POEM OF THE WEEK

This beautiful scrap of verse is a mystery. We don’t know who wrote “Westron Wynde”, nor when. But the note of longing in it, particularly keen in John Taverner’s musical setting, can be heard across the centuries. The text here is from the earliest known manuscript version. It’s thought to have belonged to a musician in the court of Henry VIII, though the words may be much older.

To modern ears, the third line’s “Cryst” sounds less like a prayer than a despairing expletive. Christ, I’d rather be in bed! When will this bloody weather finally break? Hang on, though. What is the weather doing? Does our lovelorn singer want the wind to bring the “small rain”, or to blow it away? Editors disagree, and sometimes add punctuation, or even rewrite the lines, to support their views. “When wyll thou blow?/ The smalle rain down ‘doth’ rayne,” ran one popular Victorian version, which also censored that blasphemous-sounding “Cryst” to “Oh”, and changed the final “And” to “Or” to banish the thought of lovers entwined in bed. As Rebecca Lee points out (see feature, left), a good edit can improve a piece of writing – but a bad one can butcher it. And yet these four lines have survived any number of editors’ hands. Writers can’t resist “Westron Wynde”; Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway quoted it in their novels. For all its anonymity, it feels personal, even intimate. A postcard from the past: the weather’s awful. Wish you were here. Tristram Fane Saunders

Westron wynde when wyll thow blow the smalle rayne downe can Rayne Cryst yf my love were in my Armys And I yn my bed Agayne

256pp, Chatto & Windus, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Tyler has been publishing novels for 58 years – surely the longest productive streak in authorial history. How does she do it? By writing the same novel again and again, say her detractors. Admittedly, her books share family resemblances: nearly all are set in Baltimore, feature small but significant dramas

and are constructed without visible artfulness. But when they are so clever and wise and readable, say her devotees, why should she do anything different?

French Braid is a family epic in miniature. It starts in 2010 as Serena gets on a train with her boyfriend James. At Philadelphia station, she bumps into her cousin Nicholas and an awkward conversation ensues. For some reason, Serena’s mother, Lily, and Nicholas’s father, David, aren’t on great terms. “Maybe there’s some deep dark secret in your family’s past,” James suggests

‘Alert to every detail’: Tyler’s latest novel includes an oblique self-portrait

to Serena. Here, Tyler is teasing us about the low-key expectations of her plots. But there is indeed a secret, deep and dark, revealed towards the end. Nothing overdramatic, but moving nonetheless.

From here, the novel leaps back to the 1950s, tracking the backstory of David, Lily and sister Alice – plus their parents, Robin and Mercy. Over 240 pages we drop in on the Garrett family’s progress – the marriages, the divorces, the jobs gained and lost, the slow drifting apart and eventual reconciliation as the pandemic strikes and living together becomes necessary. In each chapter the perspective shifts from one family member to another, creating a layered family portrait.

Tyler has always been good at showing how time can alter the way we view a person. Lily, described by her envious sister Alice when they were young as seeming like she “gave off some kind of high-pitched signal that only male ears could detect”, ends up running through three husbands. When the woman that the put-upon David finally brings home is introduced to the Garretts, along with her daughter, she is seen as too old by the family. Yet their marriage turns out to be the most solid of them all.

It’s little surprise that David went for a maternal figure. His actual mother, Mercy, never seemed cut out for motherhood – or marriage. A keen artist, she specialises in pictures of people’s houses. (“I want to zero in on the single feature that reveals a house’s soul.”) She ends up living in her studio – a semi-official separation from Robin that her tactful family never mentions.

In one of those great set pieces that Tyler specialises in, Robin throws a surprise 50th anniversary party for Mercy. “Oh, I wish I’d known,” she says to him with characteristic affectionate impatience, “I could have been looking forward to it all this time.”

Mercy is something of an oblique self-portrait of the author. Certainly, her artist’s eye for the ordinary is very like Tyler’s: “She pressed the doorbell and then studied it intently. Her vision seemed to have sharpened and she was alert to every detail.” In the chapter told from the point of view of her 12-year-old granddaughter, Candle, she visits a more successful painter in New York – a place whose literary scene has dutifully praised Tyler, but never taken her to heart. Candle wonders why Mercy isn’t more successful, given the effort she puts in. “Oh, hon,” she replies, “it’s never wise to look over your shoulder… just run the race on your own.”

Tyler tries to squeeze a little too much onto her canvas here: two late plots involving a closeted family

member and a mixed-race marriage feel tacked on. The titular metaphor comparing the overlapping strands of a French braid with how families work – “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever,” says David – is rather too neat, and dangerously close to twee. The scene that will stay with me is Mercy painting with Candle, the only sound “the whiskery strokes of their two brushes”.

You imagine Tyler, now 80, working on her fiction with just the same fastidious attention. “Silence made what she was doing seem more important – more purposeful, almost like praying.”