Book Review – Midwinter by Fiona Melrose
It is the onslaught of the literary festival season here, and as a result, I have a unusually large pile of books to read, some for professional reasons, some for pleasure, and when the stars align, both. Among this pile was snuggled a book called Midwinter, by Fiona Melrose.
I ashamedly admit to have known little about the author, or her book. I just opened it up as the next in the pile and started reading – a courtesy for an upcoming event on which we would share a stage.
After a few short chapters I assumed that Fiona was an English author, with six generations of deep and muddy roots in Suffolk, where much of the action takes place. I was astonished (after a quick Google) to find out that Ms Melrose is SA-born and bred and currently resident and had only spent a few years in that windswept rural corner of England.
This book, to put it mildly, is a marvel. At its root are two tragedies that shape and warp the two protagonists – an ageing father and barely adult son, Landyn and Vale, struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving and cold corner of England. The book opens with the first incident, a drunken boat accident on stormy night off the Suffolk coast. The second, an incident of violence in Zambia decades prior, robbing the father of his wife and the son of his mother. Growing painfully and raggedly from these two incidents is the story of these two broken men slamming blinded and bruisingly into each other, their rage, their grief, their hopelessness, their humanity and their eventual redemption in each other’s pain.
The book draws its fuel from deeply empathetic drawings of Landyn and Vale – one old and sad and mostly gentle, the other young and bewildered and undone by loss. The father’s inarticulate love for his motherless son, the son’s wrath and resentment at a failed father who he blames for his mother’s death act as the harsh backdrop for the story. Beautifully written and is underpinned by dialogue so authentic that I could hear the bray and lilt of thick country accents as their restrained few words to each other fail to disguise unexpressed emotions and unspoken truths.
The story of that terrible night in Zambia unfolds slowly over the course of this short novel as it wraps around the story of this diminished family battling to cope with themselves and their hardscrabble lives on their failing family farm in England. The chapters are alternately narrated by Landyn and Vale, giving the reader a clear and nuanced view of two sides of their same shattered worlds.
My description of the novel may seem bleak, but the beauty of the language and dialogue lifts it out of the blackness of their character’s lives (as do some of the marvellous secondary characters who make their contributions along the way). But I loved these two damaged men by the end of the book. I found hope in their fumbling and angry love for each other. The best of fiction both moves and transforms the reader – Midwinter was wildly successful on both counts.
Watch this author. She is still relatively young, and there are few debuts that I have read as satisfying and accomplished as this.
