It may be a shock for some to realise that it is 20 years since Susanna’s magnum opus, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was published – it was to me. For those who don’t know, Strange & Norrell was a densely yet meanderingly plotted novel of over 900 small-typed pages, a Dickensian-style Regency tale of magic and mystery.
It was a work of love (which I loved, incidentally), and took many years to write. Since then, for a variety of reasons, Susanna has published relatively little, although all generally appreciated by readers. Her last novel, Piranesi, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller in 2020 as well as the winner of the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
With that in mind, anything new from Susanna is to be appreciated. And so, we have The Wood at Midwinter, a small hardback, complete with lovely black-and-white artwork by Victoria Sawdon, to fill up the space. (It’s been a recent publishing trend, this – see also the MacMillan Library series or Joanne Harris’s books based on the Child Ballads.)
As you might expect from a tale of less than 60 large-fonted pages, the story itself is slight but memorable. I read it in less than half an hour. As befitting a story released close to Christmas, The Wood at Midwinter is a fable heavy on the fairytale C. S. Lewis (Narnia) vibes. Merowdis Scot is a 19-year-old young woman who with Apple, her talking pig, and her two dogs Pretty and Amandier, goes off for… yes, you guessed it, a walk in a wood in midwinter!
It’s a reminder of old-school fairy tales – not only Narnia, but also those of the old Andrew Lang Victorian fairy story collections, with a touch of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and most recently perhaps those folklore stories recently reimagined by Joanne Harris (A Pocketful of Crows, The Blue Salt Road and Orfeia). As you might expect from Clarke, the prose is lush and imaginative, each sentence feeling that it is carefully crafted, as it was with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
I understand that The Wood at Midwinter is set in the same world as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but frankly you’d be hard-pressed to notice. There are no direct links that I could see, it rather having the feel of one of those extended footnotes from the larger work.
Like Narnia, there are symbolic elements – Merowdis brings ‘light to the world’, for example, and there’s mention of ‘the Virgin and the midwinter child’, but like some of Lewis’s work, you can read the story well enough without having to be bothered by the religious subtext should you wish to do so. Instead, it is a tale that revels in the atmosphere of Winter and nature – viewers of the television programme Winterwatch take note!
This one is one of those lovely gift packages – nice to look at, lovely to hold, charming to read – that seem ideal for Christmas, for those wanting to give the gift of a book. As the author suggests in the Afterword, Kate Bush fans may love it. It is all very lyrical and allegorical, with a lovely use of language. It has that wistful dreamlike feeling connecting people and nature that some of Kate’s early songs had on albums like Never for Ever. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere – a mood piece rather than something with a plot. Nice to read, and look at, but quickly forgotten, I think. Quirky. It’s nicely presented, pleasant to read and possibly soon forgotten once read.
THE WOOD AT MIDWINTER by Susanna Clarke
Published by Bloomsbury Circus, November 2024
64 pages
ISBN: 978-1526675217
Review by Mark Yon
