From my very first reading, I fell headlong into the cwtch of Jane Fraser’s novel, Advent, losing myself in the cramped but cosy kitchen of a stone farmhouse on the Gower peninsula, among three generations of strong Welsh women who between them embody the old century and the new at the start of the Edwardian age.
Ellen feels as though she has never been away. The light is fading fast from the kitchen with its two small windows, one back, one front, the ceiling low and beamed. Same smells: hams hanging from the charnel, damp washing draped over the kitchen maid above the range, whitepot baking in the oven.
Jane Fraser, Advent
Fraser’s debut full-length work tells the story of Ellen Thomas, who emigrated to America to escape an excruciating personal humiliation at home and made a life there before being summoned back to help with her ailing father and the faltering family farm. Redolent of wet wool and loose tobacco, mothballs and stable straw; rich with lilting voices and rural period details that feel both familiar and strange, it features an ideal female protagonist. Feisty but fragile, poker-backed and passionate, sturdy yet sensitive, Ellen drops back into her old life like a fortune-teller’s hot wax into cold water, convoluted into a form she hardly recognises as herself, contorted by the unhappiness that drove her away and wrestling with her role in a time and place where women are hemmed and harnessed and held to very definite expectations and a different, restrictive standard. Where will she choose to bide? And can her private vision for the future come to pass?
Though they’re seventeen, on this special day they long to be much younger, to be children again rather than the hardworking men they’ve had to become. They want to believe in something they don’t believe in anymore, like Father Christmas, for things to be like they were once upon a time.
Jane Fraser, Advent
Jane Fraser is indisputably a writer of place, as so many Welsh writers and writers of Wales seem to be. The concepts of cynefin (‘the place where we feel we belong‘) and hiraeth (‘the longing for home when far away’) pulse through their work like blood in the temple, and Fraser’s place is Gower. Familiar to us today as a holiday destination and as Britain’s first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Gower’s rugged history encompasses farming, coal mining and the rise of industry that drew men from the land, and a significant role in the Welsh Religious Revival — an awakening, contemporary to this novel, that touched profoundly the lives of over 100,000 people. Atmospheric of all this, Advent is also intimate in scale, based on the life of Fraser’s own great-aunt, whose emigration to America provided the jumping-off point for the fiction that she’s woven here. It is a very human novel, and perfect for this time of year, when the fireside (both literal and figurative) beckons and our thoughts inevitably turn to family near and far, lost and found — whether we want them to or not.
An interesting choice and insightful observations
Another one for my Reading List. Thank you!