Many moons ago, I started a little ad hoc Favourite Quotes series which I would really love to maintain way more frequently than I have, given I’ve written five in the last ten years, not for lack of quotes but for lack of – well, who knows? Time? Energy levels” Just remembering to do it? The weather? Let’s just blame it on the weather … which brings me to this post.

Weather is not a rare occurrence in novels given the way it can be used – for scene setting, for establishing tone, as a plot device, metaphorically or symbolically, or …. you fill in the blanks. One of the most memorable novel weather openers, for me anyhow, comes from Charles Dickens’ Bleak house (read before blogging). In the first paragraph the time of year is set by reference to the “implacable November weather”, in it includes references to “mud” and “smoke”. Then in the second paragraph comes the famous foggy opening:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. (p. 1)

It’s memorable because it’s beautiful to read – and because, along with the first paragraph, it sets the scene of physical and moral dankness, of gloom and decay. Nothing is clear and there are just enough but not too many words – “defiled”, “pollutions”, “creeping”, “wheezing”, “wrathful”, “shivering” – to convey this murkiness is not just physical.

Rather different to Dickens’ gloom is Niall Williams’ This is happiness (my review). It is framed by an unusual weather event – the rain stops at the beginning of the novel – indeed, Chapter 1 comprises one sentence, “It had stopped raining” – and returns at the end having been absent over summer. Rain coming and going is not, of itself, unusual, but it was unusual for there to be no rain for a few months in that part of Ireland. In any part, really, but the novel is set in the fictional Faha, County Clare. Early in the novel though, is a beautiful description of the rain from the narrator’s earlier visit to Faha as a boy:

Rain was falling, though not exactly. Rain in Clare chose intercourse with wind, all kinds, without discrimination, and came any way it could, wantonly. (p. 28)

Why I like this quote in particular is the agency it gives the weather – rain – it “chose intercourse with wind …”. It is an active player and it is in charge. But, for a period it disappears, and its absence heralds sunshine and metaphorically, the coming of the “light”, of change. This “light”, this change, has a physical basis in the electrification. It’s not, however, a happy-clappy story, the coming of “light” is not a simple thing, and Williams recognises that no “light”, no change, is absolute. In a great ceremony, the lights are turned on, and the novel concludes, “It had started raining”.

So, Niall Williams’ novel is framed by a rainless summer. Alan Fyfe’s novel, The cross thieves (my review) has a very different – non-weather-related framing. It is one of those novels set in a day (and is also written in the ring or chiastic structure), none of which is entirely relevant to my chosen quote, which is:

In late autumn, the summer heat hadn’t quite fallen off, but the sky was overcast and gossiping about rain that might never break – the weather was having an argument with itself, contesting for the supremacy of oily humidity or a night chill. (p. 10)

You might guess why I chose this as my final quote for this post? It’s the agency given to the weather again: the sky is “gossiping” and “the weather was having an argument with itself”. It occurs near the beginning with Gark heading off on his wild, avenging mission, and brother Pell in pursuit. What it conveys is a sense of volatility and internal and external conflict, which is perfect for this novel about economic precarity, emotional trauma, and physical violence.

Writing like this is part of the reason why I love these books. The language used is intrinsic to our understanding of the stories and their themes.

Do you have any memorable weather quotes – from novels? Or poetry? I will allow that too!