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.   

Reading Woolf: Between the Acts

Between the Acts was Woolf’s last novel, and she died before finishing editing the book. Having enjoyed so many of Woolf’s books, I’m sad to say that this was another that just didn’t gel for me. It has a lot of promise, more so than Flush, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark and I wonder if Woolf had had the time or inclination to work on it further, whether a tighter book would have resulted? It is impossible to know.

Between the Acts takes place entirely in the course of a single afternoon during which a play is performed, the summer pageant, in the gardens of Pointz Hall. The story centres around the family: Isa (Isabelle) a young, unhappy mother; Mr. Oliver, her aged father in law; Mrs Swithin, Mr. Oliver’s sister; and Giles, Isa’s husband. Through the characters of Isa and Giles we see played out passion and ennui; the characters of Mr. Oliver and his sister Mrs Swithin juxtapose faith and reason. Joining the family for lunch is Mrs. Manresa, a flirtatious and sexually appealing women and William Dodge, a homosexual and an ‘artist’ though he rejects the title.

The story opens with a lot of promise. “It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool.” Isa, the main force of the story, is sitting in the room as her father in law is discussing practical village matters with a gentleman farmer, Rupert Haines, and his wife. Isa is reflecting on the emotions Rupert Haines, the man in grey, stirs within her. She suspects them to be love. In the meantime, the family is talking. Isa, in spite of her outward calm, is troubled. Her marriage, it seems, is also troubled with suggestions of infidelities on her husband’s part and her own struggling to understand how exactly she feels about her husband.

The family are preparing for the pageant, each person fitting to a familiar role. Mrs Swithin puts up the sign, she and her brother talk about the weather. Isa sits quietly, yet inside she is seething with emotion: frustration which rises from her marital situation and the endless cycle of repetition, the repeating of roles from one year to the next. “Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, it would be wet or fine; and every year it was – one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: ‘The girl screamed and hit him about the face with the hammer.”

Enter Mrs Manresa and her friend William Dodge. Dodge inspires different emotions in each of the characters. Underlying, yet not spoken, is his homosexuality which stirs disgust in some, sympathy in others. When Giles returns home from work he is stirred by the presence of Mrs Manresa, as is Mr. Oliver, who is seen as something of a ‘wild child’ not behaving to normal etiquette and flirting quite openly with the men. Isa is annoyed with Mrs Manresa’s affect on her husband and the suggestion of further infidelity.

The weather is fine and so follows the pageant. Penned by Miss La Trobe, the event is something about the ages of men. Or something like that. I don’t know. At this point I completely lost the plot (or the plot was lost); the entire pageant part of the book was a cacophony of words that meant absolutely nothing to me. Except this part, perhaps:

“Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the centre?

Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.”

I don’t know if Woolf was hinting there or if not, but certainly I got the impression that the plot really was nothing and as a consequence I had no idea what it was about. Scenes opened, scenes closed. Lines were started, lines were lost. There was interval upon interval, many costume changes, we followed this character then that character. No one seemed to be able to finish a sentence or thought. No one seemed to know what was going on.

This pretty much bombed Between the Acts for me. The novel, from some point after the first third, was like the closing part of Orlando: fevered and stuttering; a whirling jumble of words, ideas and imagery. I couldn’t follow it. So much murmuring, so much half-finished dialogue. Too…unfinished, perhaps?  It was a bewildering read; despite its short length, it was a struggle to finish it. I still have no idea what I was reading. Can anybody help me?

Between the Acts receives a bewildered 5 out of 10 Biis. It’s early promise just didn’t flow through. 

Reading Woolf: The Years

In embarking on a thorough reading of Woolf’s works, The Years was one of the books I was most interested in. I’m not sure why this is; perhaps it was something to do with reading Woolf’s diaries in which she spent so much time talking about her book ‘The Pargiters’, as it was originally titled; a book she spent a considerable amount of time writing and about which she was so conflicted. Coming down from something as extraordinary as The Waves, it’s perhaps not surprising that this change in direction caused Woolf so much angst. This was also the book that Leonard Woolf lied to her about for fear that telling her it was a failure would send her spiralling into a further bout of depression. This alone generates a certain degree of intrigue.

