Trevor's silences are still golden

It's almost autumn, and autumn, too, in the world of "literary fiction", when someone will reap the Booker Prize and the crop of novels hangs ripe and variously distended and polished by the demands of the market. There will be some rare fruit, tasting just of itself and all the easier, therefore, to overlook.

William Trevor offers us, in this his 13th novel, one such. The Story of Lucy Gault broaches what seems to be one of the richest challenges an artist can meet in age - the appalling discretion and compromise that attend tragedy in our lives, and the refinement to our moral selves this may bring.

When I add that the novel is preoccupied with what is not said, not done, do not be put off. Trevor has written a novel as lovely as his extraordinary novella, Reading Turgenev, which seemed to give expression to the air between the words.

It is Ireland, 1921. The big houses are under threat of the torch, the Ascendancy families embattled. The Gaults at Lahardane are a happy family of three, Everard the retired captain, Heloise his beautiful wife, and their little daughter Lucy, who loves her home so much that this love brings about her impossibly sad story.

One night, three men break into Lahardane. The captain fires a shot. A man is wounded.

The Gaults decide to leave in the bad atmosphere that this shot has intensified. Lucy takes another decision, lives another life altogether than the loving, declining exile of her uxorious parents, who eke out with formal modesty a dwindling legacy and their crescent love.

"Why are you so good to me, Everard? Why do you listen so well?" asks Heloise.

"Perhaps because I love you," her husband replies. Love is attention in this book, which repays attention and somehow captures certain kinds of love, each of them thwarted or cut short, but even then flowering in a way that may not be anticipated, yet is completely believable.

Hardest of all to write are those works of the poetic imagination in which apparently little, but actually everything, happens, because you have to make the reader, by fanning his mind with suggestion, share the absent storms set up.

Lucy finds and loses love, living in a home that has many of the gauzy yet concrete qualities of such houses in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen.

Her life, and that of the man her father's shot wounded, grow together. Lucy in age is tended by nuns, who "will be displaced, as the family that is still hers was ... But it would hurt her visitors to say that maybe it has to be again and she held that back, an unimportant lie of silence".

This book unpacks silence and reveals the important truths. It is a beauty, redeeming quite the nearvulgarity of Felicia's Story. May Trevor flourish to add to his own rich autumn.