Changes

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If you have read Charles Frazier’s Frazier's 'Cold Mountain', or indeed seen the film, then you'll have a fair idea what to expect from his latest offering - 'Nightwoods'. As with 'Cold Mountain', the landscape of the Appalachians is the dominant character, this time set in the 1950s. He even manages to get his requisite bear into the story although thankfully it fares rather better than the unfortunate beast in his first book. The dark, oppressing majesty and beauty of the mountains and woods pervades the whole story.

The story centres around Luce, a loner who lives a reclusive life as the caretaker of an old hunting lodge in North Carolina. Why this young woman has sought the solitude of live on the edge of the lakeside town is explained. It’s It's a sad tale of rural misunderstanding that means that even her father, the local police officer, has no contact with her despite living so close by. When Luce's sister, Lily is murdered, Lily's traumatised twins show up on Luce's doorstep bringing the real world into her life in dramatic ways. The two children don’t don't speak, although initially it is unclear if this is just a result of their trauma. At around the same time, her benefactor for whom she has been looking after the lodge dies and his grandson comes to the town to check out his inheritance.

It's also a fairly stylishly written book. Sentences are often short and may lack conventional rules of grammar, which didn’t didn't irritate me, but I know some don't like. My main gripe about the style, and Frazier is by no means alone in this, is the aversion to the perfectly functional use of inverted commas for speech. There isn’t isn't a great deal of dialogue in the book, which makes it less irritating, but the absence of indicators of speech is, to my mind, avoidably confusing and adds very little. Rant over. That's certainly no reason not to read this book though.