Winchelsea

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This book was so slow-burner that for the first ⅓ of it I thought I might not finish it at all. But in the end I’m very happy I didn’t leave it. After recounting those first and, frankly, quite uninteresting years of Goody’s life a grand adventure of a book has started to emerge in front of me. And I have to say that it was very much to my liking and gave me a real pleasure to read it. The letter from Goody at the beginning says that her true narrative, through the different lenses of the text has turned into something of a novel. I found this destabilising to the text immediately as she talks about ‘the novel’ with the certainties of a modern writer, where the term was still a disputed and nebulous term in 1779 when she is writing. She also makes the point that most of the narrative was told by her to a man and so warns the reader that the book may sound like a man writing as a woman more than the real lived experience of a woman. This caveat seems to have no meaning or purpose within the world of the book but instead refers to the fact the (twenty-first century) novel is in fact written by a man and making excuses for the fact it sounds like a man writing a woman. This is still further complicated by the fact that Goody does in fact live as a man for a large section of the book which sort of makes her a pseudo-male narrator anyway. Goody was a reasonably consistent character and we had a couple of well thought out supporting cast members. There is a wrapping up at the end were Goody is allowed a final say in her story but by now we don't really know who she is any more or how she feels about anything that has happened to her.

I greatly appreciated the unfolding of this book, the plot, the characters, the voices, the mysterious and unforgiving sea, the deeply complicated town & the secrets it guards. Given Alex Preston named his fifth novel after a small town nestled on the Sussex coast, it is unsurprising that the power of place is integral. Sweeping vistas of imperious dunes, thunderous waves and atmospheric renderings of landscapes “fringed by fernbrake and hawthorn” are offered throughout Winchelsea. But, most pertinently, so are insights of what lies beneath the town’s surface. The main character of Goody was enthralling to read about through her character journey and transformations. She is quite flawed and rebellious and takes part in many questionable deeds and adventures but you cannot help but love her. What I found most jarring was the abrupt end of Part 1, followed by Parts 2 and 3 - the pacing up to the end of Part 1 and after was just off for me and felt like an afterthought. I truly felt like the ending of Part 1 could have been the end of the novel. Parts 2 and 3 felt a little rushed, condensed and like there could have been enough material for at least one more book if explored in greater detail.

What holds the novel together as much as its driving plot are its incantatory atmosphere and spellbinding language. Nights are noisy with owls and fieldfares, “their lonely twits falling down through the dark”, while meaning oozes via sound and rhythm from antique vocabulary such as “fallalery” and “yelloching”.

Then we switch to another narrator for the ending portion.. At least this was a character we are familiar with from fairly early on in the book but suddenly it feels like now the book is about him and no longer really about Goody at all. In a plot which moves at an impressively athletic clip, Goody becomes bandit, lover, leader, revolutionary. With commanding descriptive powers, Preston draws us through Goody’s ever-changing 18th-century world, each tableau thrumming with vitality.The attempts to create an eighteenth-century atmosphere in the novel feel false and a little ‘theme-parky’. Characters, when drinking beer, only drink porter, presumably because that’s a more ‘old-fashioned’ sounding beer; they wear, doff and remove tricorns with great regularity (not the hat’s name at the time when people actually wore them), they ‘go marketing’ rather than to the market. Strange word choices are frequently used as a way of making the book seem olde-timey, a number of characters ‘festivate’ in this book, a word that seems to have been used be nobody at no-time. Most egregious is the name of the main character, Goody. The word is short for ‘Goodwife’ and was used in Puritan areas particularly as interchangeable with the word ‘Mrs’. Even the most famous Goody, Goody Two-shoes, was really called Margery. Winchelsea” is as much a book about the characters in it, as about the land they were living on. I very much liked that the author has put so much effort into painting not just where this book was placed, but also its history. And have done so without ever abandoning Goody or any other characters that were telling her story. It was rather done THROUGH her and what she’s done.

If you aren’t familiar with Winchelsea and it’s smugglers you probably won’t mind this so much. If you like a bawdy tale with sex, booze, sailing and bloodshed then give it a go. Just be prepared for abrupt story changes, unfinished threads, and a feeling that there was so much more to be explored.I REALLY enjoyed this for the first three quarters; I felt like I was on my own smuggling adventure. In Winchelsea, we are transported to the mid 1700s. Goody Brown, rescued from drowning as a baby and swiftly adopted by her rescuers, grows up in the small smuggling town of Winchelsea. At sixteen, she witnesses the murder of her father and is given little choice but to fill her father's shoes for the very same gang that brought him to his untimely demise. With help from her brother, Goody joins a rival gang and plots her revenge. I didn’t find the writing particularly engaging, the author throws in long antiquated words every so often as if to show off their intelligence, but it isn’t in keeping with the characters portrayed and just seemed pompous. It goes off on tangents about the Jacobite’s and the king over the water, that felt like they belonged to another book he wants to write, not part of this one, in fact he hints at further stories at one point, sigh. The original focus of the book is lost, and rushed at the end. In fact throughout its all over the place, unfinished threads, stories that start then go nowhere. Characters changing their character without explanation, I could go on. Did not satisfy this reader in any way, in fact I think I’d do a better job myself! Goody was a very interesting and often surprising character. Her dramatic beginning in some way or other shaped her for her whole life. Despite being raised as a lady with as much comfort and education as her foster family could muster, she never was one. Always wild, she didn’t care very much about the pressure of social life and it’s rules. She was never certain as to whether she was man or woman, she lived her life as both and neither. I think that was one of the things I liked the most about her: she was living her life the way she wanted it to be. And at the same time, she went through so much at such a young age. The way she was portrayed gave me an inside as to what emotions she felt and through this she felt much more close to me.