future suitor. Sadly, those hopes are dashed. The end of summer nears and so too does Ralph’s tenure with the Ryalls, but not before he pronounces his love for Lucy. Lucy’s self-reproach for the bisecting of her family weighs heavy, though. “She believed she had no right to love until she felt forgiven,” and thusly she rejects Ralph’s affection and proposal of marriage. His love unrequited, Ralph returns to his English home and shortly thereafter enters the war.
Guilt-laden, unbeknown to them that their daughter and home persevere, Everard and Heloise live a life in exile on the continent -- an exile both self-imposed and inflicted by Mussolini’s war. It’s not until Heloise contracts influenza and perishes that Everard resolves to return to Ireland and the home he left behind three decades previous.
Arriving at Lahardane, the Captain is astonished to find the house unsealed and tended. Yet he is more astonished to find Lucy alive; the daughter he thought for deceased now a grown woman. But Everard’s return to a paternal relationship with Lucy is, logically, strained. Moreover, he feels undeserved of anything greater than the respect Henry and Bridget would extend to that of a stranger, for it is their house now -- as it has been since he entrusted it to their care with his exit in nineteen twenty-one -- and he is a phantasm. Still, Everard makes every effort to atone for his absence, for an adolescence and adulthood choked by his neglect, delinquency and taciturnity.
In the end, the forgiveness that Everard searches for is diminished by his daughter’s redemption: Lucy has forgiven the arsonist wounded by his single shot. It was the young boy, Horahan, who many, many years ago put the tragic sequence of events in their lives into motion. But it is now the older man, after unrelenting nightmares of successfully setting the Gault estate ablaze, killing Lucy, who is driven to insanity.
1. “Why must we go?” Lucy asks her father [p.22]. “Because they don’t want us here,” he answers. Do the plans that Everard and Heloise make to leave Lahardane for the security of England seem at all hasty? Do those plans seem especially rash after Lucy’s disappearance?
2. “I belong nowhere else,” says Everard of the land that has been Gault property since the eighteenth century. Is it cowardice or courage, then, that propels Everard to sacrifice the heritage of Lahardane for the safety of his family? Has Everard, as Trevor writes [p.27], “too carelessly betrayed the past and then betrayed, with easy comforting, a daughter and a wife”?
3. As Lucy chose to run away so too have her parents. Have they run away for very different reasons? Are Everard and Heloise relieved, in a way, of the suffering and regret they have by “playing at being dead”? Have they found a certain freedom at the tragic cost of losing their daughter? At what point does Lucy lose hope for the return or resurfacing of her parents? And why do they flee their home before understanding the true fate of their only child?
4. “It’s no good loving one another…. I’m not someone to love,” Lucy humbly says to Ralph [p.111]. What are Lucy’s reasons for feeling this way? Why does she reject Ralph’s affection and proposal of marriage?
5. “Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so,” writes Trevor [p.119]. Have the Gaults indeed made too much of their memories?
6. On a lonely Italian piazza Everard listens to the earnest plea of his wife: “Please don’t make me go back,” she says [p.107]. Meanwhile, in the melancholy surroundings of Lahardane Lucy asks, “Why do they not come back?” What is the nature of tragic loss and how do we deal with it? What sense is there in Everard and Heloise forsaking all communications with friends and relatives for nearly three decades, in turning their back on Ireland and all it has represented to them? How realistic or metaphorical might be Trevor’s intentions here?
7. Trevor writes, “Novels were a reflection of reality, of all the world’s desperation and of its happiness, as much of one as of the other. Why should mistakes and foolishness -- in reality too -- not be put right while still they might be?” So when he’s given an unexpected chance at atonement by discovering his daughter alive upon his return to Lahardane, is Everard successful in repairing the relationship he razed with Lucy? Does Lucy forgive her father? Does she forgive herself? More importantly, why is forgiveness from her father so precious when it was he and Heloise who deserted Lucy? How does the history of the place play itself out in similar ways?
