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: 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.  

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson isn’t a prolific writer, but she is a great one. Her latest offering, Lila, continues her exploration of the fictional town of Gilead, focusing this time on the wife of the Reverend John Ames. Lila appeared as a side character in both Home and, in a more prominent position, in Gilead so it was lovely to return to her here and discover her perspective. In fact I think this is the most beautiful, most stirring and poignant book of the three.

Lila’s story is filled with loneliness and absence. From the beginning, Lila has been rejected, cast out, as we learn in the opening sequence:

“The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn’t let her near them anymore because she picked them up by their tails sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches, and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats, but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held onto it and it bit her so she let it go. Why you keep pounding on that screen door? Nobody gonna want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again, and after a while night came.”

The child Lila is taken up by a woman named Doll, who wraps her in a shawl and rescues her. It’s apparent that Doll’s actions save Lila’s life, but from that point they live on the road as Doll avoids Lila’s family who, unbeknownst to Lila, keep following after them, less bothered about the child than the insult to their honour of Doll taking her.

The story is told in a series of recollections. At the point we meet Lila the woman she is married to the Reverend John Ames, a man much older than she is, and expecting a child. Doll, who was like a mother to Lila, is long gone. Lila who had lived her life on the road, who had worked for a period in a whorehouse, struggles with trust and is constantly on her guard for the time when the Reverend will cast her out, as others have, preparing herself to make the next move out of this town where people know too much about her and report on her every move. But the Reverend loves her (if you’ve read Gilead you will know this) and slowly Lila moves towards an acceptance of her new life.

As always there is a religious element to the story. John Ames is a religious man (not surprisingly, given he’s a Reverend) and has lived in a religious family his whole life. Lila comes to him a vagrant, an untrusting (and perhaps untrustworthy, though I think it is quite apparent how trustworthy she is) woman, a whore, a woman who doesn’t enter churches for fear she’ll be ripped off. An un-baptised woman, who the Reverend baptises and then spends considerable effort trying to wash the baptism off. Through Lila we see the church, the Bible, its rituals and beliefs through a more naturalistic point of view. Lila is horrified at the idea that Doll and the others from her wandering family won’t be waiting for her in heaven because in their ignorance they were not baptised. Yet at the same time she reads the Bible and find her life in it, albeit in the most unlikely seeming places.

There’s a lot to take in, yet it is easy because Lila is so beautifully, so honestly written. The voice throughout the book is extremely authentic, you really feel like you are listening to Lila relay her story. She is an astonishing character. She is honest, kind and unfettered by convention. She believes in love, yet has experienced it so little. She craves it to the point that she imagines stealing the child of a fellow prostitute once it’s born, as she was once stolen. Her plans are subverted and yet, in the end, she has a child of her own. The presence of this child forces her to confront her lack of trust, her inability to take root. Much of her story centres around the idea of the lost child, as she describes here when reflecting on a time when a woman (albeit kindly) mistakenly believed she’d had an illegal abortion and offered to help her:

“She’d been thinking about herself hiding that filthy dress under her coat the best she could, all sweaty even out in the cold, knowing anybody who saw her would think what that woman did. Guilty of the saddest crime there is. Nobody surprised to know she had that scrap of paper in her pocket. Old shame falling to her when it had been worn to rags by so many women before her. She could almost forget that the shame wasn’t really hers at all, any more than any child was hers, not even a child cast out and weltering in its blood, God bless it. Well, that was a way of speaking she had picked up from the old man. It let you imagine you could comfort someone you couldn’t comfort at all, a child that never even had an existence to begin with. God bless it. She hoped it would have broken her heart if she had done what that woman thought she had, but she was hard in those days. Maybe not so hard that she wouldn’t have left it on a church step. How did that woman know it wasn’t back at her room, bundled in a towel and crying for her, waiting for her voice and her smell, her breast? The sound of her heart. God bless it. And she so desperate to give it comfort, aching to. Frightened for it, just the sight of so much yearning reddening a little body, darkening its fact almost blue. Maybe that was weltering.”

