One Day by David Nicholls

One Day is a very readable modern novel spanning twenty years of an on-off relationship between two kindred spirits, albeit opposites, who met at university in Edinburgh on graduation day. We witness their lives spiralling both up and down, portrayed movingly in a recent film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.
I’m interested that David Nicholls was inspired by Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Emma and Dexter are a contemporary Tess and Angel Clare: soul mates, though poles apart in background and experience. I find myself thinking what if Angel had pursued Tess on meeting her by chance at that summer evening dance; their happiness would not have been so fleeting nor ended so tragically. And so it is with Emma and Dexter, but that is the stuff of which novels are made and why we love reading them. There are parallels: Dexter’s unsent letter from India (cut from the film) reminds me of Tess’s unread letter, pushed under Angel’s door the night before their wedding. Angel’s middle-class family and comfortable background mirror Dexter’s privileged upbringing. Both heroines are strong, yet fated by circumstance.
I loved reading their witty conversations and letters, made all the more poignant by the hands fate deals them, as it does all of us as we grow older in the game we glibly call life.

You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.

The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

I read this novel recently following some sad news and it has been an easy comforting read. It is not a clever academic novel; much of it is predictable but it is carefully written and well researched. I found myself caring about the characters and what was to become of them as I quickly turned over the pages, travelling with the heroine, Elise, from Vienna to a country house in Dorset, shortly before outbreak of the Second World War.
There is a dream-like quality that embraces both emptiness and possibility as loss is explored in all its fullness.
Somewhere a clock ticks backwards and midnight is un-struck. Juliana plays and plays and it is every time at once. Burt is fishing in The Lugger on the Danube at dawn, and Mrs. Ellsworth and Hidegard bake a game pie together in the small kitchen of our old apartment.

Perhaps nothing is really lost; memories endure for those left behind. The accompanying Concerto in D minor for Viola, composed by Jeff Rona, expresses that beautifully in addition to these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 1590.
Nor is the earthe the lesse, or loseth aught.
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought...
For there is nothing lost , but may be found if sought...

All that remained were the stone steps leading down to the lawns. The lawns themselves had reverted to meadow grass and weeds tore through the lavender and thyme borders. Then the sun slunk out from behind a cloud, casting a watery light across the valley and catching a treasure-hoard of golden daffodils and the red flash of a kite’s wing. The song of a Dorset warbler punctured the stillness, and in a shaft of pale sun I glimpsed clusters of buttery primrose speckling the path leading to Flower’s Barrow.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse

Pitiful old Winter has returned,
Limping up and down our roads,
Spreading his white blanket of snow
While the Cers wind cries in the
branches of the pine trees.
Traditional Occitan song

It is 1933. A young man walks into a deserted book shop in a quiet town near the Pyrenees. His quest: to ask the owner to translate a medieval letter written on parchment in the old Occitan language.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ he asks.

And so the story unravels… The solitary young man is mourning the loss of his older brother, missing, presumed dead in the Great War. Alone in his grief, he crashes his car in a snowstorm and seeks refuge for the night in a nearby town. He is invited to the local fete but takes a wrong turning… What follows is both possible and implausible: a masterly ghost story that weaves itself around the reader, drawing him in closer…
Freddie and Fabrissa take comfort in finding each other, across the centuries, worlds apart. A healing takes place; it is enough that their loss is recognised, their loved ones ‘known unto God’.
The next day I reread the account of their initial meeting to find out what really occurred. Had I imagined it? It seemed as clear to me as it was in Freddie’s memory. Or was it? And there I let it rest.

A sad tale’s best for winter: a moving story exploring love and loss. I shall look forward to reading it again in December.