Bernard MacLaverty (2017) Midwinter Break

As usual I was trying to remember if I’d read Bernard MacLaverty’s work before. I’m a great reader but not very good at it. His work Cal strikes a note, but what kind of note I’m not very sure. Memory wise, nothing. Midwinter Break is quite a simple story that follows that clichéd pattern of nothing happens twice.

An elderly couple Gerry and Stella Gilmore go on a short break from their home in Glasgow to Amsterdam. They’re Irish enough to split their faith between them. Religion is woman’s work and Gerry, once an architect and then a lecturer, is happy enough to indulge her and get on with his drinking. MacLaverty is good on this one. The little sins of indulgence that becomes obsession and then possession. One of Gerry’s pals, for example, once told him that he shouldn’t drink alone that people like him needed other around him to slow him down, he was a pace setter, drinking more and faster than others. I’m in the slow lane here. At home Gerry can away with it because they live separate lives, him with his music and his few drams before bedtime. Stella with her school-marmish ways and memberships of local committees and church groups.

One of the dramatic principles often repeated is characters must want different things and this produces conflict. When in Amsterdam Gerry has a bit of a fall and finds it difficult to hide how much he’s drinking from Stella. She throws a bombshell of her own, not as large as when her and her first-born son were almost killed by a bullet during the Troubles in Ireland in the early seventies, forty-two years earlier, but small enough to hurt and cause pain. Her reason for the Midwinter Break wasn’t just a holiday, but an exploration of dedicating her life to God, fulfilling a vow after that bullet had passed through her and joining a semi-religious community in the city called Beguines. Gerry’s hidden alcoholism is old news for her and she demands separation and a new life, a turning of the page, away from settled ways and shores. Dramatist as he is MacLaverty, of course, shows that resolution is not always resolution.      

Comments

I'm not Irish at all, at all, however Midwinter Break seems like a very believable tale. I know of two married couples where she found escape from domestic tedium through church and he found escape through booze. Both stayed married a long time but not for life.

yeh, elsie some statistics suggests that after kids leave home and blah, blah, blah, people have a tendeny to split up more. Architecularly, we're locked into builiging more and more single accommodattion.