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.
“I often wonder about
the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city’s
sidewalks. One sees them day and night, you and old, well dressed, in rags –
often with shopping bags – picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers,
envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and what they’re
after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Sometimes I
think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be
self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers
drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers
who write at all.” 
“It is not at all
self-evident what boredom is. It implies, for example, an idea of duration. It
would be crazy to say, For three seconds there, I was bored. It implies
indifference but, at the same time, requires a degree of attention. One cannot
properly be said to be bored by anything one has not noticed, or in a coma, or
asleep. But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and
bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is no accident that
boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. They flourish in a
single region of the mind. Embarrassment, though, on the scale of things to
feel, is trivial. It does not even constitute – as do humiliation, envy, guilt –
an actual emotion, a condition of the soul. Its command of the attention is
absolute. Someone who needs and does not have a handkerchief is likely to be as
preoccupied as someone scared to death. Most of the safest form in this is established
by form, by sameness, by rote. For others, the stereotyped is most
embarrassing. It is by no means clear on which side of this question humor is.
A surprise can be comic, as can a certainty. Leaving humor out of it, there
exists embarrassment pure. Alas.”
