Hibernating ideas

© C A Lovegrove.

The Wood at Midwinter
by Susanna Clarke.
Illustrated by Victoria Sawdon.
Bloomsbury Circus, 2024.

It was winter, just a few days before Christmas. A few flakes of snow fell on the quiet fields. Along the lane that led to the wood came a carriage, driven by a young woman. Her name was Ysolde Scot and her sister, Merowdis, sat at her side.

How to describe this short but disconcerting offering from the author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell? A modern fairytale? Yes, it is this, though just occasionally the whimsy slightly defuses the uncanny feel of magic. A beast fable perhaps? There are indeed talking animals, even trees, but there’s no moral implied. A Christmas ghost story? True, it’s set at midwinter in Victorian times, but there’s no male antiquarian dabbling with supernatural matters to be seen, nor any decaying mansion with dark corridors.

No, what this dreamlike tale most reminds me of are the Breton lais of Marie de France, with natural magic invading the liminal space separating it from the everyday human world. As the author writes in an Afterword, she’s fascinated by characters “who are bridges between different worlds, between different states of being, characters who feel compelled to try and reconcile the irreconcilable.”

This liminality is, I feel, what links the approach of Susanna Clarke and her medieval counterpart, cemented I believe by her use of Anglo-Norman names and Arthurian motifs.

© C A Lovegrove.

“A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They’re the same thing really”.

Merowdis is our chief concern, a nineteen-year-old who we soon sense to be fey, in the sense of being otherworldly: her parents, if rather permissive for Victorians, are still intent on her marrying George Blanchland but, shockingly, she’d prefer to walk unaccompanied in the woods and talk to her pets – two dogs and a pig – and converse with the trees.

But Merowdis is no Red Riding Hood; in fact her unusual name (as the author clearly intended) derives from an Anglo-Norman spelling of ’emeralds’, their green colour perhaps an indication of the girl being a bridge between summer greenery and pale midwinter. Her sister’s name is of course an echo of Anglo-Norman and Breton legends of Tristan and Iseult; and while the surname of her fiancé George is the same as a quaint village on the Northumbria and County Durham border, it also features (though spelled Blanchelande) as King Mark’s Cornish hunting ground in early Tristan and Iseult romances.

All the foregoing is to emphasise that this sense of timelessness and vague geographical setting is merely the background canvas to Clarke’s tale of Merowdis as both fey and saint, and even as mother. Taking place in the same world as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell and sharing the atmosphere of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, the story of Merowdis offers us a glimpse into how a young woman falls in love with a vision of something not quite human, to the extent that what she sees somehow becomes true a year later.

In her Afterword, subtitled ‘Snow’, the author explains how she was inspired by the songs of Kate Bush, in particular the tracks on the album 50 Words for Snow, and how ideas and connections it contained fed into the pagan themes that entered this story. But I also detect Clarke’s deliberate attempt to remind us that midwinter now is associated with another birth, in which another virgin adores an individual who is rather more than human.

And there are more fecund ideas that this magical tale brings to mind, as all wonder tales are likely – and are probably composed – to do. The early modern Welsh antiquarian who called himself Iolo Morganwg came up with what he claimed was a traditional name for the winter solstice, alban arthan, ‘the solstice of the little bear’, and I fancy that this notion fed into the narrative – though whether consciously or not I couldn’t say. But it seems likely that the idea of a hibernating bear, combined with legends associated with King Arthur, became yet another ingredient for the seething cauldron of ideas this seemingly slight tale represents.

But the reader doesn’t have to know or even recognise any of the foregoing to be bespelled, ensorcelled, enchanted by The Wood at Midwinter. Clarke’s narrative, initially at least, produces an emotional response much as a dream can, and evokes wonder much as a traditional fairytale might; aided by Victoria Sawdon’s haunting illustrations and mesmerising endpaper designs we enter a mysterious woodland transformed by snow, meet animal helpers, and are confronted with a disturbing yet awesome vision of how things might be for Merowdis. I could say much more but I should let the author’s words speak for themselves.

© C A Lovegrove.

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Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND² Online Edition). Aberystwyth University. Retrieved 20 December 2024, from https://anglo-norman.net/entry/miraude.

This review of another of the author’s long-awaited fictions, even though it only takes the form of an illustrated short story, is posted to coincide with 2024’s winter solstice.