The Years

Elmore Leonard advises against opening a book with the weather or wasting plot time describing objects or places. For conversion to film that is sterling advice, naturally, and there's no reason why a reader can't be an involved part of that snappily paced adventure on paper either. One is allowed some fun, one hopes. It's Christmas, so I'm out on a round of visits and meals and this afternoon have been paddling in the sea sipping port and brandy out of a hip flask, so I don't have a copy of the book I want to talk about with me and these words might have an uneven pace, a drift and giggle gait. Clouds drift, beautiful puffy ball gown clouds, the sky is a Wedgwood dome. We're at Bluebell Barns admiring the mackerel shoal sculpture. Later the solar light will catch them shimmering silver in make-believe waters. We are warm on the corner sofa with a clear view and strong coffee. Three dogs sleeping. I shall get back to the point now. The Years is the last book that Virginia Woolf published in her lifetime and if you have time for weather and little details there is something here that makes the whole so much more than the sum of the parts: the description is the narrative. In brief: the novel follows the lives of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the 1930s (the then present day) and was first envisaged as a sort of long essay of stories about the social and economic life of women. Published in 1937 it is not a new book and it is possible you have already heard of it/read it/studied it: if so, it is worth a revisit, I think.

A very good review here if you want more information (yes, this may be cheating. But my friends are making Bellinis and the mackerel require further admiration.)

The details are not little, after all, they are how life is, and how life is, is important.