The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor

Civil strife blights lives as well as land in the work of Ireland's master of memory. Patricia Craig surveys his territory

In his novels and stories, William Trevor has often explored the ownership of land and property in Ireland. The rancour of hot-headed insurgents is opposed to "Big House" sangfroid, and all the unspoken accommodations that underlie this central schism. His masterly story, "The News from Ireland", has the weight of historical misdeeds crying out for redress, even if redress in the form of inertia – letting events run their course and the big house disintegrate.

The Story of Lucy Gault, Trevor's striking and resonant new novel, treats conditions in the country as the conduit of a domestic tragedy. It opens in 1921, during the civil war, a time when the Irish big house was most pervasively under threat. "The death," Elizabeth Bowen wrote in The Last September (1929), "execution rather – of ... three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness." Politically motivated arsonists are on the loose. In this novel, landowner Capt Everard Gault fires a warning shot at three marauders in the night, coming up the drive with petrol cans. Inadvertently he injures one of them. Dire repercussions spiral outwards from this event.

What's evoked at this point is the special unease and instability that living in Ireland engenders; but soon the focus narrows, as the child of the house comes centre-stage. Lucy Gault, eight in 1921, very nearly suffers a fate akin to that of Lucy Gray in Wordsworth's ballad. What actually happens is almost worse, as ideas of retribution (but retribution for what?) and unutterably malign chance become entwined. Trevor's last novel, Death in Summer, featured a stolen child; this one has a lost child, lost to parents, lost to a "normal" upbringing, lost to life's fulfillments. It's a powerful story, full of lacerating implications – and all the more powerful for being understated.

"Petrified" is the word Trevor uses to describe the eventual condition of Lahardane, the County Cork house that survived the Troubles, and where Lucy Gault – first grown up, then grown old – works at her embroidery or reads the novels of Trollope. It's as far removed from mainstream activity as you can get. All kinds of upheavals, wars and social revolutions, are enacted elsewhere. We reach a time when the streets of the town of Enniseala are full of foreign tourists, and people walk about with telephones clamped to their ears.

As time passes, the bleak events assume a pattern dictated by the working out of strands of compunction, possibly misplaced. The guilt suffusing much of Trevor's narrative is out of proportion to the initial wrong, as are the punishments exacted. In the hands of a master storyteller, though, the discrepancy is a source of richness, with its oblique connection to the canker at the heart of bygone social arrangements in Ireland, and their lingering effects.

The Story of Lucy Gault is a thoughtful and eloquent undertaking, written with all Trevor's grace and finesse (though with only a muted gesture in the direction of his characteristically satirical standpoint). It is charged throughout with a pervasive disquiet, and a plangent melancholy.

Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore is due from Bloomsbury in November