It is a beautiful story, humane and thoughtful. It is similar, in many ways, to my favourite of Robinson’s works, Housekeeping, which explores the issue of vagrancy in more depth, though more coldly. Yet Lila is such a warm book, it is honest and true, it asks us to think about the nature of religion and how it applies to the innocent, those not touched by church teaching or doctrine. It asks us to think about the nature of compassion, about the idea of sin (original and not). It asks us to think about judgement and what that means. Lila doesn’t judge. She is compassionate. She is distrustful yet honest. She tries not to tell lies, even when telling the truth feels like a lie. She is uneducated, but that doesn’t make her unknowing. She is the outcast who comes back into the fold through the love of a sinner and a man of the church. It is an unlikely story, stunningly told. A beautiful, soulful book.

Lila receives an open-hearted 9 out of 10 Biis. 

Reading Virginia Woolf: Orlando

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to see the Royal Exchange Theatre (Manchester, UK) production of Orlando, starring Suranne Jones. It was a strange encounter. I was already familiar with the story, having read Orlando a number of years ago. It was a strange experience all the same. The story was narrated and acted, which created an unusual resonance, an off-tone which was somewhat distracting. Yet it was beautiful, at times compelling to the point of tears, and Suranne Jones leaped miles in my estimation as her performance was nuanced, gentle and brutal. I left the theatre unsure how I’d felt about the production. The story is magnificent, the delivery somewhat unsettling. I think this is a fair summation of how I feel about the book too.

It is, perhaps, unfortunate that my two initial introductions to Woolf – Mrs Dalloway and Orlando – put me off re-reading Woolf for some time, and in the course of my reading so far these remain the two that I feel most ambivalent and conflicted about. Orlando is probably what you would describe as exactly my kind of story. It confronts issues of gender, of the female ‘role’, it spans centuries of history, it has levity and adventure. There’s a lot to recommend it. Yet, again, I found myself struggling through it. I’m not entirely sure why.

The premise of Orlando is that Orlando, a boy, is born in the Elizabethan era. He is born into a wealthy aristocratic household and is fortunate to be taken under the tutelage of the Queen. Orlando the boy has numbers of adventures and encounters, until circumstances lead him to take a position as Ambassador in Constantinople. Here, in the throws of revolution, Orlando sleeps and sleeps and wakes one morning having become a woman. From that point on Orlando lives through the following centuries as a woman, landing in the ‘present’ in the end. It is an interesting premise.

That Orlando confronts the question of gender is quite obvious from the subject matter, and it is enables Woolf to use the text as a vehicle for exploring male and female roles though I think she manages to do this without it being a sledgehammer approach (though perhaps I’m biased there, I don’t know). For example here where Orlando approaches England for the first time as a woman and starts to realise what this will mean for her:

“She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,’ she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There’s the hairdressing,’ she thought, ‘that alone will take an hour of my morning; there’s looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there’s staying and lacing’ there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there’s being chaste year in year out…’ Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. ‘If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who no doubt has a wide and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,’ Orlando thought. Yet her legs were amongst her chiefest beauties. An she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast head. ‘A pox on them!’ she said, realising for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood. “

There is more, of course. At its heart Orlando is a lightweight tale, full of silliness and raptures. Its premise is, of course, quite unrealistic and there is a sense throughout the novel that Woolf is having a little play with words, with spinning a yarn to the benefit and credit of her friends (inspired, as it was, by Vita Sackville-West). It is in spirit a fun novel, particularly in the early stages as Orlando falls in love with Sacha during the infamous winter storm that froze the Thames for several months and has his heart lifted then broken. These scenes are beautiful, evocative. Like here, as Sacha describes her home:

“Sacha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked life a wolf. Upon which he told her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket.”

I think where I lose the thread with Orlando is towards the end, where the writing becomes tumultuous and vivacious. It is, perhaps, a similar issue to that experienced in Mrs Dalloway when the spin and whirl of the writing becomes too much and I simply find it painful to go on reading. Towards the last ten pages or so the words jumbled and tumbled and spun and I really wasn’t sure what was going on. And perhaps the fact that it spins this way towards the end colours my whole experience of the book. I found myself just wanting to finish it, all semblance of enjoyment obliterated. Not a great experience to end with.

(I might still watch the movie though)

Orlando receives an unhappy 6 out of 10 Biis.