Winter Journey

by Isabel Colegate

A fierce, funny, unsentimental book about growing older, about grace and forgiveness, and about hope for a world we must too soon leave behind.

His wild years behind him, Alfred Ashby, a celebrated photographer now in his late fifties, has returned to where he was raised, the family farm in rural England. The old house in the valley, little changed by the years, provides him an agreeable darkroom, necessary solitude, and a link to a more tranquil past. His reverie is broken by a January visit from his headstrong older sister, Edith, a former MP and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her, Alfred's bachelor life is undesirable, his work obsessive and disturbing. She has plans for Alfred, for the farm and for the future, plans she hopes will help the two of them mend their frayed relationship and forget their past sorrows, past mistakes. In the course of their long winter visit, this infinitely complicated brother and sister confront their deepest selves and retrace the tangled paths their lives have taken.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature

199 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Isabel Colegate was born in 1931 in London and was educated at Runton Hill School in Norfolk. In 1952 she went into partnership with Anthony Blond, who was then starting a literary agency and would go on to found a publishing house, and in 1953 she married Michael Briggs, with whom she has a daughter and two sons.

Colegate’s first novel, The Blackmailer, was published by Blond in 1958 and was followed by two more novels focusing on English life in the years after the Second World War: A Man of Power (1960) and The Great Occasion (1962). These were later republished by Penguin in an omnibus volume, Three Novels, in 1983.

Though she has written a number of other successful novels, as well as reviews for the Spectator, Daily Telegraph and TLS, Colegate is best known for her bestseller and major critical success The Shooting Party (1980), which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was adapted for a now-classic 1985 film version. The book is still in print today (with Counterpoint in the US and as a Penguin Modern Classic in the UK). More recently, she has written the acclaimed novel Winter Journey (1995) and the non-fiction work Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitaries (2002).

Isabel Colegate was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in1981. She and her husband live in Somerset.

Valancourt Books

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s nice to read something without cell phones in it. The theme here is broadly British class distinctions. By the 1990s, the time of the action, Edith “...thought about them more than was quite consonant with her frequently expressed belief that they had ceased to exist.” (p. 31) It’s 1992 and Alfred has inherited the family house and land in Somerset, Mendip Hills. He lives alone, works as a photographer, and has survived a wretched Dickensian boarding school. He’s taciturn, unkempt, repressed and widely traveled. He enjoys walking with his countless dogs and has tragically lost a lover: the eccentric Lydia. He’s stuck psychologically. Edith runs a successful foreign language center in London, was once an MP, who after two divorces finds herself bored and seeking greater satisfaction in life than mere money, which she has. She has driven in from London to visit her brother in winter, which seems their preferred season. The novel does not proceed chronologically but flits about in time. When we flashback to the death of their mother, Alfred cannot respond to his hardworking father’s profound grief in a way he feels would be appropriate, while Edith finds it “self-indulgent.” What an icy decorum at the heart of these two. Gradually we meet the local yokels: a retired vicar, Lawrence Raven, very likable, who’s troubled by dreams of beautiful tumescent boys. There’s the weekly help, the nasty Mrs. Weeks, drunk on her own self righteousness, and her daughter, the long-suffering Mrs. Jupp whose ex-husband’s beatings have compromised her vision. There’s Sean, Mrs. Jupp’s son, Mrs. Weeks grandson, who has been jailed for stealing car radios and who Alfred hopes to find garage work with John Jarrett. In his younger days Jarrett impregnated many of the village girls but now he’s alone. The sixties are beautifully limned: the London scene, the wild, drug-addled youngsters. Lydia is a highly paid fashion magazine model who while vacationing with Alfred jumps to her death from a Welsh cliff. Then comes Alfred’s grief; one wonders if now he’ll be able to understand his father’s earlier suffering. I’ve enjoyed this book but it’s not my favorite by Isabel Colegate. That would be The Shooting Party followed closely by the fine Statues In A Garden. Next I want to read her A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses which is nonfiction.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted; the beginning and ending echo each other and point towards the spare but powerful way the novel meditates on belonging to one's home. Lyric passages. Alfred watching flocks of birds and the light on the cathedral as he wrestles for healing and forgiveness. The icy drive home in the dark with the hare running in the headlights is fully of mystery.

[Nat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t finish this book and gave up on page 77!

Even though I enjoyed some of it (it does have some beautifully written descriptions of nature which I liked), overall, I found it extremely tedious.

I hate not finishing books but took the advice of my boyfriend who reminded me that life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy!

[Tiago · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me 85 pages to get into the rhythm of the book and to really enjoy it. I don't know if it was my own problem or if it was the book itself, since the beginning felt like it dragged quite a bit. If it had been better in that specific point, I would have given it four stars. It was a great book about interpersonal relationships in a slightly older age, when memories from the past rush in during the visit to a familiar place and/or because of the visit from a family member. It ended on a great note and the story was very credible as were the feelings and the restraint expressed during the narrative. Enjoyed it tremendously. Maybe when re-reading it in a few years, if that's the case, the long beginning will be a welcome feature.

