The shocking things saints do
The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke. Bloomsbury, 2024. 62 pp., $16.99
As I write from just above the forty-fifth parallel north, midwinter is fast approaching. It’s nearing noon and the sun hasn’t made it yet over the tops of the Douglas firs that line the south pasture. I suspect it won’t today. If all I had to go by was the quality of the light slanting across my desk and picking out the last golden leaves on the branches of the witch hazel outside my window, I’d think it was late afternoon. The goats have grown thick coats. We’re hauling their water, hot, from the laundry sink because the water spigots are wrapped against freezing. The air smells cold.
Here between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Range winter is less frigid than in many northern places. But while the weather varies by longitude, for the reader in English literature the season wears a harsh and inhospitable aspect in the mind’s eye: Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge huddled over a smoldering fire in his cavernous house, breath smoking in the chill air; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando skating past peasants who chop fruitlessly at the frozen Thames, desperate for water to sustain life; Christina Rosetti’s Christ Child born into a world where the earth itself has turned to ice, too hard even to admit the burial of those who cannot outlast the brutal cold.
All this is conjured by the title before the reader even cracks open the holly-and-ivy-edged cover of Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter. So are the richness and heat of A Christmas Carol or Orlando in the volume itself—the gilt and purple cover with orangey-red end papers, the thick, creamy pages, the beautiful typeset. The book even smells good. And at fifty pages, it makes a leisurely read to wrap up the old year or welcome a new one while sitting by a crackling fire or in the yellow glow of a lamp. (If you’re looking for gift pairing ideas, Annie Lennox’s A Christmas Cornucopia is the perfect musical complement.)
The story itself is deceptively simple, like the pen-and-ink illustrations by Victoria Sawden that evoke the beautiful, dangerous forest. On an afternoon in midwinter the Scot sisters make one of their habitual visits to the wood. Merowdis gets out of the chaise and takes a walk while Ysolde drives on to make a few social calls. Then they go home. Nothing changes. And yet everything changes.
The Wood at Midwinter is a book that bears reading and rereading. When I finished it for the first time it felt too brief, almost unfinished. But Clarke’s writing is like the ivy and bramble that appear throughout the book. It’s alive, sending down roots in the mind and shooting up in unexpected places. With a few strokes of her brush, she has created a whole world, and it reveals more of itself over time.
It is a book that resists definition, keeps the reader off balance. The pet pig, Apple, along for the ride in the chaise, chats with her friends, a snobbish lap dog and an anxious hound. For a moment it seems that this might be a comic story of talking animals. But the darkening forest contains other creatures; the wood itself speaks; nature is still red in tooth and claw.
The tug-of-war between themes runs right through the story—tame and wild, human and animal, society and nature, Christmas and Solstice—a tension and a blending reminiscent not only of Dickens and Woolf but of pre-Disney fairy tales, of C. S. Lewis, Elizabeth Goudge, Joan Aiken, or Katherine May. “A church is a sort of wood,” says Merowdis. “A wood is a sort of church. They’re the same thing really.” In a 2020 interview, Clarke suggests that—Christian or Pagan—the crucial demarcation falls “between people who see the world for what they can use it for, and the idea that the world is important because it is not human, it’s something we might be part of a community with, rather than just a resource.”
As the story opens, the narrator’s gaze rests on Ysolde, sympathetic, practical, patient, and kind. But Ysolde drives away, and the reader is left—like Dante, in a dark wood—with Merowdis. Merowdis is thoughtful to the point of abstraction. She doesn’t understand the perspective of those around her, perhaps because she’s preoccupied with reality on a larger scale. It seems likely that she can understand what animals say, though she’s as vague with them as she is with her fellow humans. She perceives the voice of the wood distinctly. Her sister thinks she is a saint.
The options for young women in the Scot sisters’ world seem to be either religious vows or marriage vows, and Merowdis is unable to see a life for herself in either. Isolated within her family and society, she goes to the wood in hope of discerning another way. There she sees a vision. And though it promises suffering, she welcomes it with open arms. Her response is an almost word-perfect echo of Jesus’s words in Matthew 19:14, though Merowdis makes an ambiguous, multilayered Christ figure. She knows the story of the Virgin and the Midwinter Child, whom the wood calls, “the hidden Sun,” and she says, “the hidden Sun is not enough for me any longer.” The path she sees in the vision seems possible to her; it offers a way her love can be of use.
Ysolde appears again only briefly near the end of the story when she returns to pick up Merowdis—and her bonnet, which Ysolde is ruefully unsurprised to find lying forgotten in the snow near the wood-gate. If Merowdis is something of a little Christ, Ysolde is a little Virgin. Although she understands her sister better than anyone, she still doesn’t understand her. She loves her, practically and sacrificially, as well as she knows how. Ysolde’s love, though imperfect, makes a way for Merowdis to be in the world, even though it brings Ysolde pain. She treasures the things that happen to them both, and they change her.
On midwinter’s day, for long ages past, human beings have marked the moment when the darkness reaches its zenith and earth begins to emerge again, inexorably, into the light. Coinciding with the northern hemisphere’s midwinter season, Christians around the world have celebrated another kind of solstice—the turning point when the Virgin accepted an unknown path of suffering and love and the Unimaginable God came to Earth as a human embryo who would love and suffer, and the world started the long climb: The coming of Christ, whose everlasting kingdom is and will be founded on right relationships and true justice.
It’s a shocking story, if we can see through the accumulated layers of sentimentality. The story is full of suffering. But it’s not gratuitous misery. It’s suffering that has endured to reach an infinite joy. Clarke has also spoken about the importance of joy in her life and her work: “I am very interested in describing joy. Where does one look in modern culture for joy?” Suffering comes to every life, and The Wood at Midwinter is full of its shadows. But the story also asks us to consider whether there might be something more.
“Saints do shocking things,” Apple the pig tells her friends the dogs. “It’s what makes them saints.” But it’s not the shock value that makes a saint. As both Merowdis and Ysolde discover in the course of the story, saints do shocking things for love.
And that changes everything.
Lucy S. R. Austen is the author of Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. She lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her husband and children.
Such a beautifully written review, so right for this time of year. Perhaps the connection between wood and church is, to evoke G. K. Chesterton, the “God of Earth and Altar.”