The Wood at Midwinter
“Fantasy depends on immersion. Without it, the magic remains out of reach.”
Susanne Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter presents itself as a winter’s tale, a fantasy set in the depths of a mystical, snow-covered forest. The story promises enchantment and transformation. Clarke tells a story around the mysteries of midwinter with a child who appears from beyond.
The narrative centers on a woodland where the passage of time and the natural world bend to an internal magic, transforming the forest into a living character. The protagonist, Merowdis, moves through these woods with her talking animal companions and encounters other magical creatures and faces challenges that seem intended to test her resolve. On the surface, this setup offers the opportunity for Clarke to revisit and find new aspects of her fantasy world as she explores themes of transformation and the changing and unchanging seasons of life.
Clarke’s prose is strikingly minimalistic. The book’s marketing promises a “beautifully woven narrative,” but the marks on the page are a series of short, declarative sentences that form a staccato rhythm, creating an abrupt, choppy reading experience. For a story set in a world where magic is meant to infuse every shadow and snowfall, and in which the indefinable presence of the fantastic escapes from another world, the prose feels starkly unembellished. For example, she writes:
“Merowdis, the dogs and the pig entered the wood. A thin layer of snow covered the ground. Copper-coloured leaves lay all around, their edges outlined in white frost. In every direction were avenues of bare trees sinking into blue-white, milky mist punctuated there by green-black holly bushes. The air smelled of frost and earth and decomposing leaves.”
Clark’s descriptions are rote, as if the images have been constructed from stock photos. While this is the mode of Grimm’s Fairy Tales or other oral stories, it doesn’t allow enough room within the narrative to mean much more than talking trees, animals who have lines of dialogue, and the unstated compulsion of Merowdis to wander into the forest looking for her yet-to-be-born child. The trees stand, the snow falls, and the animals appear, but all in a way that feels routine, stripped of the physicality and meta-physicality that would make this world feel alive.
Clarke’s depiction of the forest and its inhabitants remains abstract. The forest, as it’s presented, is a generic backdrop rather than the deeply realized character it could have been. Without specific and considered images, the story becomes an outline, a skeleton without flesh.
Fantasy turns metaphor into its own reality. In a naturalistic story, a horse is a horse. Naturalistic writers steadfastly avoid personification. D. H. Lawrence excels at presenting animals as they are and avoids the hackneyed similes and metaphors of personification. He makes a mark between the symbolic and the allegorical, leaving the physical horse on the side of naturalism, the symbol of the horse on the side of symbolism. In Lawrence’s last book, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, he draws on the way in which man draws symbolic power from the horse. “The horse, the horse!” He writes, “The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action in man!”
Fantasy, on the other hand, crosses that gulf between the observed animal and the symbol. Desert sand in fantasy may be made of tiny grains of minerals, rock fragments, salts, and desolation. Animals in fantasy not only talk and resemble humans in animal costumes but are the specific embodiment of a symbolic, rather than allegorical, relationship to the fantasy world. In The Wind in the Willows, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. H. White, animals are made of fur, bones, blood, personalities, histories, and abstractions. They may exist midway between the world of humans and another world, like frogs living in our garden also living in your pond.
The animals in The Wood at Midwinter are little people in fur coats. In Clarke’s previous books, one of her talents was to articulate the inexplicable, to find linguistic substance outside of language that existed in the gap opened when fantasy fuses the metaphorical tone, vehicle, and tenor. The metaphor depends on two unlike things being compared. In the phrase, “She slept like a bear,” a girl’s sleep is compared to hibernation. She is both sleeping deeply, but not really hibernating. Suddenly, in this figure, there is the girl and a bear and sleep and hibernation, and many other things.
A reader tends to discard the things that don’t seem to apply. In fantasy, the protagonist may be fused into the bear. She became a bear and sleeps the slumber of midwinter, for example. And now two things are jammed together, and in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, for example, in this fusion, Clarke found the other word of fairy. There are in the girl and bear a fusion thought, feelings, and abstractions that are ineffable and were not present before this fusion occurred. These fusions do not happen in this work, but rather she explores a literalness that fails to ignite the magic of fantasy.
At less than 100 pages and released in hardcover, The Wood at Midwinter is a gift item or collector’s edition. Readers familiar with her other work can recall it with something new. The Wood at Midwinter implies, rather than expands on Clarke’s existing world. While the story is sure of itself, it fails to move through its minimalistic surface. Fantasy depends on immersion. Without it, the magic remains out of reach.