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Haweswater (P.S.)

by Sarah Hall

ISBN13: 9780060817251
ISBN10: 0060817259
Condition: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The village of Marsdale is a quiet corner of the world, cradled in a remote dale in England's lovely Lake District. The rhythm of life in the deeply religious, sheltered community has not changed for centuries. But in 1936, when Waterworks representative Jack Ligget from industrial Manchester arrives with plans to build a new reservoir, he brings the much feared threat of impending change to this bucolic hamlet. And when he begins an intense and troubled affair with Janet Lightburn — a devout local woman of rare passion and strength of spirit — it can only lead to scandal, tragedy, and remarkable, desperate acts.

From Sarah Hall, the internationally acclaimed author of the Man Booker Prize finalist The Electric Michelangelo, comes a stunning and transcendent novel of love, obsession, and the passing of an age.

Review:

"Mardale, the remote British hamlet where Hall's remarkable debut novel is set, is a close-knit community of tenant farmers 'where grand events and theatrical schemes rarely take place.' So when a handsome stranger arrives in 1936, suspicions run high among the hardworking villagers. Jack Liggett is up-front about his plans for Mardale: he has come to inform the villagers that their homes would soon be at the bottom of a massive reservoir. According to Liggett, the dam associated with the project will be a 'wonderful piece of architecture and engineering.' But the villagers, who view the project as 'so strange and vast that at first it was not taken seriously,' resist, setting off a losing struggle between the insular community and the modern world. Caught in the middle is Janet Lightburn, the daughter of a local farmer, who begins a tempestuous and tragic romance with Jack. A Booker Prize finalist for her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, (published in the U.S. in 2005), Hall is a talented writer, and though U.S. readers may have trouble with the phonetically rendered dialogue ('Twa Pund. Eh? Yan more ootstanding' '), the story, with its undertones of loss and grief, tugs at the heart." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"Book lovers haunting the moors of literary fiction in search of another tryst as stirring as 'Wuthering Heights' should embrace Sarah Hall's first novel, 'Haweswater.' Although the book's tardy, modest arrival in the United States (four years after it first appeared in England, and now only in paperback) probably condemns it to obscurity here, this young writer has enjoyed extraordinary success in... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) England. 'Haweswater' won the Commonwealth Best First Novel Award, and her second book, 'The Electric Michelangelo,' was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. Ideally, American book clubs — preferring paperbacks and perpetually torn between the newest releases and the classics — will discover this lush, tragic story about the obliteration of a real-life village in the Lake District.

Hall grew up in a farming community in northwest England near the Scottish border, not far from the Haweswater Reservoir. Built in the early 1930s, the four-mile-long reservoir was a cutting-edge feat of engineering at the time, but it involved flooding the little town of Mardale, where tenant farmers had worked and worshipped for centuries. Hall's novel, grounded in the stones and loam of this doomed village, is a celebration of that way of a life and a memorial of its passing — unutterable sorrow balanced delicately with the intoxicating beauty of this place.

The story is full of subtly drawn characters — some introduced even in the final chapters — but it revolves around Janet Lightburn, the daughter of a respected tenant farmer. She was born in a hail of curses from her usually devout mother, and something of that surprising anger hovers around her as she grows up. 'Her ways were not in keeping with her youth or her sex,' Hall writes. 'She had developed a disturbing habit of staring at things, staring clear into them, so that her eyes never dropped during chastisement or argument.' Despite her raw beauty, she vexes the young men of Mardale, who find her too intimidating, too smart, too manly.

But then a stranger named Jack Liggett arrives in a new sports car, like something from another country, or even the future. 'He was dressed for a dinner, or a dance, like an unusual, exotic bird,' Hall writes, and he announced 'a project so strange and vast that at first it was not taken seriously by the village.' The farmers simply ignore the reservoir plans for months, as though it's too preposterous to worry about. But Janet 'had both the intellectual dexterity of an adult and the reckless tongue of any youth running to catch up with their own life. ... A volatile combination.' She dives into the details of the project, exhorts the passive farmers to resist and finally confronts the dashing spokesman who has announced their demise.

Their sparring bristles with wry wit, a touch of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Neither Jack nor Janet can understand the attraction to the other. 'It could have been sheer mischance,' Hall writes. 'For there are times when passion can describe a random passage of its own accord, like electrical energy in the atmosphere which will strike out in any direction, seeking a high object to ground itself on.' When that first strike finally hits, it's a fantastically charged moment — cover your eyes, Jane Austen! — erotic and rough. These two forbidden lovers keep at it secretly in the forest, under a waterfall, behind the barn, leaving them scarred and bruised, with pebbles ground into their shoulders and pine sap in their hair. Jack falls in love with her and the land he's pledged to flood, while Janet burns with conflicted passion for 'this beautiful, hateful, loved man.' It's 'the sort of romance that shakes up history and devastates valleys.' That it results in a climax of legendary tragedy is signaled in the book's opening chapter without any reduction of its final power.

But their fated affair competes with another one just as passionate: the author's yearning for the village. Mardale is so beautiful that it seems to hover between our world and the land of myth. Hall never projects any modern-day environmental notions onto the past. Instead, she laments the loss of this valley with sentences that pass over the pages like a lover's caress: 'In the morning the light was terracotta, a burnt orange lapping over the eastern fells. The road to Swindale was still eerie and unlit, twisting through trees on the steep valley side, soaked by shadow.'

During periods of drought, the remains of stone buildings still rise above the surface of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall's incantatory prose might call them forth again, too.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:

"Sharing thematic parallels with...Lady Chatterley's Lover, Commonwealth Award-winning Hall's outstanding debut novel is beautifully rendered and offers rich meditations on nature, community, passion, and love." Booklist

Review:

"Hall paints her scenes in dark, symbolic, sometimes overwrought prose, straining for mythic overtones....A portentous debut, but this winner of the Commonwealth Best First Novel Award is proof of a literary talent with more to come." Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Sarah Hall divides her time between the north of England and North Carolina.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780060817251
Author:: Hall, Sarah
Publisher:: Harper Perennial
Author:: by Sarah Hall
Subject:: General
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Country life
Subject:: Westmorland (England)
Subject:: General Fiction
Subject:: Love stories
Edition Description:: Harper Perennia Paperback
Series:: P.S.
Publication Date:: October 2006
Binding:: Paperback
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Pages:: 267
Dimensions:: 8.06x5.34x.73 in. .52 lbs.

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