I’m just back from a long-awaited, oft-postponed visit to Vancouver. I came back with more books than I left with: no surprise there! A couple of them are ones I claimed from my mother’s ‘donate’ pile (one of my undertakings was to help her sort her many – many! – books so that the ones she wants most to read and reread are actually on shelves and the others eventually make their way into the hands of other readers); a couple of others were just too good to pass up when I spotted them on the bargain books shelves at the UBC bookstore; and one, Bach’s Sonic Tapestry, is by and inscribed by an old family friend.
I actually finished reading one of my new books while I was still in Vancouver, Sarah Winman’s A Year of Marvellous Ways. Between jet lag and the actual work I now have to catch up on (I even set up on out-of-office reply for the first time I can remember, to be sure I actually would take meaningful time off!), I don’t expect to be able to write a proper post about it, so I thought I would at least give you a sense of it before its details fade away.
A Year of Marvellous Ways is about a lonely and eccentric old woman, Marvellous Ways, and a young man, Francis Drake (he’s heard all the jokes about his name already!) whose paths cross in the remote village in Cornwall where she lives. Drake is in trouble, mostly because of his traumatic experience in the Second World War; Marvellous lives mostly on her memories, which are mostly of lost loves. Predictably, these two misfits heal each other, though the details of it are not so predictable. It’s a touching enough story, just shadowed enough with tragedy to avoid being twee.
The novel’s most distinctive aspect is its style, which might seem to you either poetic or overly mannered: I had both reactions, sometimes at the same time. Here’s a sample:
That night an old woman at the end of her life, and three young people at the start of their lives lie in bed listening to the earth turn. It has a melody that only the gentle hear. They each lie thinking about love. Lost love and love to come. The old woman falls asleep first. She falls asleep with moonlit lips upon her lips and the sweet scent of china tea and gorse flower whispering tales from sun-drenched time. The young woman who smells of bread thinks love is like yeast. It needs time to prove. It is complex. She thinks she might get a dog instead. Along the coast in a cottage called Long Gone a young fisherman thinks only of her. He thinks love is like the sea, beautiful and dangerous but something he would like to know. And in the boathouse a young man lights a cigarette. He takes two puffs, one for sorrow two for joy. He thinks about a woman called Missy Hall. For once it is a good memory. The moon falls behind the trees and the lights go out.
Do you like that? Could you read a whole novel like that? I mean, of course it isn’t literally all like that, but quite a lot of it is. In the end, for me, it was a bit much, but I didn’t dislike the novel.
I picked up A Year of Marvellous Ways because I really liked Winman’s more recent novel Still Life. (Still Life definitely deserved a proper write-up too, but when I read it last year, I just wasn’t up to the job.) I think if I had read A Year of Marvellous Ways first I wouldn’t have picked up Still Life, so I’m glad it happened the other way around.
Once things settle down (including my currently very muddled internal clock), I will be reading the others, probably starting with Drifts, which I dipped into on the plane yesterday. It was enticing but clearly deserved more attention than I was able to give it in between bouts of turbulence.
Novel Readings 