SHORT TAKE: The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury 978-1-63973-448-1, $16.99, 64pp, hc) October 2024.
Except for children’s books, I can think of relatively few authors for whom a relatively spare short story would be the occasion for a pricey hardcover, but between the holiday gift-book market, the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and the anticipation surrounding anything Susanna Clarke writes, one can hardly blame Bloomsbury for grabbing the ring. To be sure, The Wood at Midwinter is a lovely fable of a 19-year-old young woman far less comfortable in society than in the woods with her talking dogs and talking pig (even the woods itself talks to her), but it takes a lot of Victoria Sawdon’s graceful illustrations, large-font typography, and a fascinating afterword (which is largely Clarke’s paean to the inspiration of Kate Bush’s songs), to get the whole thing up to less than 60 pages. We’re told that the story is set in the world of Strange and Norrell, but that hardly matters; it’s firmly in the tradition of ‘‘magic wood’’ tales, and the narrative voice echoes the storytelling cadences of writers from Andrew Lang to C.S. Lewis, rather than the Austen-tinged Regency period irony of that novel.
What may surprise some readers, and what gives the tale something of an unexpected edge, is how radically the young woman, named Merowdis, acts on her desire to become one with the magical world of the wood, and with nature in general. Somewhat enigmatically described as a saint by both her sister – the only other human character – and by Apple the pig, she makes a number of references to midwinter births and bringing light to the world, which invariably evokes a Christian subtext, and which Clarke rather astutely skirts around rather than doubling down, Narnia-style. If she’s learned anything from C.S. Lewis in this charming but really rather minor work, it’s that for the sake of both the tale and the modern reader, it’s probably wiser not to be C.S. Lewis.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
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