Weathering by Lucy Wood

Weathering tells the story of a family: Ada and her small daughter Pepper and Ada’s mother, Pearl, who also happens to be dead. Ada and Pepper have returned to Pearl’s house by the river to clean it out and do it up before selling it and moving on. In the beginning Ada releases Pearl’s ashes into the river, and through this act the woman appears. I’m not a fan of ghost stories, in general, but this is not exactly a ghost story. A story with a ghost in it, with a twist, is perhaps more accurate.

The three female characters are the real core of the book, as we come to understand their relationships through lives which are led surprisingly separately. Pepper, the youngest of the three (she’s only 7) has lived a life being dragged around from place to place by her mother, never staying anywhere very long and never getting attached. She is terrified of going to school, school having always been a source of conflict in her and her mother’s life. She finds Pearl’s house both interesting and boring; out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but watch the river pass by. Then she discovers her grandmother’s cameras, her books about birds, her photographs, and through the media of photograph she begins to fix herself in her own life. Pepper is an absorbing character, strangely authentic despite having a voice beyond her years. She grows to love the new house, manages to settle, despite her reservations, at the local school. For Pepper, being at their Grandmother’s house allows her to set down some roots, to settle.

Pepper’s trajectory is quite different to that of her mother’s. Ada is rootless, deliberately so. She is conflicted and guilty about her escape from her mother’s house, not eager to return. From the beginning she is clear that her presence there is temporary, she is only going to be there long enough to fix up the house and sell it. She doesn’t want to reconnect with the other villagers, all of which are suffering the isolation and degradation of a village under decay. Yet somehow she gets suckered in. Whilst reflecting on what it is that drove her to leave, the loneliness and her awkward relationship with Pearl, her determination to leave it all behind for a life which is equally uncertain wavers. Will she set down roots in this place where her own awkward daughter seems to be settling in? I’ll let you read the novel to find that out.

Then there is Pearl. Pearl is the most nebulous, least settled of the characters. Perhaps that’s because she’s the ghost, but her character is like the mist rising from the fields: impossible to grasp. She begins in the river, eventually making her way all the way to the house. Wherever the water goes, whichever form it is in, she can follow. She clings, wanting to remain, to understand. Eventually she reveals herself: first to Pepper, who has never met her before, and later to Ada. Through their quiet interactions, the love buried deep within their silent relationship unfolds and we learn how Pearl herself, seeming blended into the landscape, had longed to escape, had intended to, and only set down her roots reluctantly. As she describes here:

“Why did she do it? After all it was always a trial, what with the cold in winter that made her face so stiff. Or clouds of midges in summer, the devils biting her wrists and eyelids. Rain wrecking everything. Winds knocking the tripod over. Difficult to go for a piss without at least some of it trickling down her leg in the hurry to get it over with before some walker came along.

But she knew why. She could remember exactly why, even now. For the way that time seemed to slow down and stretch, measured in the river’s ripples rather than by clocks and mealtimes. For the invisibility. For the hush. To forget. To make some sort of record – but of what she wasn’t sure exactly. To notice things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed: dragonflies hunting, the patterns of light, the specific way that water poured over a dipper’s back.”

The landscape itself is the pivot around which the book revolves. The isolated house, the endless flowing of water: the river, rain, snow, ice; its dripping in puddles, the lightning. The presence of the landscape is quite visceral in this book, heavily focused throughout the story and described with infinite beauty, like here:

“It had been raining forever. Sallow days, like something woollen left on the line too long, its colours rinsed out. The trees smeared into wet air. There was no going out but the woods and river looked different every day and she kept watching them from the window, not wanting to miss anything.

She turned the page. It was late afternoon: just on the cusp between light and dark. What her mother called dimpsy even though Pepper had never heard anyone else call it that. It was hard to see the next picture and when she looked up it had suddenly gone very dark, the sky turning the same green as boggy water. The wind knocked against the house. Lightning lit the sky like an X-ray, showing the pale bones of the trees. Pepper stood in the window and watched, remembering her own bones showing up on a screen when she’d swallowed that bit of metal which was stuck in her chest.”

The landscape is so damp, there is such wetness and cold in this wintery book that I found myself shivering on the train whilst reading it. It was almost a depressing influence, the endless boggy dampness, the damage and decay it causes.

Weathering is a beautiful and clever book. It is a story about the weather, about the house being worn to decay by weather, about how we become weathered to each other and our homes. All of the women follow a similar path, becoming attached to a place which seems to do its utmost to reject them. They become weathered to each other, despite their apparent difference in desire. The beautiful descriptions of the landscape, the river, the endless rain and snow form a stunning backdrop to a delicately balanced story. Perhaps it was the cold, the rain, the sense of isolation and decay, the beautiful descriptions and language, but this book is heavily reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, a comparison which could only be complimentary being both a brilliant novel and a personal favourite of mine.