The Years is an historical novel, charting the fortunes of a family – The Pargiters of the original title – over the pre and post Great War period. The Pargiters are a ‘well to do’ family, well connected and reasonably wealthy. The novel opens as Mrs Pargiter, who has been unwell for some time, is dying. Awaiting her death are her husband Colonel Abel Pargiter (who we learn, very early on, has a mistress) and her children: Eleanor, Morris, Martin, Milly, Delia and Rose. Edward, the eldest Pargiter, is away at university. As Mrs Pargiter dies we learn key distinctions in the personalities of the children, with two in particular standing out: Eleanor who reacts with compassion both towards her mother and to her small sister Rose who has suffered a fright, and Delia who is the only one who reacts with relief and an apparent lack of sadness at her mother’s death.

“’It has come,’ Delia said to herself, ‘it has come!’ An extraordinary feeling of relief and excitement possessed her. Her father was pacing from one drawing-room to the other; she followed him in; but she avoided him. They were too much alike; each knew what the other was feeling.”

Delia senses both her own desire for her mother’s death and her father’s, whilst the others react more standardly with tears and open sadness. It is a notable distinction, created with a few, well placed, sentences.

Having established the character of Delia so clearly, she then disappears from the book almost entirely until the end. Aside from hints of some sort of disgrace, we know nothing of what happens to Delia after this point. Instead the book focuses largely on Eleanor, the eldest daughter who stays with her father, who never marries, who travels the world by herself. It is, perhaps, the most interesting part of The Years that it focuses largely on the fortunes of the female characters – these being the people least likely to achieve anything, the ones who would stay home from the war, who would not sit at the Bar or enter commerce or government or hold a distinguished post at a university. We learn about Kitty, a cousin of the Pargiters, whom Edward wished to marry but who married Lord Lasswade in line with her mother’s wishes. There is always the sense about Kitty that she suited the life that she chose (or was chosen for her) yet it was not the life that she wanted. There are Sara (also known as Sally, I found this very confusing) and Maggie; more cousins, one of which married a Frenchman and the other of which is a storyteller, a kind of fantasist who doesn’t seem to do anything in particular (yet she is very interesting all the same). There is Rose who goes to prison for throwing a brick, Rose the activist who appears, like Delia, more often through rumour and reference than in direct presence.

Through the eyes of these female characters, disenfranchised and limited in their options despite their wealth and status, we see the world changing. Yet it is Eleanor, I think, who embodies the most interest in this book. Eleanor is there from beginning to end. She suffers ennui, she furrows her small path through life always observing if not partaking in the events that occur. She reflects on subjects like marriage, like life, like war yet there is always the sense that Eleanor is outside all of these things. As she reflects here:

“My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked about her life. And I haven’t got one, she thought. Oughtn’t a life to be something you could handle and produce? – a life of seventy odd years. But I’ve only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I’m the only person here, he thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying – the night Kitty’s engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying, Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I’m the youngest person in this omnibus; now I’m the oldest…Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s “I” at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting-paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene. And then they say, she thought, “We’ve been talking about you!””

Is The Years a failure? Compared to the poetic masterpiece that is The Waves, I think I can understand the judgement. The Years is a long book, yet it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Unlike Woolf’s more challenging works (and arguably, brilliant), it is a very easy book to read, quite entertaining and it flows very easily. Despite its length, it didn’t take very long to read. So it felt lightweight, compared to her other works. And this is perhaps the source of the problem with The Years, it fails by comparison.

