A Spell of Winter & Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore
These books came together in one volume and when I started the first, A Spell of Winter, I wondered whether it was going to be for me. The first few pages were fine and then I seemed to lose interest but I persevered and suddenly it came alive. The story is set around Catherine and her brother Rob whose mother walked out on them when they were young and whose father suffered mental illness and was taken to a sanatorium. They are brought up by their grandfather - a remote figure, a governess and servants. They are isolated from the outside world. Here we have mystery, incest and family secrets. The era in which the story is set is just before and into the first world war.
I thought I was pretty unshockable, having read my fair share of 'books that shock' over the years but the incest between the brother sister did shock me. I think it was the fact that they reveled in it. It felt cloying and wrong. I became to dislike Catherine so much with her schemes and threats to the governess who finds out the truth. And when Catherine finds herself pregnant the servant Kate comes to her rescue in finding someone to 'deal with it'. She never tells her brother about the baby but becomes obsessed as to where Kate has buried it. It was a difficult and disturbing book to read. I guess children brought up in the atmosphere they lived in, they were hardly likely to be stable when they hit puberty but Catherine redeems herself towards the end.
The ending was a little disappointing and left too many questions. The reader never really gets to discover why the mother left, if she tried to keep in contact with her children and I wondered whether the father's madness had come out in the children! There seemed too many loose ends. Having said that Dunmore knows how to create atmospheres.
The second story, Zennor in Darkness is set around the Cornish coastline and one hugely extended family, but particularly the main characters of Clare who lives alone with her widowed father and her cousin John William who is on brief leave from the trenches before going for officer training. The cousins have grown up together and John William's sister Hannah is her best friend. In this mix is the writer D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda who rent a cottage and are looked on with suspicion and spied upon. Clare meets Lawrence and a friendship begins to form. Clare and John William are attracted to one another.The night before he leaves the two spend their time together on the cliff. Shortly after John William leaves for camp word comes that he has been in an accident and is dead. Not long after that Clare finds she is pregnant. The story revolves around the family, their reactions to the war, sending their sons out, trying to keep them at home, desertion, suicide, love and protection. The horrors of life in the trenches have been told by John William only to the men of the family but the shell shock he suffers is seen only by D H Lawrence (who he meets once) and his mates in the regiment, who Clare's father meets when he visits the officer training camp to find out what really happened.
This is a portrait of war and how it affected villages and families all across the country. I found it very moving at times and loved the way Dunmore had inter-weaved the closeness of family and village life - the everyone knows everyone elses business syndrome. There is no hiding place in a village!
These books came together in one volume and when I started the first, A Spell of Winter, I wondered whether it was going to be for me. The first few pages were fine and then I seemed to lose interest but I persevered and suddenly it came alive. The story is set around Catherine and her brother Rob whose mother walked out on them when they were young and whose father suffered mental illness and was taken to a sanatorium. They are brought up by their grandfather - a remote figure, a governess and servants. They are isolated from the outside world. Here we have mystery, incest and family secrets. The era in which the story is set is just before and into the first world war.
I thought I was pretty unshockable, having read my fair share of 'books that shock' over the years but the incest between the brother sister did shock me. I think it was the fact that they reveled in it. It felt cloying and wrong. I became to dislike Catherine so much with her schemes and threats to the governess who finds out the truth. And when Catherine finds herself pregnant the servant Kate comes to her rescue in finding someone to 'deal with it'. She never tells her brother about the baby but becomes obsessed as to where Kate has buried it. It was a difficult and disturbing book to read. I guess children brought up in the atmosphere they lived in, they were hardly likely to be stable when they hit puberty but Catherine redeems herself towards the end.
The ending was a little disappointing and left too many questions. The reader never really gets to discover why the mother left, if she tried to keep in contact with her children and I wondered whether the father's madness had come out in the children! There seemed too many loose ends. Having said that Dunmore knows how to create atmospheres.
The second story, Zennor in Darkness is set around the Cornish coastline and one hugely extended family, but particularly the main characters of Clare who lives alone with her widowed father and her cousin John William who is on brief leave from the trenches before going for officer training. The cousins have grown up together and John William's sister Hannah is her best friend. In this mix is the writer D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda who rent a cottage and are looked on with suspicion and spied upon. Clare meets Lawrence and a friendship begins to form. Clare and John William are attracted to one another.The night before he leaves the two spend their time together on the cliff. Shortly after John William leaves for camp word comes that he has been in an accident and is dead. Not long after that Clare finds she is pregnant. The story revolves around the family, their reactions to the war, sending their sons out, trying to keep them at home, desertion, suicide, love and protection. The horrors of life in the trenches have been told by John William only to the men of the family but the shell shock he suffers is seen only by D H Lawrence (who he meets once) and his mates in the regiment, who Clare's father meets when he visits the officer training camp to find out what really happened.
This is a portrait of war and how it affected villages and families all across the country. I found it very moving at times and loved the way Dunmore had inter-weaved the closeness of family and village life - the everyone knows everyone elses business syndrome. There is no hiding place in a village!
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