It made me shiver, it made me cold and damp and made me long for roaring fires and a warm blanket to cuddle down under as I read. I was charmed by Pepper, frustrated by Ada and Pearl. The behaviour of the villagers made me smile, their burdens so familiar and yet so unique. It is a cold and unwelcoming landscape in which the warmth of three women stands out as a testament to mother/daughter relationships, the difficulties of them and the rewards.   

School for Love by Olivia Manning

I’ve had School for Love sitting on my shelves for a mere eternity, after having bought it on impulse on a recommendation from a trusted source. Years passed. The shelf grew dusty and the book has had time to yellow before I eventually stuck it on my TBR list and it finally saw the light of day. What a shame it took me so long.

School for Love tells the story of Felix, a boy living in the Middle East during World War II. His father, a soldier, has been killed and when his mother dies from typhus he is left an orphan. This is how he ends up going to live with his Aunt, Miss Bohun, who lives in Jerusalem. Miss Bohun is not a blood relation, but was adopted by his father’s family as a child. In all his life Felix has never been to see her, and all he knows about her is that his mother never wanted to visit her. Why, he didn’t know or understand.

There is a reason, of course. Miss Bohun is one of the most appalling, mean and reprehensible characters I have ever encountered in literature. If there is no other reason to read this book, the dreadfulness of Miss Bohun is it. She is truly memorable. When Felix arrives, he is welcomed by Miss Bohun who almost immediately begins to discuss expenses. Felix can stay with them, she says, but his share of the cost will be eleven pounds. Immediately we know something is awry, as the vulnerable Felix notes when catching a glimpse at the list of shared household expenses, “She did not hand him the paper but, peering at it over her arm, he noticed she had put Telephone and Kerosene down twice. He did not like to mention this.” It is this ‘not liking to mention’ things that Miss Bohun so neatly relies upon and exploits.

Living in the house with Miss Bohun is another women, Frau Leszno, who appears to be a servant, her son Nicky and an old man, Mr. Jewel, who lives in the tiny attic room. Frau Leszno is extremely hostile to Felix and it’s apparent that there is some conflict between her and Miss Bohun, a suggestion that the house is in fact Frau Leszno’s but somehow Miss Bohun has engineered things so that she is in control. Nicky, too, is quite ambivalent to Felix. The loneliness and austerity of their living conditions are almost unbearable, except for the presence of Faro the cat, who becomes the sole repository of affection for Felix in the house.

School for Love is a classic coming of age story. Felix’s trajectory is quite familiar; having come from a situation of extreme naivety, he is forced to grow up quickly and take responsibility for himself. He begins to make his own judgements, heavily influenced by the arrival of Miss Ellis who comes to live in the house when both Frau Leszno and Mr Jewel are unceremoniously ousted by the terrible Miss Bohun. Felix finds himself entranced by Miss Ellis, who is a pregnant widow and extremely pretty and who, in Felix’s words, “When Miss Ellis spoke he suddenly, with the instinct of youth, of a creature with unblemished eyes, recognised truth, truth, truth, and he knew that truth was the thing he wanted.”

But it is the awful Miss Bohun that really makes this book. Miss Bohun with her ‘charitable’ acts, her commitment to the ‘Ever Readies’ a religious group whose sole aim is to prepare for the end of days. In the house there is an ever-present power struggle, initially between Frau Leszno and Miss Bohun, and then between Miss Ellis and Miss Bohun, the conclusion of which is surprising and I won’t reveal it here. Miss Bohun sees herself as a charitable person, yet she uses her position to seek out and dominate vulnerable people like Felix and Mr Jewel, takes them in with her initial kindness then gradually exploit them. As described here as she explains her ‘arrangement’ with Frau Leszno:

“’Our first arrangement was that we held everything in common. She supplied some pieces of furniture, it is true, and I supplied others. But if she chooses to be petty and lay claim to the things she provided – well, she must just take them with her. I don’t doubt something will be found to take their place.’ Miss Bohun’s voice became cheerful as she talked. ‘I find that my troubles always sort themselves out. You can’t do better than trust in the Lord. I don’t know of any occasion when God has failed to look after me. Faith is a wonderful thing. Since I’ve found it, I’ve never had a day’s illness and as for money – well, money seeks to grow on trees! I used to be such a nervous ailing sort of girl! I used to dread the future with nothing but my own little private income – a mere two hundred pounds a year – but how wonderfully things have worked out for me.’ There was in Miss Bohun’s tone something exultant that held Felix amazed.”

