Winchelsea

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The Winchelsea of the 1740s that Preston details sits atop a network of subterranean passages used by smugglers to store booty from the continent. The murky and treacherous world of piracy, corruption and gang warfare is the focus of this exhilaratingly twisty novel that is something of a warren of connected and echoing recollections itself. The main character of Goody was enthralling to read about through her character journey and transformations. She is quite flawed and rebellious and takes part in many questionable deeds and adventures but you cannot help but love her. It has come to my attention that “presentism” has begun to be used regularly in cultural, historical analysis of writing, theater, movies, etc. While I can see some reviewers leaning into a “form” of implications of present day mores infiltrating this book, I am inclined to believe that is not a major issue.

What I found most jarring was the abrupt end of Part 1, followed by Parts 2 and 3 - the pacing up to the end of Part 1 and after was just off for me and felt like an afterthought. I truly felt like the ending of Part 1 could have been the end of the novel. Parts 2 and 3 felt a little rushed, condensed and like there could have been enough material for at least one more book if explored in greater detail.It starts off being told from Goody's perspective and I will say the first 30% is fairly gripping. You are right into the action for sure but once 'revenge' for the Father's murder has been delivered the next middle section of the book feels overly long and winding. I really struggled to get through it because there didn't feel like anything much to keep me reading but eventually it livens up again only to then experience reading whiplash when suddenly at 75% of the way through book it is suddenly being told from another characters point of view and worst of all a character we have never encountered before. Goody's experiences, thoughts, etc are gone. We have no idea what she is thinking any more and I found myself not caring I REALLY enjoyed this for the first three quarters; I felt like I was on my own smuggling adventure. TW to bear in mind; sexual assault, sort-of-incest (idk how else to phrase this but you'll understand if you read), murder, gore.

There is a wrapping up at the end were Goody is allowed a final say in her story but by now we don't really know who she is any more or how she feels about anything that has happened to her. Another element of this eighteenth-century story which is twisted into weird shapes by its twenty-first century sensibilities is the trans narrative. There are a surprising amount of stories of gender crossing in eighteenth-century fiction and reality, from the female alter-egos of Molly House attendees to the stories of female husbands and people like Charlotte Charke living as a male but when Goody does this, it’s treated from a twenty-first century perspective. Goody lives for a while as a man called William and finds themself comfortable as a non-binary person at the end of the novel. All the other characters seem aware of the notions of sex and gender being separate and of gender performativity and the notion of a gender spectrum. When one character has met Goody as William, even when he finds out that William is not a born-man, keeps using male pronouns - a polite and social thing to do nowadays but not really within the scope of an eighteenth century understanding of sex and gender where they still believed a big jump could un-invert a women’s genitals and make them male. I’m not saying that eighteenth-century people would have been necessarily cruel or barbaric towards a male-presenting person but they simply would have not conceived it the way we do, and nor would the trans person themselves. There were elements that I loved about Winchelsea. It would probably have been a five star read if it wasn’t for the change in voice. The story is told in 3(ish) parts. The first and longest from Goody Brown’s perspective. This I found to be the most engaging. The second voice didn’t engage me as much but it was necessary for the next part of the story and to develop the character of Goody Brown further and to reveal the desperate measures that she had to go to.Then we switch to another narrator for the ending portion.. At least this was a character we are familiar with from fairly early on in the book but suddenly it feels like now the book is about him and no longer really about Goody at all. The letter from Goody at the beginning says that her true narrative, through the different lenses of the text has turned into something of a novel. I found this destabilising to the text immediately as she talks about ‘the novel’ with the certainties of a modern writer, where the term was still a disputed and nebulous term in 1779 when she is writing. She also makes the point that most of the narrative was told by her to a man and so warns the reader that the book may sound like a man writing as a woman more than the real lived experience of a woman. This caveat seems to have no meaning or purpose within the world of the book but instead refers to the fact the (twenty-first century) novel is in fact written by a man and making excuses for the fact it sounds like a man writing a woman. This is still further complicated by the fact that Goody does in fact live as a man for a large section of the book which sort of makes her a pseudo-male narrator anyway. If you aren’t familiar with Winchelsea and it’s smugglers you probably won’t mind this so much. If you like a bawdy tale with sex, booze, sailing and bloodshed then give it a go. Just be prepared for abrupt story changes, unfinished threads, and a feeling that there was so much more to be explored. It is the story of Goody Brown and the corrupt world that she lives in. Throughout the story you are presented with trials and tribulations far beyond your ken that you really do feel like you have been invited into another world. Goody was a reasonably consistent character and we had a couple of well thought out supporting cast members.

Winchelsea is really evocative of time, place and situation and Alex Preston has done an amazing job of transporting the reader with this story. I greatly appreciated the unfolding of this book, the plot, the characters, the voices, the mysterious and unforgiving sea, the deeply complicated town & the secrets it guards. What holds the novel together as much as its driving plot are its incantatory atmosphere and spellbinding language. Nights are noisy with owls and fieldfares, “their lonely twits falling down through the dark”, while meaning oozes via sound and rhythm from antique vocabulary such as “fallalery” and “yelloching”. Given Alex Preston named his fifth novel after a small town nestled on the Sussex coast, it is unsurprising that the power of place is integral. Sweeping vistas of imperious dunes, thunderous waves and atmospheric renderings of landscapes “fringed by fernbrake and hawthorn” are offered throughout Winchelsea. But, most pertinently, so are insights of what lies beneath the town’s surface.Goody was a very interesting and often surprising character. Her dramatic beginning in some way or other shaped her for her whole life. Despite being raised as a lady with as much comfort and education as her foster family could muster, she never was one. Always wild, she didn’t care very much about the pressure of social life and it’s rules. She was never certain as to whether she was man or woman, she lived her life as both and neither. I think that was one of the things I liked the most about her: she was living her life the way she wanted it to be. And at the same time, she went through so much at such a young age. The way she was portrayed gave me an inside as to what emotions she felt and through this she felt much more close to me.