I just finished the audiobook for North Woods, and I sat for thirty straight minutes in a joyous, weeping rapture.
As I was listening to North Woods, I was ruminating about life. What is life? Time, grief, pain, joy, ecstasy, and above all change. But do things really change?
Mason’s mellifluous language and advanced jargon (he used concupiscence twice!) doesn’t detract from the fact that his novel explores the human experience through a quaint yellow house in a verdant area in North England.
The novel is just stunning. The sweeping pastoral images conjured by Mason’s vast use of literary techniques is complemented by the touching and truly human vignettes in each chapter.
I loved the format of the novel – the integration of poems, ads, speeches, etc. as little interludes between chapters were such a nice breakup of the form. It is also an epic; it spans time from pre-colonial all the way to our modern era.
Above, all, though the novel is just heart-achingly beautiful.
The novel explores the pain of forbidden love, the bitterness of a twin sister who is less desired, the tragedy of a mother with her mentally ill son….these stories grip you, hurt you, and leave you with such a sense of emotional connection.
The sweeping use of the yellow house and nature as observers of these changing human stories just speaks to how the areas we live in hold so much. They hold laughter, they hold love, they hold hate, they hold tragedy….and as we pass on, the cycle of nature begins anew to observe the machinations of us foolish little humans.
Nature itself is it’s own character in the novel, in a sense. It is weaved into the fabric of the story both as an observer and as a participant. His description really puts you there.
The pure emotion that Mason captures with his words left me crying, and crying, and crying.
This novel changed me. I never thought to reflect on how cyclical things are, how pain is life, how love is life, how it’s all just part of the fabric of our universe. People die, nature is destroyed and rebuilt, and through it all, things change and yet things stay constant. Such a gorgeous novel. Please read, especially the audiobook. Highly recommend.
by ColdestWintersChill
1 Comment
LOVED this book.