Well written, but the plot was too boring.

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.

What a heartbreaking story.

This book, for me, is a modern Victorian novel, if ever there could be such a thing. The story seems rather non-20th century, but it is not entirely implausible, given the setting and time. Trevor's writing is straightforward, but with enough elegance to convey the flair of a mid-20th century writer. Disappointing I found the last sections; the passing of time seems rather brusque, given the novel's slower pace. However, I recommend this read without hesitation.

This is a book about place and loss by a truly beautiful writer who concerns himself primarily with the fascinating vicissitudes and weaknesses of the human mind and spirit. He examines our human failing in such a way that we can marvel at and ponder them. I generally prefer his short stories, but he needed a longer form to explore these events. It is interesting to note, however, that this is remarkably spare for a novel. The plot draws you in and, though unusual, could very well happen. From the title, there is the essence of a legend which he weaves in like a kind of chorus - the thoughts of the town. He also uses madness to suggest alternative versions of the story. I don't want to spoil it, so I won't say anything directly about the plot details. It concerns the formation of Ireland as an independent nation and what happens to those who had to move aside for this to happen. There is self-exile and self-denial based on the need to be forgiven or the inability to forgive oneself and there is pain from this that is visceral. The ability to forgive and find beauty is portrayed as secondary to loss yet it is more mysterious. Also, people who have voluntarily made personal sacrifices find peace. He manages to communicate an interesting concept that a piece of land and a house can take precedence in people's lives over the need for community or recognition of political boundaries. Also, the meaning in the story is in the details and small gestures and thoughts of the characters.

Wonderful bits to share from the final chapter- shouldn't give much away:

"Take from the forest its mystery and there is standing timber. Take from the sea its mystery and there is salted water."

"Her tranquility is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard. and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told, and is the reason for its being: is what they know, besides the gentle fruit of misfortune's harvest? They like to think so: she has sensed it that they do."

Perhaps he is telling a bit much here, but he does it in a such a poetic, succinct, and slightly mysterious way.

A beautiful, melancholy book about coming to terms with what has been. Really good.

Read in a day. The most captivating book I've read this year. It has a haunting and dreamlike quality. Lucy was 8 when her Protestant parents felt they had to leave their Irish home in County Cork in 1921.
Her father shot but lightly wounded a youth who had intended, with others, to burn their house down. Lucy wished to stay, and ran away through woods. She fell and broke her leg, and was unable to return home. Her parents, finding discarded clothing where Lucy frequently bathed in the sea, thought she was drowned. It was only after they had abandoned Ireland that Lucy was found, emaciated but alive. Her parents couldn't be contacted, and Lucy grew up waiting for their return, to apologise for running away. She declined marriage to a man she loved and who loved her back, because she wanted to make peace with her parents first. Her mother died in Switzerland and her father eventually returned when she was about 38.
The plotter who was shot joined the army, and went mad due to his dreams about setting her house ablaze. After her father's death she visited him regularly in the asylum to play snakes and ladders! She grew old in the old house in the end. Such a sad novel, I suppose about redemption and forgiveness.

Not my favorite Trevor book. I thought it was well written (as all his books are) but I felt the story never realized the great potential I believed it had. I had a hard time connecting to the characters as I had in his other books. Overall I was disappointed in this one.

Exquisitely beautiful and terribly sad. I loved it.