Winter is coming. Ada left the remote English valley of her childhood in her early 20s and never looked back. Thirteen years later, after the death of her mother she returns to sell the family home. Accompanied by Pepper, her six-year-old daughter, Ada intends to stay in the dilapidated house only briefly. But winter comes, and the rain-sodden, wind-beaten, snow-crusted valley drags her back to her roots and forces her to face the past.
As its title suggests, the weather plays a huge role in Lucy Wood's debut novel. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might leave all but the meteorologists running for cover. What else can be said of the elements that hasn't already been said in classic literature – King Lear, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, to name a few. But Wood's novel, loaded with pathetic fallacy and personification, manages to bring inventive descriptions to the universal. Skies are orange, olive, silver. The noisy, hazardous river at the back of the house is "all grunt and galumph and glinty rapids". Rain is relentless, "like feet stamping".
Weathering is about loneliness and the human need for connection. As Ada and Pepper do their best to settle into the house, helped along by a cast of eccentric and believable neighbours, the ghost of Ada's mother Pearl stalks around the gardens. Both Ada and Pepper can see her, and their conversations and interior monologues inform the reader of a poignant backstory of missed opportunities.
All three characters are in limbo, looking for peace. Pepper yearns for a home to call her own. Ada struggles with the guilt of abandoning her mother, a peculiar woman who preferred birdwatching to people. Pearl’s ghost wanders the house, trying to recall what has happened. We learn that an earlier abandonment set her on a fateful course, one now navigated by succeeding generations of mothers and daughters. Ada does not want history to repeat itself, but as the house and weather close in around them, there is much to learn by reliving the past.
Thrown in at the deep end
Wood's debut short story collection Diving Belles won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2013. In the acknowledgements to Weathering, she thanks Jon McGregor for his support. McGregor's Impac-winning Even the Dogs memorably conveyed stories of addiction and homelessness, with its dream-like, first-person-plural narrative making the reader complicit. Although the backdrop to Weathering is far less desolate, Wood has a similar ability to capture voice and is equally unafraid of throwing the reader in at the deep end, letting the voice of her characters carry us along: "ARSE OVER ELBOW AND a mouthful of river. Which she couldn't spit out. Which soaked in and weighed her down until she was steeped in silt and water, like old tea."
The mother-daughter relationships are brilliantly described, particularly the miscommunications and “pretending to be deaf” that goes on between the teenage Ada and Pearl. Their frugal, rural existence and inability to communicate draws them apart. On the day Ada leaves for bigger things, what goes unsaid is heartbreaking: “Pearl shrugged. ‘I’ve got a new batch of prints to go through,’ she said. But why did she say that, when she knew she was just going to sit in the house watching it get dark?”
Pepper brings light to the narrative, with dialogue that is convincing and funny: "What would you pick out of no toes or no fingers?" While her view of the valley and the people she meets there is entertaining, sometimes her descriptions belong to a more adult voice: "Pepper glimpsed the cat running past the front door. Dark rivulets of rain on its back." The relationship between herself and Ada feels very real though, reminiscent of Julia Kelly's recent novel The Playground, which also deals with a single mother battling to make a new life.
Ada’s attempts to integrate herself into valley life bring romance her way, and the opportunity to develop her skills as a chef. In a stunning analogy, she chops up the carcass of a deer, approaching it incrementally to make it manageable: “She’d expected a strong reek, something awful, but the deer smelled musty, of curdled milk, and fresh too, like dried grass.”
As winter sets in, the three generations batten down the hatches and prepare for the worst. Wood guides them through the storms with visceral imagery and stylish prose. Ada and her daughter emerge sodden but stronger for it: “No sunset there, but a February fog, woolly and glorious.”
