claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

One of the Boys packs a huge emotional punch. This is the unflinching story of an abusive father and his two sons after he takes them away from their mother, told using wonderfully stark prose. I was particularly affected by how the younger son begins to copy his father in believing that his mother deserved the beatings she received. It was heartbreaking to to see him continually hope that even after every broken promise his father would change. I read this book in one gulp, gripping the pages and willing the boys to escape. Only wish it could have been longer.
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The story of Lucy Gault starts when Lucy is eight, almost nine in 1921, when her father shoots through the shoulder a possible member of the IRA who has come to burn the 'big house' that the Gault family have lived in for generations. These actions - the possible burning, and the shooting - start a chain of events that change the Gault's lives, and the man who is shot, for ever.

The book is suffused with a feeling of melancholy (in fact like all of Trevor's books that I've read) as well as a kind of dreamy detachment. This time I tried to work out how he achieves it, and I think it has a lot to do with how Trevor uses passive construction of sentences: "The two men on the promenade were watched from far away" for example, and also with a sense of longing, and of time inevitably passing. Anyway, however he does it, it is wonderful.

There are sections in the novel where I was desperate for resolution; willing for things to happen, which of course, when they did were not exactly as I hoped. Near the end there is a passing reference to an old bicycle, and for those that have read The Story of Lucy Gault

Spoiler

did you read this as meaning that Lucy and Ralph do once again meet briefly? I'd be really interested to know what you thought. <\spoiler>

I'm already sad that one day soon, since Trevor died last year, I will have read all of his work.

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I especially liked the nature writing in At Hawthorn Time, and gradually came to care about the characters, and worried for what was going to happen at the end. But I'm also not sure it needed its beginning (a car crash) and its ending (who is in the car crash). It's a quiet book, and perhaps it would have worked better for me if it had stayed that way.
I also wasn't sure about some of the internal voices of the characters (lots of cliches), which sometimes were hard to distinguish from each other.
But a solid, nice read.

3.5 stars. I read this first when I was about twenty, and my recollection now (age 50) is that I loved it, although I might be remembering the film more than the book. This time around I did enjoy it: Spark's peculiar style, the repetition, the characters of the girls and their teacher, the forward looking moments, but also it felt quite slight; somehow there wasn't enough meat in the story. It was nice though to read a book that was mostly about women.

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