"Old country types used to call them the People, which is a bit ironic, really, because they aren’t."
"What, you mean they aren’t human?"
"No, I mean they aren’t people. Not like you and me. Well, not like me, anyway. ... They’re all scraps and patches, bits of greed and lust and envy and spite. And some good things too, sometimes. But not often." [loc. 5736]
Blackthorn Winter, the second in the series (quartet?) that began with Comet Weather (one of my most enjoyable reads this year), is a very wintry novel: I'm glad I read it during the liminal days at year's end.
Again, the four Fallow sisters are brought together (for Christmas) and taken elsewhere -- and elsewhen -- by resonance and ritual, by their own loyalties and friendships, and by the requirements of those who have, in one character's words, 'stayed around to help'. It's a quartet of journeys that encompasses the Wild Hunt, the Green Children of Woolpit, the Maunsell Forts, the Mithraeum, and a number of London pubs. (Williams' descriptions of these made me tremendously nostalgic for the time before Covid when pubs were somewhere you could go at Christmas.) Oh, and I believe there's a nod to the Bridge Theatre's role-swapping Midsummer Night's Dream, which made me happy.
A plethora of the arcane, with new characters introduced and existing characters reimagined. I did feel that this volume wasn't quite as tightly plotted, or written, as Comet Weather: in particular, there was a lot of dialogue that could have been trimmed without damage to the plot. Much of Blackthorn Winter is set in London, and there were moments where the geography felt unclear, or perhaps dreamlike. (Also, there is no tube station in Peckham).
Despite those minor criticisms, I enjoyed this a great deal, and learnt a lot (Lincrusta, Austin Osman Spare, the temple of Nodens). And there was a lovely warm sense of familiarity, as though the author had visited places that I knew, and had the same responses to those places.
I am very much looking forward to the next volume(s) in the sequence, and to the resolution of some tantalising sub-plots.
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