...it made perfect sense to me how I, a man who for so many years had walked the line between the quick and the dead, might be able to hear their voices in the silence when others could not... [loc. 1833]
The bulk of this short novel is Freddie Watson's first-person account of an evening in the small village of Nulle, in south-west France: it's framed by events in 1933 (five years after that evening at the fête de Saint-Étienne), when Freddie is recounting his story to an antiquarian bookseller, explaining the provenance of a document written in medieval Occitan.
Freddie has spent a decade mourning his brother George's death in the First World War. After a nervous breakdown, he decides to take a motoring holiday in the Pyrenees: a blizzard sets in, his car crashes, and he finds his way through the forest to Nulle. He's welcomed by the proprietors of the guesthouse, Monsieur and Madame Galy, and invited to join the festival that night. At the festival, he's made welcome, and spends much of the evening talking to a young woman named Fabrissa about grief and loss. Some of the villagers (many of whom are in costume) have crude yellow crosses stitched to their clothes; there's a sense of tension; men from outside burst into the hall, wielding swords...
The Winter Ghosts is an understated, melancholy narrative about loss, about grief, about loneliness. I suspect that I wasn't really in the right frame of mind for it, and though the prose was lovely the plot felt lightweight and predictable. The ancient letter is more poignant than Freddie and Fabrissa's conversation -- and it's based on real events seven hundred years in the past. (Mosse's afterword provides thorough references and an overview of the persecution of the Cathars.) I'd have liked more about Freddie's healing than a few sentences about George's death and the need to remember. And I'd have liked to know more about what had happened in the time between the visit to Nulle and the visit to the antiquarian...
This, I suspect, was a case of 'right book, wrong time': maybe I'll come back to it next winter.
No comments:
Post a Comment