8. The appearance of Horahan at Lahardane seems honest and innocuous but also suspiciously malevolent. Is his motive for stopping in on the Gaults true? Is he struggling to achieve some peace of mind by assuring himself that Lucy is alive and not the victim of the blaze that in his nightmares he successfully sets? Is it impossible to believe that maybe he had returned to fulfill the task the Captain’s rifle-shot interrupted? So why does Lucy ultimately forgive Horahan? Does forgiveness from Lucy come easier to Horahan than it does to Everard, and why might that be?
9. Even if she hadn’t been separated from her parents at such a tender age would Lucy’s life have unfolded much differently?
10. To Sister Antony and Mary Bartholomew “[Lucy’s] tranquility is their astonishment…. 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.” Do these nuns that regularly visit Lucy in her old age detect a significant parallel between her and St. Lucia of Syracuse, who in the strength of God stood immovable after condemnation against Roman guards ordered to drag her away?
11. Is it William Trevor’s intent to have the Gault name analogize the word guilt?
1. “Why must we go?” Lucy asks her father [p.22]. “Because they dont want us here,” he answers. Do the plans that Everard and Heloise make to leave Lahardane for the security of England seem at all hasty? Do those plans seem especially rash after Lucys disappearance?
2. “I belong nowhere else,” says Everard of the land that has been Gault property since the eighteenth century. Is it cowardice or courage, then, that propels Everard to sacrifice the heritage of Lahardane for the safety of his family? Has Everard, as Trevor writes [p.27], “too carelessly betrayed the past and then betrayed, with easy comforting, a daughter and a wife”?
3. As Lucy chose to run away so too have her parents. Have they run away for very different reasons? Are Everard and Heloise relieved, in a way, of the suffering and regret they have by “playing at being dead”? Have they found a certain freedom at the tragic cost of losing their daughter? At what point does Lucy lose hope for the return or resurfacing of her parents? And why do they flee their home before understanding the true fate of their only child?
4. “Its no good loving one another…. Im not someone to love,” Lucy humbly says to Ralph [p.111]. What are Lucys reasons for feeling this way? Why does she reject Ralphs affection and proposal of marriage?
5. “Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so,” writes Trevor [p.119]. Have the Gaults indeed made too much of their memories?
6. On a lonely Italian piazza Everard listens to the earnest plea of his wife: “Please dont make me go back,” she says [p.107]. Meanwhile, in the melancholy surroundings of Lahardane Lucy asks, “Why do they not come back?” What is the nature of tragic loss and how do we deal with it? What sense is there in Everard and Heloise forsaking all communications with friends and relatives for nearly three decades, in turning their back on Ireland and all it has represented to them? How realistic or metaphorical might be Trevors intentions here?
7. Trevor writes, “Novels were a reflection of reality, of all the worlds desperation and of its happiness, as much of one as of the other. Why should mistakes and foolishness -- in reality too -- not be put right while still they might be?” So when hes given an unexpected chance at atonement by discovering his daughter alive upon his return to Lahardane, is Everard successful in repairing the relationship he razed with Lucy? Does Lucy forgive her father? Does she forgive herself? More importantly, why is forgiveness from her father so precious when it was he and Heloise who deserted Lucy? How does the history of the place play itself out in similar ways?
8. The appearance of Horahan at Lahardane seems honest and innocuous but also suspiciously malevolent. Is his motive for stopping in on the Gaults true? Is he struggling to achieve some peace of mind by assuring himself that Lucy is alive and not the victim of the blaze that in his nightmares he successfully sets? Is it impossible to believe that maybe he had returned to fulfill the task the Captains rifle-shot interrupted? So why does Lucy ultimately forgive Horahan? Does forgiveness from Lucy come easier to Horahan than it does to Everard, and why might that be?
9. Even if she hadnt been separated from her parents at such a tender age would Lucys life have unfolded much differently?
10. To Sister Antony and Mary Bartholomew “[Lucys] tranquility is their astonishment…. 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.” Do these nuns that regularly visit Lucy in her old age detect a significant parallel between her and St. Lucia of Syracuse, who in the strength of God stood immovable after condemnation against Roman guards ordered to drag her away?
11. Is it William Trevors intent to have the Gault name analogize the word guilt?