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 The
changes that sunshine, fog and storms bring, which permeate the
novels of Dickens, Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, might appear to have
lost their relevance to the contemporary reader. Felicity James
is a DPhil student with the English
Faculty at Oxford University. Here she discusses weather in
the modern novel.
Penelope Lively, in her 1996
novel 'Heat Wave', has her central character, Pauline, summarise the situation.
"For previous generations," Pauline reflects, "weather
would have been a grim and capricious dictator." For Pauline, the technologically
literate, 20th century spectator, "The weather is an aesthetic
diversion." But as the title suggests, it is the weather which
prompts the plot. Lively’s summer prickles with emotional electricity,
crackling from the fields of baking wheat, unsettling relationships
and stirring up a final storm.
The independent Pauline is
forced to confront her helplessness before the ‘elemental processes’
of the weather and her emotions. The book's central theme
is immediately recognisable, an idyllic summer and at its end, awakening
and regret. This idea of luxuriant, unpredictable heat remains deeply
evocative. Persisting long after foreign holidays and cheap air
travel have diminished our dependence on the unreliable British
sun, it carries a powerful nostalgic charge.
 If
the past is a foreign country, as in that classic of lost innocence,
L.P. Hartley’s 'The Go-Between', then it is sunlit and luminous
with heat. As Hartley’s narrator watches the thermometer climb,
he feels that the summer warmth is a ‘liberating power with its
own laws’, and fatal consequences.
This atmospheric intensity
is brilliantly reflected in the sweltering summer’s day of Ian McEwan’s
'Atonement'. "I love England in a
heat wave," declares the book's central character, Leon Tallis.
"It’s a different country. All the rules change." But as the cool night falls,
it is the Tallis family itself which is to change irrevocably. Innocence
is destroyed and, through a child’s false accusations, becomes destructive.
 This
use of the weather as a complicit partner in the plot is a McEwan
trademark. The stifling heat of his first novel, 'The Cement Garden'
prompts the brother and sister to remove their clothes and attempt
to revisit childhood. In 'Enduring Love' a sudden gust of wind wrenches
the hot-air balloon from the hands of would-be rescuers and sweeps
the narrator forward into the path of another’s obsession.
The writers who bring the
forces of weather into the pages of the modern novel are not only
carrying forward the preoccupations of earlier ages, they are reminding
the reader of the smallness of the self, opening the mind to levels
beyond immediate concerns.
The weather defies attempts
to keep it ‘an aesthetic diversion’, confronting us instead with
a reminder of the uncontrollable aspects of our own lives.
Related link
The Modern Novel
Shakespearean Storms
Thomas Hardy
The Romantic Poets
Mark Twain
Daniel Defoe
Oxford University's
English Faculty
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