Trezza Azzopardi, born in Cardiff studied creative writing at The University of East Anglia and is currently a lecturer there. Winterton Blue, first published in 2007, is her third novel. Her acclaimed first novel The Hiding Place (2000) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her second novel Remember Me (2004) tells the story of a 72-year old homeless woman ‘in search of her stolen possessions and her troubled past’ and is set in Norwich.
Winterton Blue also has a mainly Norfolk setting and is centred on the lives of two people. To quote from the book’s advertising blurb “Lewis haunted by the memory of his brother, by a stolen car and a river running full, and most of all by the boy at the wheel. Anna is haunted too, but her ghost is very much alive. Rita, Anna’s mother, is the exact opposite of her daughter – loud, carefree, and a daredevil, at seventy six. When Rita suffers a fall, Anna must leave London and spend the winter looking after her mother in Yarmouth.” Anna & Lewis meet and “find themselves having to face troubling truths about who they are and what they might become.”
Initially I made the mistake of trying to skim read this book under the misapprehension it might be another ‘lightweight novel with a salty tang’ (Peter Tolhurst). I was wrong. This is a book to savour both for the quality of it's writing and the intricacies of the plot. There are a lot of flashbacks particularly in the story of Lewis and if you are not on the ball, as I wasn’t to start with, things can get a bit confusing. So take the story at an easy pace, the writing deserves a more measured approach than I gave it credit for. It does have a ‘salty tang’ particularly near the end but is certainly not lightweight.
I enjoyed this book; one of the main reasons, it surprised me to realise, being the positive take on Yarmouth, a place that doesn't often get a good press. There are lovely descriptions of the bluster and harshness of the wind on the beach, the shimmer and blur of the sea and sky, lovely space-filled descriptions of the sea scape and the surreal beauty of the wind farm visible from the beach.
As a backdrop to the two main characters the place performs a healing function, not wholly credibly. Both protagonists are presented as complex and troubled. I felt involved and moved by Lewis' memories of his childhood, the fear and insecurity created by his mother's violent boyfriends, the careful protection and then loss of his brother, and we meet him caught in the grip of an obsessive disorder which rules his life. However, as soon as Lewis leaves London and engages in the Norfolk landscape I somehow lost him. His story loses impetus, his disabling complusion seems to fade and resolve without adequate explanation, and his adult relationships with Bredon and Carl read awkwardly, without conviction. Anna perhaps never quite presents as a convincing character - there is a sense of a disorganised unfocused present, and a history of bad judgements regarding her choice of men, but aside from that little is given to fill out the complex woman we are asked to believe in. I was also irritated by the cliched relationship between Anna and her dotty mother - a patronising and tired image of older women - they are not all mad! I was on Anna's mother's side all the way - go on, marry Cabbage! Tell your over-bearing daughter to get a life! Which she sort of doesn't - she becomes besotted by a small, barely inhabitable hut on the Norfolk coast, which she buys and moves to, accompanied, ultimately, by the recovering Lewis. It is a sentimental and unsatisfying ending to the book and a cosy resolution to the protagonists personal difficulties. I rather liked the idea that the beach house was destined to fall into the sea, and was therefore inevitably temporary, and I felt that the symbolism of this echoed the use of Yarmouth as a symbolic backdrop rather than a real place. None of the characters are local (except for a fleeting glimpse of a barmaid), and the beauty of a Norfolk winter coast is described with affection and skill, but does not become rooted and peopled and real.
Copyright © 2007 Archant Regional Limited. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions