Midwinter – Fiona Melrose (2016)

From the moment I started reading this novel I was captivated, sometimes you just know you’re in for a beautiful reading experience. Midwinter was Fiona Melrose’s first novel, and I am fortunate to have her second novel Johannesburg waiting tbr. This is a novel firmly rooted in the Suffolk landscape, a novel of a father and son, grief, guilt and how we find our way home. Beautifully written and deeply heartfelt – I absolutely loved every word.

Landyn and Vale Midwinter; father and son are Suffolk farmers; they live together on the land their family worked before them for generations. Life is very difficult for them struggling to maintain their business in the face of the large corporations. The novel is narrated in alternating chapters by Landyn and Vale.

The two men have remained haunted for years by what happened during Vale’s childhood in Zambia. The family had taken up the call for farmers when things at home had seemed impossible, and Landyn was facing the ruin of his farm. Two years later Cecilia, Landyn’s wife, and Vale’s beloved mother is killed in a horrific incident at the family home in Zambia, and Landyn brought his traumatised son home to Suffolk.

“For ten years I’d shirked the memories. I always felt them scratching at the darker corners of my mind, still feral: but sitting on a tree stump in the gathering dark, all of it – the space, the fear, the sorrow all seemed to find me again. It was if the past ten years I’d only been standing still and I was back in a mess with a boy who only sees ghosts.”

Ten years on, and Vale is now twenty – a decade of grief and anger bottled up inside him threatens to explode – he has taken to blaming his father for everything that happened. While Vale is a ball of fury, his father is a quieter man, a man capable of great kindness, who loves his son desperately but simply can’t reach him. Landyn is never far from his old dog Pup, (warning for dog lovers, old Pup dies rather upsettingly during the course of the book – I feel I have to mention this.) He carries the loss of his wife with him constantly, finding comfort in the land and his animals, and especially the vixen who visits his land and appears to bring a degree of comfort and protection to his life.

“If there’s a night when I am lucky enough to get a glimpse of Cessie in my dreams, I can tell you as sure as day follows night, I’ll see my fox before the next day is out. Even half a look of my vixen and I’ll know it’s her like I know my own heart. I know too without ever asking that it is my fox that has kept blood in my boy’s veins.”  

As the novel opens, the beginning of a terrible winter seems to bring things between Landyn and Vale to a head. Following a terrible argument, Vale goes off to find solace in alcohol and his childhood friend Tom. Tom has always been Vale’s best friend, since before the family went to Africa, closer to Vale’s dad than his own drunken, waste of space of a father who is usually absent anyway. As a storm starts to blow up, the two drunken young men decide to take a boat out to where the river meets the sea in a swirling maelstrom of dangerous water. There are consequences for both young men that are destined to last months.  

“The water was syrup. Pa always said about boats, to send them out you have to work hard, charting the course and stuff, but for the most part, if you just give it some push, a boat always finds its way home. Same with horses. I didn’t give a shit about horses and I was well past ever wanting to see a boat again. You always hear about the speed of light travelling at this and that, but that night I knew for sure that darkness just stands still.”

The story of what happened in Zambia a decade earlier is told in flashback throughout the novel, and in those snapshots Fiona Melrose beautifully illustrates the confusion of a child who has just lost his mother. So much goes on over a child’s head, and the young Vale’s sorrow and confusion is palpable.

I loved the feeling of landscape in this novel – Fiona Melrose’s descriptions are wonderful and with them we have a feeling of loss that pervades the whole novel. Everything is portrayed so poignantly and with such understanding, as we watch Vale hit rock bottom, hoping that he can find his way back to the father who loves him so much.