2022/19: Moonwise -- Greer Ilene Gilman

But in Cloudwood it was endless hallows. There no wren was slain, no seed was scattered; though he cried the ravens from the turning wood, no winter ever came to green. The gate was lost... [p 23]

Two young women, Ariane and Sylvie, find themselves in balladland: in a chilly wintry wood, or on a moor, in the world of Cloud which they invented (or discovered) in a synergistic gleeful season of storytelling when they were younger. Ariane journeys through Cloud and encounters a child who is also, perhaps, an ancient deity or power: Sylvie's journey is (or seems) shorter, and she travels with a tinker who becomes her friend, but who, like the child, may be something more. There are two witches, goddesses, forces: Malykorne and Annis. Annis is winter and wants to freeze time. Mally wants spring, and the cycle of the year.

For long swathes of this novel I was not sure I understood what was happening: but the plot is just one layer of this novel, varnish or garnish over an intricately woven web of words. There's a lot of north-country dialect here -- specifically northern English, with its Nordic roots ('Tha'st nodded again, and t'cake's kizzened up') -- and though the wood that Ariane and Sylvie enter seems to be somewhere in North America, there is a European, perhaps a British, feel to it. The wren is hunted, there are stone circles and thornbushes, scarecrows and stars, bleak fells and homely farmhouses shuttered against the night. The language is seductive and incredibly dense. I think I recall someone saying that reading Moonwise was like being inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins ... though there are also moments where it seems about to break into iambic pentameter, and the text is studded with echoes and iterations of folk-song, ballad, fairytale. Ariane, and especially Sylvie, bring a touch of modernity too, albeit modernity as of the novel's 1991 publication: '"What has it got in its 'pocalypse? Tell us that, precious."'

I have attempted to read this novel more than once and been distracted by mundanity: turns out what I needed was a quiet winter weekend (it's a very wintry book) and a melancholic nostalgia for the act of shared creation. And now I feel equipped to continue reading Cloud and Ashes, which is ... set in the world of Cloud, or tells tales from Cloud, or is simply a layer below the stories in Moonwise.

Unaccountably not available as an ebook: I do own the paperback, but reading physical books is increasingly uncomfortable on the eyes, so I resorted to the Internet Archive.