Sarah Winman can write. Her first novel, When God was a Rabbit, about a family who leave London for Cornwall, was a best-seller and a wonderful read.
Now she has written a new novel about a fey old woman called Marvellous Ways, who lives in a caravan beside a remote Cornish creek off the River Fal, and waits, and remembers her life.
Marvellous is a nurturer and a one-time midwife, but this has not always endeared her to the locals, many of whom suspect her of witchcraft.
Marvellous is waiting for something, mostly for Paper Jack, her true love. He comes back in 1900, in what she calls the First Return, and stays for a night of love, then packs up sloe gin and pickled limpets and saffron buns, and leaves.
Her village is never the same after World War I, because the old ways of life don’t return when the lives themselves have not returned. “There was nothing actually wrong with the place. It was rightness that was at a tilt.”
So Marvellous waits, and watches the flicker of the candle she lights every night in the little church on an island in the river. And Paper Jack is a long time coming, but she meets an American, a black American serviceman who is one of the thousands in Cornwall awaiting D-Day.
When he’s about to leave he asks Marvellous for a charm, and she tells him: “Go left. I don’t know what it means but you will when the time comes. You must go left.” And he does.
After the war, another man washes up at Marvellous’s creek, damaged by fighting and guilt and on a quest. Nothing is left for him in London, so Francis Drake heads down to Cornwall and is near death when Marvellous finds him, takes him in and restores him to himself.
The writing is beautiful and lyrical – and then a snatch of banality breaks the tension and makes you giggle. Sometimes Drake wakes up to murmurs in the night, which Marvellous tells him is the chatter of saints rising. “What do they talk about?” he asked. “This and that,” said the old woman. “Mostly the weather.”
Here’s some of the beauty: “They fished in a creek still stained by the fall of day, and they watched in silence as the iridescent flow of pink and gold gave way to the solemn colour of night.”
And there’s wisdom too: describing sailors in a storm at sea, Marvellous tells Drake: “Arms reaching skywards. Mouths frozen in prayer. No atheists at sea, Drake. When the waves are the size of mountains even the godless kneel.”
Time and narrative loop forward and back, and Winman twists and ties up her loose ends so that all is as neat and infinite as a Mobius strip. This is the kind of book you want to start again when you’ve reached the end. I loved it.
* A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman is published by Tinder Press