Winterton Blue

Anna, a graphic designer, may have a streak of gray in her hair, but she's still young and inchoate. Lewis, a dodgy loner, is on a late, misguided, oedipally fueled quest to avenge his twin brother's death following a car accident 20 years earlier. In alternating scenes—sometimes whole chapters, sometimes just a few paragraphs—Anna and Lewis meet, and, uneasily, inflame each other at a British seaside B&B. The place is owned by Anna's mother, Rita, who at 76 is vivacious but in shaky health; Anna has been summoned there by Rita's quasi- companion, retired actor Vernon Savoy, to look in on her. Anna, partially deaf (perhaps psychologically) since childhood, seems so vulnerable, and Lewis (who is tracking down the death car's driver), so blankly menacing, that as they come together murder seems as likely as romance. Vernon, meanwhile, has little patience for Anna's ambivalence toward Rita. The Welsh-born Azzopardi, whose Hiding Place was a Man Booker finalist, does certain kinds of interiority exquisitely, as when writing about Anna's obsession with Rita's tourmaline ring. But her extreme stream-of-consciousness style forces readers to fill in narrative gaps, offers few clues to Anna's feeling for Lewis and makes secondary characters (Anna's charming maybe-suitor Brendan; Lewis's thuggish-yet-sweet sometime-stepfather Manny) confuse more than thicken the plot. (Mar.)
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English novelist Azzopardi portrays with extraordinary empathy characters whose grief and alienation overwhelm their sanity. In The Hiding Place (2001) and Remember Me (2004), she set her acutely sensitive characters within richly drawn social contexts. Here, in her most impressionistic novel, Azzopardi leaves the larger sphere out of focus, concentrating on the wounded psyches of two strangers. Lewis and Anna are on desperately improvised missions of healing as they unknowingly move toward each other on their way to Yarmouth's wind-roughened coast. Volatile Lewis is plagued by guilt and rage over his twin brother's death some 20 years ago. Easily undone Anna, an artist charming in her quirkiness, frets over her devil-may-care mother, and is lured out of her shell by the sea's moody beauty and the surreal sight of a wind farm. It was a gamble to isolate her brooding characters to emphasize their feelings of apartness, a limiting approach rectified by the mesmerizing novel's strong undercurrent of suspense. Azzopardi casts a blue spell brightened by flashes of humor and promises of love. Donna Seaman
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