Winter: The Story of a Season, by Val McDermid review: 'revealing'

I was going to call this an amuse-bouche, but really it is a stocking filler. Appropriate enough for a book about the year’s coldest quarter, but cosy and cooried in though it is, it is a stocking filler. It is part of a series – the book has an excerpt from Michael Morpugo’s Spring as a taster, and Bernardine Evaristo and Kate Mosse are scheduled for Summer and Autumn. It is a cute idea, although calling it “a landmark series” might be somewhat breathless. Morpugo’s book begins with the Vernal Equinox – 20 March next year, and described by Morpugo as “officially spring. But it isn’t. I know what spring should be and this isn’t it”. Since McDermid’s hivernal eulogy takes us up to Burns Night, I fear February might be shortchanged and sidelined. It is not as if the only joy of February is its brevity.

Val McDermid | Lisa Ferguson

Winter is a little love-letter to the year’s tail end and first twitch awake, and it allows McDermid a space to write unlike herself. It is memoir-ish, and it did make me wish she would produce a proper memoir. There are hints here – a grandfather jailed for black marketeering cigarettes, a youthful dalliance with the folk scene with both awakening political nous and a rueful retrospective glance at naivety, a certain accommodation with aging and the never-shalls of life: although not participating in the Loony Dook hardly counts as a squandered life opportunity as far as I am concerned.

Much of this will evoke a certain degree of nostalgia in readers of a certain age, and I count myself as one. I remember the Stakhanovite efforts of hollowing out a neep to make a tumshie lantern, the dubious joys of dooking for apples (and the year our parents conspired to turn it into a mass chickenpox infection to get it over and done with), the squibbish nature of back garden fireworks. I would imagine that many readers will feel the chime of recognition across these pages, even when the “in danger of becoming a national treasure” narrator peeks through recounting transatlantic trips and commissions to recognise female authors during Edinburgh’s Hogmanay. Certainly, moments like “Me, I love soup. Probably because my mother was a fine soup maker” run the risk of bathos. My Mum is a cracking soup maker, has taught me well enough, and frankly the idea of putting a tin of tomatoes in broth is – well, I shake my head and, like a skinny white BA Baracus, pity the fool who do such a damn fool thing.

READ MORE: Silent Bones by Val McDermid review: 'a murder that could have changed the future of Scotland'

There are points where McDermid is revealing about the process of writing, about the space required to solve problems in narration, and the manifold ways in which crime writing has changed. From pay phones to forensics, the world is not as it was, and McDermid has been more attuned than many writers to the slow changes over years compared to the regular cycle of individual years. Again, a substantial autobiographical work that fleshed out the changes she had witnessed, and endured, would be a serious text: as much social history as literary history. (I do like to remind people that McDermid’s first book, Report for Murder in 1987, was published by the pioneering Women’s Press, rather than a corporate: there is surely a story there to be told).

Nonetheless, there is a strangeness about this book. We can all reminisce about writing our names with sparklers or sodden socks while sledging, but – however we make meaning from it – Christmas is still at the centre of the winter season. Although McDermid writes about gifts and about Christmas Day being a work day (cue predictable boo-hiss at the Kirk), there is nothing about Christmas as a religious celebration. I do not believe that McDermid grew up in a household so atheistic that she has no memory of nativity plays or carolling. The description of Burns Night tries its damnedest not to point out his various pomposities and hypocrisies, but I think McDermid is trying too hard and reading too slightly to consider the poem “The Rights of Woman” as fit to stand beside Wollstonecraft, Sand and Greer. His poem, after asserting women have the right to protection and decorum, states they have “For Right the third, our last, our best, our dearest, / That right to fluttering female hearts the nearest; / Which even the Rights of Kings, in low prostration, / Most humbly own - 'tis dear, dear admiration!”

READ MORE: Val McDermid on Winter, her 'most personal' book to date

Although there is a smattering of cultural references – the Snowman, Outlander, The Broons, the Reverend IM Jolly – again, it is the absences that intrigue me. Winter seems to me the hearthstone of many favourite childhood books: The Box of Delights, The Dark is Rising, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. I have an ongoing tease with a friend about whether she – a fellow lover of winter – resembles Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen or CS Lewis’s White Witch (“always winter but never Christmas” as Mr Tumnus says) more. There are even the Arctic thin spaces at the end of Pullman’s Northern Lights.

Winter strikes me as a time for regeneration, and not just because we used to have a Doctor Who special. It is a serious time, a time to look back and to plan ahead. Each year, I re-read John Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day” and hope for his insight: “and I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” And a Good New Year, one and all.

Winter: The Story of a Season, by Val McDermid, Hodder Press, £16.99

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here