That doesn’t mean to say I felt the book a failure in itself. It includes Woolf’s excellent characterisation, her insights and ranging eye. She continues to stab characters down in a few words, pinning them like a butterfly to a board with lightning quick observations. Her focus on the feminine experience, remembering that this covered a period during which women did not have the vote, and she shows how it is possible – through the characters of Eleanor and Rose – to exercise a political influence in spite of the lack of traditional franchisement. It is a lesson, perhaps, to those who throw out those pithy remarks about voting ‘I don’t know why people don’t vote; it’s their only chance to have a say in the political landscape’ when in fact this book shows that there are a myriad ways to be politically active, rather than simply putting an ‘X’ in a box once every 5 years. Perhaps the problem with The Years is that it covers so much ground that the focus become lost, the meaning hovers somewhere in the air above the book and its power is curtailed as a result.

I don’t think The Years is a failure. I think if I had read it before Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse or The Waves I would have thought more highly of it. And perhaps it is one of those books that benefits from re-reading, from slow and detailed examination. It was a pleasurable book to read, enjoyable in a way Woolf’s works often aren’t. It wasn’t a failure, and I don’t think it was a book that Woolf should have been depressed about. The problem is that Woolf had set the bar so high. For any novelist of calibre, this book stands up as an accomplished piece of work. For a writer of Woolf’s calibre, perhaps it does not.

The Years receives an enjoyable 7 out of 10 Biis.  

Reading Woolf: Flush

This is going to be a very short review, because I didn’t really like Flush at all. In fact I read it in a single day, perhaps not in the best frame of mind as my son was in A&E having been run over by a cyclist (my son’s fault, as it happens). Fortunately my son was fine, but the book wasn’t. Sorry Mrs. Woolf, not your best.

Flush is the story of a cocker spaniel dog, the property of the renowned poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (famed for the lines “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”). Through Flush we learn something of the life of EBB and her relationship with fellow poet Robert Browning whom she married against the wishes of her family, resulting in her disinheritance. Flush walks a fine line between representing the life of the dog, his jealousies and desires, against the backdrop of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. I’m not sure the balance is entirely right. What we know of Flush’s life has been constructed by Woolf from Barrett Browning’s various correspondences. There are some apparent inaccuracies, but not knowing much about Elizabeth Barrett Browning beyond her poetry, I wouldn’t have know this had it not been pointed out in the introduction.

 

We join Flush at the beginning of his life, born to the family of Barrett Browning’s contemporary Mary Russell Mitford. Mitford gave Flush to the sickly Barrett Browning as a companion, and at first Flush was excessively spoiled: fed delicacies from Elizabeth’s plate, fussed over and kept indoors. At first Flush chafes against this treatment, but later he learns to love it, to recognise his spoiled nature. Everything changes, however, when Elizabeth starts corresponding with Robert Browning. Suddenly her affections turn and Flush finds himself in the cold.

Perhaps the most significant incident in the book is Flush’s kidnapping at the hands of a Whitechapel gang. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pays a ransom for him, against the wishes of both her family and Robert. There is the sense that this event affects both Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning intensely. Following this Elizabeth and Robert marry in secret then escape to Italy where Flush is free to roam again.

That’s pretty much the crux of the story. Barring the Whitechapel event it’s all very pedestrian and there’s not a great deal to grab the attention. Consequently I found myself quite bored reading this book. It lacked the power, the intensity of others of Woolf’s work like, say, To the Lighthouse which also focuses on quite a small event but is different entirely in character. Instead Flush is a fussy book, a little formless and lacking Woolf’s keen eye and insight to lift it beyond being a mildly interesting view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. There were elements of the book I intensely disliked, for example the focus on Flush’s ‘breeding’ and class, and I get the sense that Woolf was trying very hard to make this a book from a dog’s perspective without really giving serious thought to how different that perspective would be. Consequently it is a book that feels too heavily overlaid with human concerns and one wonders why she didn’t simply write a book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning as that would, I think, have made a much more interesting subject.