She is the ultimate manipulator, taking people in then gradually taking them to pieces. Yet there are many questions about her behaviour: is Miss Bohun knowingly terrible, or does she truly believe she is doing people good and all her good fortune comes from her belief in God and her commitment to the Ever Readies? Does she truly believe she takes the destitute and offers them salvation, only to have her ‘gift’ unappreciated? These are the questions that Felix wrestles with, as he watches Miss Bohun and her machinations unfolding. Can a person truly care for others when they truly believe the world is destined to end? Does Miss Bohun really believe in the twisted logic she espouses?

Whatever the answer to those questions, the journey is fascinating. I was honestly appalled by Miss Bohun, the level to which she would sink whilst seemingly believing in her goodness was hard to comprehend. Yet there are people like Miss Bohun out there in the world, doing terrible things in the name of charity and salvation. The veil gradually drops from the innocent Felix’s eyes. Can he escape from her grasp, or will he too find himself inadequate to the challenge of Miss Bohun?

School for Love is an excellent book, engaging, funny, appalling (I’ve used that word a lot, but it’s very appropriate) and clever. It is the story of a women who has not loved and what that lack of love has done to her; it is a story of power, control and manipulation. It is a story about growing up, about the nature of ‘wickedness’ and what that really means in the real world. It has one of the most memorable characters I have ever encountered, skilfully played out on a canvas so tight you can feel the tension just waiting to break. 

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

 I’d heard a lot of conflicting reports about Gone Girl, even before acquiring the battered second-hand copy that’s been sitting on my shelf for a good few months unread. I think the conflicting reports really put me off reading it, no one wants to start a book thinking they’re going to hate it, and originally Gone Girl wasn’t going to be in my #TBR20 list. Plus someone at work vocally let out the ending, having seen the film and thought it ‘terrible’, which also put me off (and nearly resulted in a lynching of that individual). Then I let my daughter pick a book for me, and for some reason she was determined that Gone Girl was going to be it.

Thus committed, I decided to put Gone Girl higher up the list. I sighed. I cursed the weirdly soft cover that makes my fingers itch just thinking about it. I cursed the press and the reviews I’d read and the underlying feeling of certainty that I was just going to hate it. Then I started reading. Then I read some more, and before I knew it I’d finished the book. Did I hate it? No. Is it a great book? No.

In case you don’t already know the story, Gone Girl is the story of a marriage coming apart. Nick and Amy have been married 5 years. They were forced to move from New York, Amy’s home, to Missouri (Nick’s home) due to redundancies and sickly relatives. Then, on the morning of Nick & Amy’s 5^th wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing. Somehow Nick doesn’t seem as sad about it as he should be, and soon the suspicion falls to him; perhaps because that’s exactly how Amy planned it.

The story is told in alternating chapters from Nick’s then Amy’s point of view. It soon becomes very apparent that neither Nick nor Amy are very nice people. In fact Amy, it appears, is something of a psychopath and Nick is an adulterous coward and a liar. I think that pretty much sums them up. I can understand the number of people who have complained that neither are sympathetic characters.

Fortunately for me I am not put off by unsympathetic characters, and in fact I rather enjoy them more than sympathetic ones. This whole novel swings back and forth between the two characters as they sink deeper and deeper into their own depravities. In Amy’s absence both characters come to appreciate something about the other, that perhaps they are better together than apart whilst recognising that neither is exactly ‘catch of the year’. As Nick reflects here:

“[…]Amy was blooming large in my mind. She was gone, and yet she was more present than anyone else. I’d fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working – I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I’d spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her. I became a student of arcane so I could keep her interested: the Lake Poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.”

Okay, so the punctuation is a bit iffy, but this is the 21^st Century and no one cares about that now, right (forcing myself not to care)? Gone Girl covers a lot of ground about fakery and what is ‘real’, the difficulties of establishing a true and honest identity in an era defined by relentless advertising and media, in which the idea of ‘self’ has never been more under attack (or so it seems. Always hard to judge against earlier eras). This is particularly drawn out in the character of Amy who, it appears, is always playing a role whether it’s ‘Amazing Amy’ the character from her parents’ series of books, obsessive Amy, the ‘too nice to be true’ Amy from her diary, or ‘Cool girl’ which is an identity I encountered in this book then saw all over the place. As Amy describes here:

“That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry: they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, co-workers, strangers – giddy over those awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”

This kind of social commentary peppers the book, with Amy and Nick’s disastrous relationship serving as a pivot for a deeper view of human interaction in the media age. It makes for an entertaining read. At its heart the concept is a bit silly, and the execution edges on the ridiculous, but even so I enjoyed watching Nick and Amy slowly tear each other to pieces realising along the way that perhaps they were still the best person for the other. The lengths to which they each will go to punish the other are extraordinary, and in the end the story is not in any way believable, but it is fun and entertaining and rotten to the core and I enjoyed it. 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I had this crazy idea all of a sudden, that I was going to go and read as many of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted books as I could. This was a moment of madness; I am already committed to TBR20 (with 3 books still to go), and the longlist is called a longlist for a reason (dur, because it is long) and somehow this whole idea spiralled me into a fundamental question about my relationship with reading, this blog and what I’m doing it all for. Which is perhaps an entry for another day when my mind is clearer and I’ve worked it all out. Anyway, the point is that it’s against this backdrop that I read Station Eleven and in some ways it is the book itself which prompted the question. Not necessarily a terrible thing.

