Just had one of those weekends where you do nothing very much. Bit of shopping, bit of cooking, very little bit of housework, drink coffee and generally adopt a slothful attitude. Love it when this sort of time comes along. Having spent most of my life working damn hard, running my own business, bringing up children, commuting, it is sheer joy to know that I can do what I like when I like and, hell, if I don't feel like doing it then I don't.
So Sunday saw me curled up on sofa, Sunday papers, coffee and toasted muffin just chillin'. After lunch I wondered what to read. I have a To be Read pile full of review books waiting my attention but somehow could not concentrate, I wanted something I could sink into and I then remembered a discussion that had taken place amongst members of an online reading group of which I am a member, a discussion about Rosamunde Pilcher and I realised that was what I wanted. Pulled down Winter Solstice and I was off.
Three hours later I surfaced. I shut the book up with a deep sigh of satisfaction. I know this book well having read it several times, as I have her most popular The Shell Seekers, and each time I read either of these I am unable to put the book down as I want to find out the ending and what happens. Well, I know what happens and I know the ending and yet I read with a mounting sense of anticipation until it is done.
In Winter Solstice we have a disparate collection of people, all in some way unhappy or needful, who through coincidence and accident, all end up together in a house in a small Scottish town. Oscar Blundell, who has lost his wife and daughter in a car crash, Elfrida, a retired actress slightly raffish and eccentric who has also lost a great love, her cousin Carrie home from Austria after the end of a love affair bringing with her, Lucy, a neglected child caught between her warring divorced parents and Sam, from New York to restore a shattered wool mill and bring hope to the town, smarting from his wife's unfaithfulness They have all sought refuge from their unhappiness and by this coming together and their mutual support they emerge stronger and wiser and with new hope for the future.
Now, if you read that on a blurb you would think Yuk, not going to bother with that. it is real blurb speak and yet it sums up what this book is about. What it fails to do, and I daresay I am going to fail as well though I am going to try not to, is to give an idea of the warmth, humour and sheer down right common sense and charm this book has. OK, the characters are good looking, witty and full of the milk of human kindness, you might almost say too good to be true, but they are so likeable, not an ounce of pretentiousness.
As with all of Rosamunde Pilcher's books, the descriptions of the food, the wine, the bunch of tulips thrust casually into a pottery jug, the red silk shawl thrown over the bed, the eccentricity of it all and the serendipitous nature of an awful lot of the plot lines could, in another writer, make you reach for the sick back. However, by the device of just damn good writing, this is avoided and the reader is beguiled by the somewhat wish fulfilment plot and ending.
The Shell Seekers is one of the most popular books ever published and always appears in My Favourite Top Ten of all time. When the BBC did a crassly awful dramatised such list a few years ago, this was well up there (Lord of the Rings won if I remember rightly - probably because the films were doing the rounds at the time) and everyone I have spoke to who has read it just says Oh I LOVE that book whenever it is mentioned.
Well, I do too but Winter Solstice, though not as densely plotted, is my favourite. A book redolent of warmth and optimism and the belief in the goodness of people, I love it and it made my Sunday re-reading this for the umpteenth time.
I gather Rosamund Pilcher has retired and is to write no more. Oh I do wish she would change her mind....
PS - a simply dire TV dramatisation of this was done some years back. Do not watch and avoid at all costs. Just read the book.
