Mystery at the heart of marriage
Meet Stella and Gerry Gilmore, the couple at the centre of Bernard MacLaverty’s new novel, Midwinter Break. Originally from the north of Ireland, they have lived much of their adult lives in Scotland. Their only child, Michael, has moved to Canada and started his own family. Michael’s absence — along with the traumatic events that accompanied his birth — have cast a shadow over the Gilmores’ marriage. During the course of this sure-handed and captivating novel, they will finally be forced toward a reckoning.
Catholic Stella is searching for a way of living “a more devout life.” With her remaining years, she wants to “make a contribution, however small” to the world. The problem is she’s not sure whether Gerry will be a part of this final act.
A former architect and university professor, Gerry drinks too much, speaks in puns and mocks her faith, especially when he is inebriated.
She has booked a long weekend in Amsterdam for them, in part, to decide whether there is a viable life for her outside of their marriage. Ostensibly a romantic getaway, the trip is actually an opportunity for Stella to visit the Begijnhof, one of the oldest enclosed courtyards in Amsterdam, which was once home to the Beguines, “a Catholic sisterhood who lived alone as nuns, but without vows.”
Stella has aspirations of taking up residence there, but she learns that it’s not so simple. She can’t just leave Gerry and move into a life of piety and good works in one of the most desirable spots in Amsterdam.
MacLaverty’s novel is relatively short (240 pages), but it feels like a more expansive work because of its unhurried pace and careful attention to each moment of the Gilmores’ sojourn. It is an intimate book that makes wonderful use of the close third person.
A restrained simplicity is the stylistic hallmark of this novel. MacLaverty’s only missteps are his occasionally clumsy and largely unnecessary segues into flashbacks. Those events, parcelled out slowly in the narrative, are tied to the “Troubles” of the late 20th century: the murders and bombings that made daily life in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland so frightening.
Gerry’s drinking and Stella’s desire to live a life of faith are their respective means of coping with these experiences.
MacLaverty manages to dramatize this without reducing his protagonists to mere casualties.
Contemplating the mysteries that lie at the heart of every marriage, Stella thinks, “Nobody could peer into a relationship — even for a day or two — and come away with the truth.” It’s a measure of MacLaverty’s achievement here that he has done exactly that.