Station Eleven is a post apocalyptic novel. The story begins with a play, a production of King Lear. The actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, has a heart attack on stage. A man watching the play, Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic, tries to save him. He fails. As Arthur’s body is rolled away Jeevan comforts a child actress, Kirsten, who plays a non-speaking role as one of Lear’s daughters – something of a dreamlike scene – who had grown fond of Arthur. As Jeevan leaves the theatre he is contacted by a friend who works at a hospital about a virulent strain of flu which is flooding the hospital. Everyone is dying. So the story begins.

Within a week most of the population has died. There is no way to know how much. The usual happens: the lights go out, TV goes off, the internet shuts down, people shoot people in the streets, food runs out, etc. The story of Station Eleven centres around those people connected to the Lear actor, Arthur Leander and we see both the before and after story, again all centring around Leander. We learn of his ex-wife, Miranda, who was an artist, creator of a series of graphic novels called ‘Station Eleven’ from which the title of the book comes. Station Eleven is an advanced space station that is designed to resemble a small planet. It was stolen by Dr. Eleven, a man who took his name from the station, after the Earth was overtaken by a hostile force. Now Station Eleven hides in deep space and its inhabitants are torn between remaining hidden, accepting their new lives, or returning to Earth. As with most worlds, there is an underclass – the Undersea – rebels who seek to return to their roots. The comic book serves as both a reflection of this new world and an idea of how it could be.

The story spins back and forth between the before and after, though rather deliberately. The stories of each of the protagonists unfolds as they each come to terms with their existing world and the world that is unfolding. There is some beautiful writing along the way, like here:

“No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities.”

There are also some interesting references, like the line from Star Trek Voyager “Survival is insufficient” which as a Seven-of-Nine fan was kind of nice to see there, and there’s a sense that this is a post apocalyptic novel for a new generation, though the references back to Shakespeare are frequent. I think there’s a cleverness there that I’ve missed, but there’s a general sense of a cleverness missed, a self-referencing, the plot a little too deliberate and the slipping back and forth through time more deliberate than unsettling.

Though I was not in the best frame of mind for reading Station Eleven, I’m not sure that’s why I didn’t really like it. There are a few core things which made this a book that was difficult for me to like. For a start, I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction; I think on this genre there is simply nothing left to say (that may, of course, simply be my lack of imagination) or perhaps nothing left to say that McCarthy’s The Road didn’t already do with impeccable brevity. I don’t think Mandel brings anything new to it here. Yes, she talks of the internet, of the plenty which is not appreciated, the toys we would have to give up and their marvellous complexities: mobile phones, laptop computers, etc. The theatre continues. Some people regret the passing, some people revel in it.

Then there was Station Eleven itself, the comic book. I liked the comic book, I liked the themes it covered and I found myself more interested in the idea of the comic book than the book I was reading. I wished Station Eleven existing, I’d read it. But I’m not sure the point of it gelled here. It just seemed strangely ancillary, and it wasn’t alone. There was a lot that seemed strangely ancillary, disjointed. The prophet, the book about Leander’s life, Clark, the tattoos. Perhaps Mandel was trying to point out that life post-apocalypse would be disjointed, disconnected; that there would be gaps, stories untold, that life would not be a seamless narrative. But that’s how it is now; there is no seamless narrative.

It’s not a bad novel, it would be wrong for me to say that. I enjoyed, to a degree, reading the book and it’s well written and interesting. Perhaps it is simply my prejudice against the post-apocalyptic novel expressing itself here, but for me this book just didn’t quite work; something about it just wasn’t fully realised. It felt like an unfulfilled potential, that Mandel was skirting around something brilliant and just didn’t quite grasp it.

What it did achieve was the huge questioning around how and why I read. Something about reading this book, the feeling of missing the mark, made me realise that reading had become almost a soulless activity. That the books that are great, the ones that really move me are infrequent. This has become particularly true since I’ve been reading more. The more I read, the more infrequently the books that mean something to me become, the more books that I read the more ‘middling’ ones crop up. And it becomes more infrequent for me to return to a loved classic. I think this is something that worries me, that the more driven I am to read the latest and latest books, the further away I become from the re-read, the delving into a familiar friend, the books that stir something meaningful in my mind. I think I am in danger of becoming nothing more than a consumer, and that’s not what I want to be. There is reading as an act of consumption and reading as an act of nutrition. I feel I have moved too far away from the latter. That’s not what reading is for me.