William Trevor's latest novel is a discourse on grief and guilt. Some might regard it as familiar Trevor territory - the polite suffering of the Anglo-Irish - but psychologically The Story of Lucy Gault is closer in tone to Ian McEwan's latest masterful novel, Atonement - both feature pre-pubescent girls, who through a heedless act of immaturity, provoke tragic consequences for themselves and others.
Briefly, the story is this. Lucy Gault's parents, Everard and Heloise - the names are not coincidental - are Protestant landlords in the Cork of the 1920s. One night, three young men attack the house, intent on burning them out. Captain Gault takes a pot shot at one of them and injures him. Thus is their fate sealed. The captain desperately tries to make amends with the family of the wounded young man but he realises that any action of his - no matter how well-meaning - will only further inflame local feeling against the Gaults, and that another attempt to oust the family is inevitable. So he and his wife opt for exile.
Lucy, their only daughter, aged eight, is distraught. She is mordantly attached to the house and the lands around Laherdane, the landscape of a golden childhood. On the day the Gaults are due to leave, Lucy goes missing. She plans to run away to Dungarvan to Kitty Teresa, a maid who used to serve in the house, but she twists her ankle in nearby woods and crawls into a ruined house, unable to move. In the subsequent search, a piece of her clothing is found on the beach and her parents believe she is dead. Heartbroken, they decide to proceed with their departure from Laherdane. Several weeks later, Lucy Gault is discovered - alive - in the woods.
This is the burden Lucy must carry. She is trapped by the effects of slippery chance; frozen in a moment of wilful childishness. Wherever she goes, the story precedes her. People who don't know her, know of her through her story, told and retold over the years. In time, she becomes defined as the little Protestant girl who came back from the dead to find herself parentless and alone. She "becomes" her story.
In this way, Trevor engages with the very power of narrative itself - the character at the mercy of plot. But it is not only Lucy who is caught in narrative's stranglehold. So too is Horahan, the young man shot by the captain. (He is not even granted a first name by his author, adding to his awful defencelessness in the face of fate.)
Serious and religious, he takes upon himself the blame for the chain of events that lead to Lucy's orphaning. He is haunted by images of fire and a child's dead body, though like everyone else, he too knows Lucy's story and knows that she lives still. He drifts from job to job, barely inhabiting his life, and finally ends up in a mental asylum, retreating into an incommunicable guilt, much like Lucy's own.
Trevor's narrative is glassy with grief, a numbed narrative, quiet and implosive. He evokes beautifully the Anglo-Irish version of exile - the aimless wandering of Everard and Heloise, wintering in mountain towns in Italy and Switzerland, rootless and childless. Lucy, meanwhile, grows into a sombre adolescent and a careful adult, afraid that the slightest action of hers might unhinge the harmony of her small universe - as her running away did many years before.
When Ralph, tutor to the bank manager's children, falls in love with Lucy, she turns him away because her affections, like her life, are terminally withheld. Her life can only go on if her parents return. "Her insistence, again, that Ralph must not muddle his life with her distorted one was as painful as it had been before. That she felt she must trust some twist of fate - that all there was was fate - seemed hardly an explanation she could offer, and she did not do so." And though Lucy is at the centre of this story, she is also strangely absent, as if in fact she had died out there in the woods or been claimed by the sea as her parents believe. Her mute suffering, her patient endurance, her noble determination for renunciation make her seem spectral and enigmatic - both less and more than human.
The tension of waiting that pervades this novel is almost unbearable. As readers, we long for the captain and his wife to turn up on the doorstep as the child Lucy does, cocking her ear for every car on the driveway. We urge Lucy's father to send those postcards he writes but doesn't post to Henry and Bridget, the family retainers to whom the rearing of Lucy is unwittingly left. We are, with the characters, in the grip of a yearning for closure. But when the miraculous happens, and the widowed captain returns to Laherdane, it is an ambiguous homecoming, coloured by resentment and regret and the calamitous consequences of chance. So what Trevor gives us is cadence, not resolution.
The characters move around this world barely leaving a shadow - the captain and his wife like disembodied ghosts in Europe, Lucy in Laherdane, and Ralph, who marries someone else - a union compromised by its own silences.
There is anguish here but it is so beautifully rendered that what one remembers is the grace these characters manage to elicit from their emotionally straitened circumstances, how they grow like the barks of trees around their wounds.
The Story of Lucy Gault has a Chekhovian grandness and simplicity, it is both a fable of fate and a testament to humanity's accommodation with it.
• Mary Morrissy is a writer and critic
The Story of Lucy Gault. By William Trevor. Penguin Viking, 240pp. £16.99 sterling