CBR 8/5: Weathering by Lucy Wood

Lucy Wood’s 2015 debut novel Weathering is stunning and homely; it simultaneously feels like a chilly walk in the rain and a cup of tea by a fireside. It’s a non-scary story about ghosts, and a scary story about loneliness and memory; it’s a story about rivers and birds and photographs and family.

Ada is a single mother with a bright but complicated small daughter called Pepper and an even more difficult relationship with her own mother Pearl, recently deceased but not gone. (This isn’t a spoiler–Pearl’s voice is evident from early on in the book). Ada and Pepper come to Pearl’s rural and decrepit house in the hopes of sorting it out enough to sell it, and this interlude in the English country-side in winter, with its frosts and floods and ever-present damp, becomes a pause for them in a restless, wandering, life. The strands of this story are simple enough; Ada begins to reconnect with her roots and the idea of community, even if it’s dwindling and impoverished, Pepper begins to feel at home, and both encounter Pearl in different ways. But what makes Weathering so powerful is that it avoids sentimentality and easy answers in favour of elusiveness, and uncanniness, and genuine pain and difficulty, whether it’s the reader (and perhaps later Ada, though it’s never quite clear) realising what happened to Pearl, or the sheer frustration of not being able to get a chimney or stove in a practically falling-down house to work. There’s no sense of musical montage in which Ada suddenly learns to be good at things like driving on ice or keeping house and hearth warm, or even bonding with her daughter–every step forward seems earned, and every step back is infinitely human and relatable.

The landscape and, of course, weather, are powerful forces in the novel; the land twists people’s ankles even as it shapes their paths, the weather soaks them to the skin even as it illuminates some moment of beauty or insight. It isn’t all doom and gloom, despite the damp; it’s often funny, wry, and tender. Weathering is well-named. and well worth reading.

 

The Town in Bloom, by Dodie Smith (CBR 8/4)

This is another review in the vein of “I love a book by this author so much that its inky veins somehow run in mine, that I read it once a year at least and every time I notice something new, that its phrasing and insight sometimes shapes how I see a particular kind of landscape, or light, or expression on a face”–but this book I’m reviewing is not like that. The book by Dodie Smith that I love so much is, of course, I Capture the Castle, a fresh, sharp, funny, wistful look at coming-of-age between the wars, a book of collapsing castles and midnight swans and midsummer bonfires and glittering fortunes and cartwheels on beaches and the lonely melancholy of being seventeen and unloved.

Town in Bloom is a pleasant read. A girl on the edge of adulthood who has been raised on George Bernard Shaw and Restoration drama arrives in London to make her fortune on the stage; she arrives at a boarding-house and is immediately nicknamed Mouse by the girls who become her friends and almost-wholehearted confidantes. Mouse’s confidence lands her a starting job as a junior secretary in a theatre; there she develops an almost-requited passion and devotion for the married owner/director/lead actor. Meanwhile, her friends Lilian, Molly and Zelle have intrigues and secrets of their own.

What I liked about Town in Bloom is Mouse’s confidence; she goes after the man she wants and the job she wants with enthusiasm–this is less a tale of a country mouse’s ruin in the big bad city, than that of a frisky kitten disguised as a mouse becoming a cat. Sure she’s naive, and occasionally annoying, but weren’t we all at 18? She frankly enjoys her life and her surroundings, and her sexual and romantic awakening, and there’s an enjoyable sense of quirky adventure to the whole thing, even if it never really coalesces into something that seems real.