William Trevor and the Suspension of Disbelief

Testing the line between myth and reality in ‘The Story of Lucy Gault’

Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

In Fools of Fortune, William Trevor’s protagonist Willie observes, ‘’We Irish were intrigued, my father used to say, by stories with a degree of unreality in them.’’ In The Story of Lucy Gault, Trevor put that intrigue to the ultimate literary test: Just how far can…