Winter Journey - Softcover

Colegate, Isabel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582432503 ISBN 13: 9781582432502

Publisher: Catapult, 2002

Synopsis

His wild years behind him, Alfred Ashby, a celebrated photographer now in his late fifties, has returned to where he was raised, the family farm in rural England. The old house in the valley, little changed by the years, provides him an agreeable darkroom, necessary solitude, and a link to a more tranquil past. His reverie is broken by a January visit from his headstrong older sister, Edith, a former MP and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her Alfred's bachelor life is undesirable, his work obsessive and disturbing. She has plans for Alfred, for the farm and for the future, plans she hopes will help the two of them mend their frayed relationship and forget their past sorrows, past mistakes. In the course of their long winter visit, this infinitely complicated brother and sister confront their deepest selves and retrace the tangled paths their lives have taken. Isabel Colegate has written a fierce, funny, unsentimental book about growing older, about grace and forgiveness, and about hope for a world we must too soon leave behind.

About this title

Review:

Isabel Colegate has a unique gift for shining the bright light of passing history onto seemingly quiet rural lives, as she beautifully proved in her novel The Shooting Party. In Winter Journey, middle-aged siblings Edith and Alfred encounter each other over a long, chilly visit at the family home. The two are, by any worldly standard, glamorous successes. Born to a crotchety but well-known composer, each child found a career path that reflected the spirit of the 1970s. Edith built a grassroots playgroup movement into an independent party that eventually got her elected to Parliament. Alfred, a photographer, consorted with his lovely but mad model, Lydia, and hosted gentle parties of hippies at the family pile. Now, though they've achieved the laurels of middle age, neither is at peace.

Over the course of their visit, Edith and Alfred are forced, simply by proximity, to recall memories they'd simply rather forget. This could be a dull formula for a novel, since there's very little action propelling it into the future, yet Colegate masterfully teases this quiet material into suspense. For starters, she's not above blunt seduction of the reader. Edith, for instance, observes her brother at the beginning of the book: "There he was, in his tattered old coat, without his gloves, needing a shave, nothing to be proud of, and yet she was proud of him; she always had been. If only that wretched woman had not done that awful thing." It takes a confident writer to shill her material so baldly. Colegate writes more subtly about the frightening regrets of middle age, the way one moment a life can seem well spent and the next merely squandered. As Edith writes to a friend: "It is extraordinary how whole pockets of feeling can be stored away, forgotten for years, and then quite unexpectedly emerge in all their pristine fervour, time having wrought no modification at all." Brother and sister both suffer in these "pockets of feeling." It's Colegate's larger achievement to link their lives to the larger passage of English history. --Claire Dederer

About the Author:

Isabel Colegate is the author of twelve novels, a collection of short stories, and, most recently, A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses (Counterpoint, April 2002). She lives near Bath, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1582432503
• ISBN 13: 9781582432502
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208