The Reader's Shelf: Let’s Talk About the Weather, October 1, 2011
Oct 1, 2011"It was a dark and stormy night." This hackneyed literary line may seem as trite as talking about the weather to fill awkward social silences, but, hidden under the folds of its banality, weather can become a densely complex and nuanced writing tool. Climatological conditions like rain, a blizzard, or a dust storm set the scene of a story and are often metaphors for mood or plot turns. In the following titles, weather evolves into an additional protagonist, deeply interwoven with its fellow characters and plot. Who says talking about the weather is polite? Here it can add insult to injury, be a vengeful and often life-threatening companion, and even instigate a war.
Emily Brontë's Wuthering HeighTS (Oxford Univ. 2009. ISBN 9780199541898. pap. $6.95) whirls together violent storms and tempestuous temperaments. One would be hard-pressed to find a stormier pair than Catherine and Heathcliff, who battle each other to the grave. The two protagonists, almost always at cross-purposes, are romantic and heartbreaking as their nettling relationship rubs them raw. To match their stormy union and capture her novel's fraught mood, Brontë infuses her pages with descriptions of desolate moors and weather-beaten landscapes.
Weather is even less polite in Into Thin Air (Anchor: Random. 1999. ISBN 9780385494786. pap. $15), an edge-of-your-seat account of Jon Krakauer's harrowing experience summiting Mount Everest during one of the deadliest seasons in the history of climbing. On assignment for Outside magazine, he reports on the growing commercialization of Everest and details the terrible weather conditions that led to the tragic deaths of many of his teammates. Krakauer also explores the motivations of the climbers, those fit enough for the ordeal and those rich dilettantes who endangered everyone else.
In his debut novel, Light Boxes(Penguin. 2010. ISBN 9780143117780. pap. $14), Shane Jones deftly spins the tale of a town battling to free itself from the icy, despotic rule of February. Simultaneously a month, a season, an ireful tyrant, a force of nature, and a god, February punishes the town for flying, banning even birds and kites. When children start disappearing, the slow resentment of the townspeople escalates into full-fledged warfare against their master. In this multilayered work, Jones uses metaphor, poetic language, and textual design to convey the dire lives of a single town rebelling against an eternal winter.
Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (Norton. 2000. ISBN 9780393040166. $23.95) recounts the sinking of a commercial fishing boat in a nor'easter in October 1991. Junger brings to life its crew, the rescue teams searching for several groups caught in the same storm, and the fishing community of Gloucester, MA, as well as the storm's horrifying and devastating ten-story waves and 120-mile-per-hour winds. The Andrea Gail was lost with all hands, so Junger uses personal insight and research to create an unforgettable exploration of nature's power.
In John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin. 2006. ISBN 9780143039433. pap. $16), the Great Depression and the dust storms that turned much of the Great Plains into a wasteland are the catalysts that set a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers on the road west in search of a new life and the hope of a promising future—one that ultimately will be denied them. With an eye for detail and an ear for the Okie rhythms of speech, Steinbeck creates a reader's sense of intimacy with the Joads as they travel to California.
In Isaac's Storm (Vintage. 2000. ISBN 9780375708275. pap. $15.95), Erik Larson tells the dual stories of Isaac Cline, the leading meteorologist in Galveston, TX, in 1900, and the devastating hurricane that killed over 6000 people and nearly wiped that city off the map. In a gripping account that will ring familiar to our post-Katrina society, Larson draws on Cline's correspondence and reports, survivors' stories, and a modern scientific understanding of hurricanes to detail the fatal miscalculations made in the face of a storm so violent it defied all imagination.
"It was very cold. The sky was dark and heavy with unshed snow." Thus begins Agatha Christie's classic short story "Three Blind Mice," from Masterpieces of Mystery and the Unknown (Griffin: St. Martin's. 2006. ISBN 9780312351489. pap. $16.95), the inspiration for the play The Mousetrap. In this country house mystery, a snowstorm traps houseguests who discover that a murderer is on the loose among them. Christie's trademark skill at constructing twisting plots and dropping invisible-seeming clues is on great display in this clever tale that depends on the weather to add much of the delicious tension.
| Author Information |
| This column was contributed by Julia Algire, an iSchool student at the University of Washington, Seattle Neal Wyatt compiles LJ's online feature Wyatt's World and is the author of The Readers' Advisory Guide to Nonfiction (ALA Editions, 2007). She is a collection development and readers' advisory librarian from Virginia. Those interested in contributing to The Reader's Shelf should contact her directly at Readers_Shelf@comcast.net |
