2018/82: Midwinter -- Fiona Melrose

I’d struck my boy and now we were all in this great sucking bog. Tom was in it with us. There was nowhere to go with all that. Nowhere at all. All the years of work to make things right, to save the farm, to get us back to where we were, before it all, come to nought. For so long I’d kept Kabwe apart from Vale and me. No need to have any of that coming back here with us and start to unsettle things and yet here it was sitting in the car with us, squatting in the road half dead and needing to be run down. [loc. 1427]

Noticing the title in the 'New' folder on my Kindle, I thought this might be a suitable novel to read just after the winter solstice. It was, but not for the obvious reason: Midwinter refers to father and son Landyn and Vale Midwinter, Suffolk farmers, who are struggling to keep their farm running and are haunted (perhaps literally) by Cessie, Vale's mother and Landyn's wife, who died in Zambia a decade before the events of the novel.

The action of the book takes place in winter, true. It opens with a drunken prank that goes wrong: Vale and his friend Tom steal a boat, and there's an accident. Midwinter unravels the causes and effects of that accident -- the morass of guilt, blame and grief that divides father and son, Vale's formless rage at the opportunities he's lost and the ones he's wrecked, Tom's almost swashbuckling hunger for adventure -- and ranges both backward and forward from that night on the river.

Melrose's writing is superb: the two men's voices are utterly distinct, yet clearly both rooted in the same rural setting. I could almost hear them, especially the rhythm and roll of Landyn's narrative. He's determined to farm traditionally, despite the encroachment of multinationals and new agricultural methods. Landyn's connection with the land is profound without being mystical -- though he does feel haunted, hunted, by a fox who seems attuned to his dreams. Vale, meanwhile, for all his incoherent anger, never seems to seriously consider abandoning the farm for a different line of work. And perhaps, near the end of the novel, there's a hint as to why.

Not a cheerful book, but very powerful: and spring does come, and closure, and clarity for the reader if not the characters.