Slow-moving and with next to no plot, the story unfolds gently in the third person. I’m tired of living the way we do.” A quietly devastating story Stella describes it like this: “I’m tired. It’s only when the pair go on a midwinter break to Amsterdam that things begin to go awry and they are forced to confront the fact that they want different things out of life now that they have raised their family and no longer work.
At the same time, Stella, a former teacher, wants to explore her faith by joining a religious order - without her husband tagging along. Gerry, a retired architect, is desperately trying to hide his dependence on alcohol. Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break is an intimate portrait of a long marriage between two “empty nesters” who are keeping secrets from each other. This is a quietly brilliant novel, which makes for essential reading at any stage of life.Fiction – paperback W. Midwinter Break reads as both a summation of his themes and a remarkable late flowering. In 40 years of short stories and four previous novels, MacLaverty has written often about the distance between couples: about men floored by alcohol, and women examining their faith about religious prejudice in Northern Ireland, the violence of the Troubles and the stranglehold of the Catholic church.
This unflinching attention to the textural detail of minute-by-minute existence slowly builds into a profound exploration of the biggest themes in both public and private life: faith, politics and fanaticism love and loneliness joint compromise and individual purpose. With acute, understated tenderness, he charts the medical palaver and hyper-awareness of the body’s fragility that come with age.
It is extraordinary how his blunt, declarative sentences translate the fiddly minutiae of life – the pleated paper from a bar of hotel soap, the cellophane packaging round a pair of pyjamas – into utterly gripping prose.
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