Regarding the characters, I felt like Edith was the main character even though she might have been just one of the main two. A narrative more focused on Alfred and his thoughts would have made a considerably more interesting book, with only bits and pieces going back to Edith and, therefore, building her story. The book felt like it did it the other way around and the Edith's Parliamentary history and her two divorces were not as enthralling as Alfred's bits. You went on to read a big passage on Edith but you felt still hanging on the memory of what you had just read on Alfred.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Last night I complained to my husband, "This book is so boring!" He said, "Then stop reading it. Life is short." Smart man. It is unusual for me to not finish a book I've started, even if I'm not terribly fond of it, but I can't take any more of "Winter Journey"! I hung in there for 116 pages, waiting for the story to pick up, but it never did. This novel is wordy and dense and dull and thinks too highly of itself. I can handle all of that except dull. A few pages of dull, OK. But pages and pages of dull? According to the blurbs written on the book jacket, I should have loved this book. Sorry, it just didn't work for me. If there is a hell, I'm sure it has shelves and shelves filled with copies of this book.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

written with a decidedly english tone, this ia a tapesty of the everyday interactions of a brother and sister. relished the dialogue, enjoyed the neighborhood and wanted to drink tea and eat biscuits with the characters.

[Charles M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book details a rather boring memoir of Alfred Ashby who returns to his original residence in rural England and his interaction with various people including his sister, a former Parlimentarian. A study on latter life and its complexities, but this book really gores no where.

[Ken Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winter Journey tells the story of 60-ish siblings Edith and Arnold, reflecting on the meaning of coming home after lives spent wandering. There are many beautifully written passages and many emotionally moving moments as Edith visits her brother, who stays on in the house where they grew up.

The novel unravels in a backwards exposition structure where little by little we learn more about the background even as the plot rolls along. This structure creates tension and makes for a very pleasant reading experience as we go from the confusion of some reference (an unknown character, an inexplicable comment, or an unusual reaction) to the relief when we flashback to the explanation.

Colegate's writing style, with its lovely, long, wandering sentences (see below) and reserved characters, is so opposite of the current fashion that it took me a while to read this. Even though it is only 200 pages, it took me two weeks! But I found it very relaxing and rewarding.

"In the cold bedroom, once her parents', all this common sense and competence for the moment failed her; it was not an adequate defence against what the freezing fog had so unexpectedly disclosed, against the pity, and consequently the shame, which Alfred's casual remarks had loosed in her, or against the questions, long familiar and long avoided, for which the silence of the darkened house, broken only by the occasional unaccountable creaking as of a wooden ship in a calm sea, seemed to leave a quite disconcerting amount of space."

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

3-1/2 stars
I can't quite go 4 stars because this author tends to slow my reading by writing so many long sentences. The page print isn't all that wide, probably only 4-1/2 inches or so, but I decided at one point to count the lines in one sentence and there were 13. That happens a great deal so if you are trying to read in a waiting area or some other rather busy place you tend to lose the thought by the time you get to the 13th line. And then you read it again. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had more quiet time in which to read it.

I sum up the idea of the book with some of the author's words said by a character in the novel: "I think how the future streams towards us like in cinema advertisements and then it becomes the present for a moment and then it rushes on into the past, and we battle against it trying to go the other way, clinging to our own little stories about ourselves as if we could keep them safe from the rush of rubble passing us."

[Cheryl Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with most of Isabel Colegate's work, much of which I love, I highly recommend this novel to readers who are interested in British culture and politics--both culture and politics (political history in this case), not just one or the other. Because if you're not interested in both, there will be fair stretches that you will find uninteresting. If you're interested in both, it's wonderful!

This is a quiet, beautifully written story about an aging brother and sister who are assessing their lives and and reconciling themselves with their pasts and with each other. There was no violence, not even any dramatic conflict, but plenty of psychological depth and development. Not for everyone, but very much to my taste.

[Susan Kietzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winter Journey, published in 1995, takes place in rural England, where a middle-aged sister visits her middle-aged brother in a house on property once owned by their parents. The descriptions of the English countryside and the characters that populate it are rich and gorgeous. And yet Winter Journey is one of those quiet English novels that one has to be in the mood to read. Alas, this wasn't the case. However, it does seem like the perfect book to read on a journey into that very English countryside.

[Daphne Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I only finished this book because it was short! It is rather beautifully written but quite slow moving and the characters are not likeable. The personality of Lydia interested me and her relationship with Alfred was intriguing, why was she with him, was she really with him in any real sense or just passing time? I wasn’t inspired to read anything else by this novelist.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simple story of growing old and growing up, not a great deal happens, just life. I found this book quite lovely!

[David]

4.2

[Pooch · Rating 2 out of 5]

"...consuming large meals of wildly varying edibility."

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having travelled, Alfred now lived where he had spent his childhood.

What a treat for the eye; this is a hardback for the visually impaired and I could do this without the monocle.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

liked it a lot as I started out reading it...then about 3/4 way through I got tired of its slowness...will skim it to the end...

[Hina S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it first time on 12/12/10 and gave 3 stars
Read it second time on 10/30/20 and gave 4 stars

[Sam Davison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful, fluid writing.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of her best, although the character development of Edith was remarkable.