In the end Flush felt like a failure. It’s not a terrible book, but it’s not a particularly good one either. In reading Woolf’s diaries it is apparent that at the time of writing and editing Flush she was also absorbed in writing The Pargiters (what became The Years) and perhaps because of this Flush feels like an interlude, thrown out, perhaps, to bring in some income whilst Woolf worked through the difficulties in bringing The Years to life. A huge disappointment following The Waves and perhaps not surprising that Woolf herself referred to it as a ‘silly little book’, an opinion I’m not in disagreement with.

Flush receives a disappointed 4 out of 10 Biis. 

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who openly plumbs her own history in her work, famously so in her debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which chronicles her childhood as an adoptive daughter, living in the house of a woman obsessed with the apocalypse and highly homophobic, which is unfortunate for Winterson who is a lesbian. I haven’t read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, though it is a book which has been sitting on my shelf for some time, and having read Why Be Happy… I think it’s about time I got around to it.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal is a memoir, a non-fictionalised account of the same events but also spanning a greater period of Winterson’s life. The memoir focuses on three significant events: her adoptive childhood and her relationship with Mrs Winterson, her emotional breakdown following the death of her mother and the end of a long-term relationship, and the search for her birth mother. Interspersed amongst these events are many fascinating observations about education, about reading, about feminism, about her love of women and women she has loved, about love, sharings of wisdom and history to name but a few. It is a difficult book to explain because of this, so perhaps I can explain by saying that whenever I read a book I mark pages of interest with a little torn strip of paper, so I can return to it and write about it or reflect on it. My copy of Why Be Happy is bursting at the seams with these little strips of paper. There is much wisdom in this book, much honestly and reflection.

Jeanette Winterson is a writer who is honest and open, she writes with passion and risk, she is funny, bright and insightful. It is, whether you know her story or not, an insightful and informative read. And it’s fun to read too. There were many points in the reading that I laughed openly, other times when I felt close to tears. Winterson is a writer who pulls emotion close to the surface, but she’s not sentimental or crass. She writes an incredible amount about love; I have seen this in her fiction, most especially in The Powerbook which is, perhaps, one of the most passionate books I have ever read. It is therefore surprising that Winterson spends much of the book convincing the reader that she doesn’t know how to love, that she learned to do it wrong. As she explains here:

“No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.

And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and stead way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to love.

But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?

Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.

Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.

We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.

In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.”

Jeanette Winterson is an intelligent and vibrant woman, she is a fighter and she fights through her fiction, she reaches and explores searching out what she wants and needs to survive, but more than to survive: to live. Coming from a working class background in the North of England (not hugely different to my own, though my mother was mine and more stable) she scrabbled and fought her way out of an appalling family situation into a degree course at Oxford (no mean feat) into a published, award winning novelist by the age of 25. She touches on all of this throughout Why Be Happy, and she does this not by being modest or with hubris but with that luminous clarity she describes about her connection with language. Whilst love may have failed her, language hasn’t and her relationship with reading, how she explored and learned from it, its intrinsic value, is inspiring. Another aspect of the book I particularly loved was the way it dipped and dove around in time. This is a feature of Winterson’s books (it has certainly appeared in all the others I’ve read) and it is one that could be frustrating but which I find very personable. Particularly in the memoir form, you get the sense that you’re following the train of Winterson’s mind where she leads you, that one thought leads to another and then to another. It places Winterson very present in the book, it is like she is talking to you. A conversation I think I would find terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

I came away from Why Be Happy with a huge respect for Winterson as a writer. It is an honest, heartfelt and intelligent book. There are so many fonts of wisdom it is impossible to write about them all here. I was a fan before, and I’m more of a fan now. She is a writer not afraid of taking a risk, she is herself and unashamed of it. She has suffered, she has lost, she has used her life and her loss and her pain and her endless search for love as a mine for her fiction and it is remarkable for it. This non-fictional account is no different. What a great book, and a great woman.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal receives a respectful 10 out of 10 Biis.