The Scent of Water in Retro Reads

Oct 26, 2015 Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: england, historical-fiction, inspirational-and-religious-fiction

This quiet story of a woman who moves to a small English village around 1960 is such a lovely, insightful, and inspirational novel. Elizabeth Goudge (who also wrote The Dean's Watch), is an author who deserves to be remembered.

Mary Lindsay, a fiftyish Londoner who never married (her fiancé was killed in WWII), unexpectedly inherits a country house from her father's cousin, an older woman (also named Mary Lindsay) who the younger Mary had met only once, as an eight year old child. But that brief This quiet story of a woman who moves to a small English village around 1960 is such a lovely, insightful, and inspirational novel. Elizabeth Goudge (who also wrote The Dean's Watch), is an author who deserves to be remembered.

Mary Lindsay, a fiftyish Londoner who never married (her fiancé was killed in WWII), unexpectedly inherits a country house from her father's cousin, an older woman (also named Mary Lindsay) who the younger Mary had met only once, as an eight year old child. But that brief visit made an indelible impression on both Marys. Initially Mary thinks to sell the home she’s inherited, but she soon changes her mind and decides to begin a new phase of her life in small town England. So she moves to the town of Appleshaw, in the Chilterns area of southeast England, not far from London.

description

Chilterns village

Mary's life in her new village home soon becomes interwoven with many of her neighbors. There are several memorable characters: Paul, an aspiring author and poet who was blinded in WWII; Valerie, Paul's attractive but resentful wife who views herself as a martyr; Squire Hepplewhite, a business tycoon who's focused on making money, hiding his humble beginnings; his lonely wife Hermione (who was once a chorus dancer named Dolly); three neighborhood children who view Mary's garden and back yard as their own and resent her moving in; and more, all well-drawn and interesting characters. Though we never meet her except in a flashback and through her diary entries, the older cousin Mary Lindsay, who died at the beginning of the novel, remains a real presence throughout the novel, as we read about her lifelong struggles with debilitating depression and mental illness. She quietly perseveres through all her trials, with help from friends and from God.

The Scent of Water is heavier on atmosphere and character development than plot. It's fairly slow-paced: it kind of meanders through the months and the lives of the people of Appleshaw, but it's written so well that I was happy to meander along with it, charmed by Goudge's wonderful writing and her love for people of all stripes. Goudge combines delightful descriptions of settings with her warmhearted analysis of people's characters, and all of their wonderful potential and human failings.

Grace and mercy infuse every page, in a way that's inspiring and uplifting rather than cloying and saccharine. I'm a spiritual person, but a lot of fictional books that include a strong religious element annoy me because they're preachy or sappy. Goudge's spiritual insights, though, went straight to my heart. The "scent of water" (from verses 7-9 in chapter 14 of the Book of Job) is a recurring theme, symbolic of spiritual renewal, and personal courage and integrity are key, though they show up in different ways in different characters.

She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.

Highly recommended! June 2017 buddy read with the Retro Reads group.

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.
Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground;
Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

- Job 14:7-9 (KJV) ...more

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Oct 26, 2015 Hana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2015-reads, britain-ireland, old-fashioned

This book was such a joy. It filled my mind with clarity and quiet pleasure, like a spring bubbling up in a still wood.

While resonant with life, the story begins with a death and one that is something of a mercy, as many deaths in old age are. With her last breaths the dying woman "...said something about sailing out on living water," and with her passing the room is full of "the quietness of the deep country and the light of a marvelous sunset...a tide of gold."

There are two Mary Lindsays in t This book was such a joy. It filled my mind with clarity and quiet pleasure, like a spring bubbling up in a still wood.

While resonant with life, the story begins with a death and one that is something of a mercy, as many deaths in old age are. With her last breaths the dying woman "...said something about sailing out on living water," and with her passing the room is full of "the quietness of the deep country and the light of a marvelous sunset...a tide of gold."

There are two Mary Lindsays in this gentle yet powerful story: the woman whose death we witness in the opening pages and a second Mary Lindsay, her cousin, a thoroughly competent Londoner who capped a successful academic career with service in the war years and then an executive post at the Admiralty. The elder Mary Lindsay has just left a house and a small inheritance to her namesake. Impulsively, Mary Lindsay--a quintessential urbanite--takes early retirement and, based solely on a single childhood memory of that house and her cousin and one magical day, decides to make the old house her home.

She remembers that day, forty years ago...a long drive lined with tremendous lime trees, 'august and unearthly', a garden wall topped with lilacs grown so tall that they made a thicket of purple and white blossom above the wall, and then a door in the wall. An odd old woman, Cousin Mary, leads Mary and her father into a house weighted down with wisteria vines. In the entry hall is an old oak chest where a silver tankard with lilies stood. "The flowers and the polished silver gathered all the light to themselves and Mary gazed at them entranced, noticing that a bird with spread wings was carved upon the top of the chest....and suddenly she was no longer an intruder in this world inside the picture. It was her own world." And most magical of all, Cousin Mary shows her a collection of tiny treasures, tea sets, birds, animals, a coach with a queen inside: "fairy things of silver and gold, jade, pinchbeck, glass, ebony and ivory, all so small that only the eyes of a child could fully perceive their glory."

This is the dream-memory Mary Lindsay has inherited and which she embraces much to the astonishment (and skepticism) of her London friends. But Mary is heir to more than just a house. She is now part of a village and for one who has spent her existence in private, "landlocked in the sea of life", that is something quite new and astonishing. Mary finds herself opening to the waters of life and the worlds of others in ways she would never have expected.

The village of Appleshaw is peopled by marvelous characters: a small shy girl, Edith, adopted daughter of the artist and architect who live next door; Rose and Jeremy, her sister and brother; Valerie Randall, the long and not silently suffering wife of a war-blinded veteran; Paul Randall himself, who writes and dreams in darkness, his spirit and health broken; the erudite Vicar and his painfully timid sister Jean; and Mrs Hermione Hepplewhite, self-appointed grand mistress of Appleshaw and an inescapable whirlwind of good deeds and unchecked advice. Elizabeth Goudge weaves the lives of these, and many more characters through Mary's story with effortless grace and gentle humor.

At the center of the story are the intersecting lives of Mary Lindsay and her Cousin Mary whose long struggle for faith, purpose and sanity are gradually told in diaries left along with the house. The mysteries of the house, too, are slowly revealed. The house and its treasures, and the two Marys, become catalysts for the healing of many lives.

Content rating G: Some hinted past adultery, nothing shown. A clean read. ...more

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Jun 20, 2017 Barb in Maryland rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, general-fiction

3.5 stars for this gentle meditation on faith disguised as a cozy village story.
Goudge's writing is so soothing and gracious that this reader was gently carried along as the story unfolded.
I really liked our modern Mary--a London woman of fifty or so, who abandons her prestigious job to live in the small village house left to her by a distant cousin. I liked Cousin Mary, whom we meet through flashbacks and diary entries. The villagers are a mixed lot--we meet most of them as they interact with M ...more

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