Midwinter

By Fiona Melrose

(Corsair, £16.99)

Reviewed by Nick Major

LANDYN Midwinter is a traditional Suffolk farmer struggling to make a living. When poverty starts to erode his relationship with wife, Cecelia, and his young son, Vale, he persuades them to move to Zambia, and start the farming life anew. Cecelia is horrifically murdered and father and son return to their previous home, emotionally and monetarily bereft. It is a depressing premise for a story. At the beginning of Fiona Melrose’s debut novel, Vale is a young man. He blames his father for his mother’s death and resents his life, scraping a living in the fields of England. He spends his evenings drinking with his friend Tom. One night they steal a boat and are caught in a storm that nearly kills them both. This fresh experience of death’s immediacy forces Vale to confront his hatred of his father and their broken past.

Midwinter is a strange and ambiguous novel, in many different ways. It is unclear when the events take place. The references to Afghanistan war veterans suggest the setting is the present, but the furniture of Melrose’s world is archaic – there isn’t much evidence of mobile phones or computers. The Suffolk of the novel also has a deficiency of females for some unknown reason. The bulk of the characters are all charming locals, yet how many British people are actually farm labourers any more? Landyn is also an odd farmer. His sentimental attachment to animals suggests he’d be better running a rescue home for hedgehogs than a farm.

People who have lived on the land for generations carry the nature of a place in their appearance and character, and Melrose sometimes conveys this with beautiful prose. She can write fluid sentences and captures the local dialect well. But at times, she tries too hard, and the results are confusing. In one fractious scene, panic begins "to rise like a horse trying to escape a burning stable". Unless the horse has wings, which they tend not to do in naturalistic novels, the simile makes little sense. After the first 100 pages, Midwinter starts to produce a bountiful crop of faults, and one suspects that it was once a good short story that has been overwritten into a clumsy novel.

The narrative changes perspective between Vale and Landyn throughout, but there is a lack of psychological nuance and the characters become predictable and boring. Landyn’s affection for a local fox is laughable. He believes the creature is in some way his wife in animal form. Vale’s grief directs his every move, and there are long scenes showing his depression, yet there is no real insight into the grieving mind or the subtleties of a father-son relationship. The flashbacks of their disastrous trip to Zambia are superfluous, and when we learn the details of Cecelia’s death, it seems implausible. Back in the present, Vale’s anger seeks a release. When this comes, it is gruesome and just plain silly, and the final chapters read like a desperate attempt to finish a story that should have ended much sooner.