landingtree

And now coming back to the present! Much less review-y, notes made mainly as I went

26/04/2023

I don't find this quite successful in its handling of time. It ducks into flashback after flashback. I think I have this problem because it's gliding at some remove, at life-pace – we have only had a few prolonged scenes by chapter two. So that makes me want to be moving pretty steadily forward if I'm to track it.

The images though! The train sliding down into the lake without trace. The surface of the lake closing seamlessly again over it like normality closing over tragedy.

I have written a story set in freezing winter, but I do not know that season well, I couldn't write icicles thawing so fast the gravel under the eaves rattles and jumps. This book is full of winter.

[It makes me think of Elizabeth Knox on one hand and Moomins on the other (should reread Moomins, and I think I never read the last few, come to think of it, the melancholy ones).

I think of Moomins because of winter but also because I'd written out the following quote, about a flooded house, for the kind of detail the book has, and it makes me think of the Hobgoblin's Hat:]

“The pantry curtain rod was deeply bowed by the weight of water climbing up the curtains. If we opened or closed a door, a wave swept through the house, and chairs tottered, and bottles and pots clinked and clunked in the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets.”

I thought of Elizabeth Knox because of the sense of Christian theology, or if not theology then Christianity-inflected mysticism (I've heard Elizabeth and Francis Spufford discuss this onstage, they both believe in something like God, but were unsure whether they believed in the same one). They share a concern with passing things, and have similarities of language: in this book we get sentences like “Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look but not to buy.”

I started out thinking I disliked how this book handled time. I think now that that's because it doesn't cue transitions very much, landing me unexpectedly in flashbacks and dreams of unknown length, but also not singling out the moment when a description of what's been damaged in the flood shifts from the scale of the town to the scale of a single house – neither going back out to town-scale nor having any action follow at the house-scale. Besides this I am liking it more and more.