The Windhover by Lorna Elcock review: 'wonderfully descriptive'
Lorna Elcock’s spectacular debut bounces readers to and fro across a quarter of a century in alternate chapters as she slowly reveals how adulthood is seeded from childhood, writes David Robinson
Structurally and stylistically, Lorna Elcock’s The Windhover has a maturity you don’t expect from a debut novel. It opens in September 1957, with a three-page idyll: the three Cameron children – Ewan (6), Alison (8) and Moira (10) – and their father are swimming in a Scottish loch at sunset, their mother and granny watching them from the shore.
At this stage, and for quite a while yet, we don’t know why they’re there. We don’t yet know that the mother will be dead in a year, nor that the father and the granny will run a Highland Perthshire youth hostel set up by a crabby widow. Still, seven characters, three pages: it’s a bit of a risky opening, even before we hit the next chapter and suddenly it’s May 1982.
By now, Ewan is 30 and establishing himself in London as a one of the leading artists of his generation, and Moira is on the phone, begging him to come up to her house in Cumbernauld. She is about to give birth and their father is dying. Ewan – who hasn’t seen her for a decade – says he couldn’t possibly. In passing, in the free indirect narration at which Elcock excels, we are told how his last meeting with his father ended and how Moira and her husband helped him back to Rannoch station: “Blood pouring down, still, mixed through with tears. Their kindness, their care.”
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The hook is in. What was it that caused the fight? Why did it widen into what looks like permanent estrangement? But Elcock still isn’t going to make it easy for us. She is going to dangle that hook for a couple of hundred pages yet, when she will introduce an even bigger one.
In the meanwhile, she is going to bounce us to and fro across a quarter of a century in alternate chapters – six from November 1957 to November 1958, six from May to November 1982 – most of which tell the story from Ewan, Alison or Moira’s point of view (although Alison is missing from the 1980s ones). Each chapter opens with an otherwise blank page giving the date, and you soon find yourself paying as much attention to the month as the year in order to establish the chronology.
If Elcock weren’t such a wonderfully descriptive writer, if her characters weren’t drawn with such nuance, these recurring time slips between childhood and adulthood might well become enervating. But they don’t. Instead, we are slowly made to see how Alison took on some of her father’s rage, how devastated Ewan was by his mother’s death and how it forced Moira – resentfully – to assume adult responsibilities.
Apart from the much-missed mother, the adults are a deplorable bunch: a hot-tempered father with a string of secrets and too little care for his children’s safety, a forthright and somewhat forbidding granny, and the widow owner of the big house-cum-youth hostel set up in memory of her dead son, who turns out to be far more selfish than that philanthropic act implies.
This is a novel about how adulthood is seeded from childhood, and one of the risks of its complex structure might be some of the scenes from either time period become little more than vignettes – itself a common fault with debut novels. Before the back-ended plot roars fully into life, that might indeed be a valid criticism. But when it does – in the 1950s, with a superbly controlled sense of menace, in 1982, with a powerfully moving redemptive final chapter, any such doubts are blown away.
In 2021, the opening chapters of The Windhover were shortlisted for the development programme run by the Women’s Prize, which aims to identify talented but unpublished women writers. The main Women’s Prize for this year has already been announced, but when the shortlist for the next one is unveiled in April 2027, I’ll be surprised if this book doesn’t appear on it. Yes, that good.
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