The Gaults are a rich Protestant family, whose position in rural Cork was already on the decline before the events of 1921 put an end to their world for good and forced them into exile. Lucy Gault is a nine-year-old child who understands only that she must leave the one home she has ever known.

Refusing to leave, she decides to run away, to show her parents just how strongly she feels about the issue, in the hope of changing their minds. Unfortunately for Lucy, her parents find some of her old clothes on the beach and decide that she must have gone for one last swim in the sea, and drowned. Her father Captain Gault and his wife leave Ireland, severing all contact, any kind of reminder of the child they think dead being too painful to bear. Lucy is found alive a while later, half starved and with a broken ankle. Having no way to contact her parents, she waits.

This is the tragic event which shapes the novel, there is nothing that happens that is not seen in relation to this event. The Story of Lucy Gault is a short novel, at a mere 230 pages, or more accurately it is a long short story. Trevor’s approach works wonderfully for a short story but restricts any attempt to create something of greater scope. A static portrait of loss is created. There are no characters to speak of, and no plot, no action that moves the story forward. Just the passing of time. And despite the passing of time everything remains eerily the same, the characters themselves become ghosts, with no purpose or aim in life. Lucy retains a hope that her parents will some day return, but this hope, as Lucy grows into a young woman, slowly turns into a morbid association with a past that is forever dead.

The former household servant, who along with her husband takes responsibility for raising Lucy, remarks that if the Gaults returned tomorrow, it would be too late. Lucy is lost to the world. Meanwhile, her parents wander aimlessly through Europe, exiles whose home and family are gone. The world of Protestant Ireland has vanished, the world of horse-drawn carts and paraffin lamps vanishes, the Gault family itself exists only in the past. Nothing can be done. The narrative voice is the embodiment of this sentiment, the sentiment of a complete and helpless loss.

The narrator is lazily recounting a tale, the reader is merely listening in to it. Ireland is partitioned, World War II comes and goes, the events of the twentieth century seem to pass unnoticed. The narrative is dispassionate and unconcerned, while what is being described is the miserable lives of people who are rooted in the past, so reinforcing the sense of hopelessness. Only glimpses of what is taking place are revealed, as if nothing could be more or less important than anything else. Upon visiting a cemetery, the narrator tells us that there is an area to place weeds that have been removed from a grave, no mention is made of whose grave the weeds have been removed from. The narrative voice is in a state approaching catatonic.

In truth the story is as long as it could be, even a little longer than it should be. Stretching the story to 230 pages means that the distance necessary to carry the reader along with such a morbid tale is lost. We begin to lose sympathy with characters that begin pathetic in the best sense only to become pathetic in the worst. If the story were 50, maybe even 100 pages, the reader may have had room to suppose that not every waking moment of the lives of the characters was dominated by the initial tragedy. We could have supposed that Lucy smiled once or twice in her life.

But Trevor’s narrative is intimate, specific, we see the characters everyday life too closely to remain sympathetic. The focus on the mundane and fleeting observations, such as a clock striking the hour, rather than on deeper sentiments, reminds us that we are not being shown the deeper sentiments because they are so painful, too painful to look at directly. This begins to rob all the characters of any humanity. To focus on the mundane in this way removes all mundane humanity from the characters. People who are so consumed by loss and grief are unnatural, they have no time to be petty, bored, irritated or simply to laugh when they see someone trip up in an amusing fashion.

These are the characters that hide in short stories. It isn’t that they are one dimensional, they are more accurately described as types. In short stories we can accept that we will be shown a portrait of a type; the true character will only ever be undeveloped and implied. We will not be shown enough to see a real character. Trevor shows us everything, but develops no character.

In short bursts The Story of Lucy Gault is a beautifully written and moving story. If you have the morbid constitution to survive a longer stint of misery, it may even work as a fine novella. This is no novel, however. This is only a criticism because The Story of Lucy Gault hangs somewhere in between a short story and a novel, without really being either. The breadth of the story either requires a further narrative distance or real character development to sustain even a short 230 pages.