#649 In the Winter Sky- Jon McGregor
There is a lot of love in this story, love of family, love of the land. It’s authentic and earthy. It is also tragic like love often is, but this not a love story. This is a story about truth and life, living with your mistakes; it is about inevitability.
George kissed a girl for the first time when he was seventeen, the same night that he killed a drunken stranger with his car. The kiss led to his marriage and the killing led to a secret he would keep for many years. Both were defining moments, both were inevitable and both represent the land and the earth.
Things happen differently in the farmland. You marry the girl nest door, you work your family’s land when your father gets too old, you live with your mistakes the best you can. Macgregor writes this atmosphere so well; The slowness of a farm, the stillness of time and the deep meaning in small gestures.
“She has seen the faint smiles and nods which indicate that he is well pleased. She hopes that George has noticed; She suspects that he has not.”
The pastoral setting somehow smoothes over the tragedy as a mere fact of life. The whole story is interwoven with the poetry of Joanne. It’s from her notebooks and either unfinished, unpolished or re-written so we see the changes. Like the story itself the poetry is both delicate and deeply rooted, and at times stunningly emotional.
There is no history here.
No dramatic finds of Saxon villages.
No burial mounds of hidden treasures.
Only the rusted anchors our ploughs drag up,
Left when these fields were the sea.
Notable Passage: “The death he had made in the hole he had made in the earth.”
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