Spring Reading - April is the Cruelest Month? - For Book Lovers and Random People (2024)

April 26, 2022April 25, 2022 stargazer

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

‘Sunny and warm one day then snow the next,’ agreed Gamache. ‘Shakespeare calledit the uncertain glory of an April day.’
‘I prefer T.S. Eliot. The cruelest month.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘All those spring flowers slaughtered. Happens almost every year. They’re tricked into blooming, into coming out. Opening up. And not just the spring bulbs, but the buds on the trees. The rose bushes, everything. All out and happy. And then boom, a freak snowstorm kills them all.’

Gamache took the bread to the long pine table, set for dinner, then returned to the living room. He reflected on T.S. Eliot and thought the poet had called April the cruelest month not because it killed flowers and buds on the trees, but because sometimes it didn’t. How difficult it was for those who didn’t bloom when all about was new life and hope.

The Cruelest Month is the third book in Louise Penny’s popular Gamache series. It takes place in April around Easter and it revolves around the central theme reflected in Eliot’s poem. April is the time for hope, potential and new beginnings, but so often this potential isn’t realised. Impressively, many aspects of the novel (incl. Ruth’s geese, the significance of Easter and the backstory of certain characters) all fitted nicely with this theme.

I was less enthusiastic about how the novel seems to fall between chairs. It could be characterised as cosy crime crossed with police procedural, but it lacks the humour present in my favourite cosies and doesn’t have the darkness, grit and pageturning qualities, I typically enjoy in police procedurals.

Furthermore, there are references to literature and poetry and the story is built neatly around a central theme, but it doesn’t have the depth of literary fiction. So quite an odd combination, which seems to work well for many readers. Personally, I am not convinced.

Title: The Cruelest Month [2007] Author: Louise PennyFormat: Audiobook, narrated by Adam SimsGenre: Crime Fiction

April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.

Ali Smith acknowledges the fickleness of April and the potential for change. However, Spring, the third instalment in the seasonal quartet, didn’t feel particularly optimistic. Overall, I found it a mixed experience. The storyline with the film-maker Richard and his friend Paddy was engaging, fun and heartwarming.

The second storyline was a lot less enjoyable. The characters represented ideas and concepts rather than real people. Whilst clever, this isn’t my favourite kind of narrative. Also it felt heavy-handed. I prefer when authors have faith in their readers’ ability to think for themselves and don’t see the need to hit them on the head with the same message over and over again. It didn’t help that the writing lacked the lightness and elegance of Winter, which I loved. Finally, the numerous references and links, which less literary readers (or maybe it’s just me) may struggle to identify, felt more significant in Spring and without them it’s difficult to gain full understanding of events, characters and dialogue, most of which have a deeper meaning.

Spring may be my least favourite, but it was still fun to see how the quartet comes together and spot the similarities and threads, which run through the novels.

Title: Spring [2019]Author: Ali SmithFormat: Audiobook, narrated by Juliette Burton Genre: Contemporary Fiction

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair. Far out in the bay a cluster of almost motionless fishing boats hovered like a flock of white birds on the tranquil sea. How beautiful, how beautiful. Not to have died before this... to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this.

The Enchanted April focuses on the more positive aspects of April. New beginnings, new life, beauty. Four women, who barely know each other in advance, leave their unsatisfactory lives in London for a while and take residence in a medieval Italian castle.

I found the portrayal of the four women and their interactions absolutely wonderful and the novel was a pure delight. At a different time, I might have rolled my eyes at the easy solutions, the happy endings, the romantic life perspective. But I let myself be captured by the enchanting Italian atmosphere and just went with it. As an antidote to Ali Smith’s depressing social commentary and incomprehensible cleverness, The Enchanted April was just perfect.

Title: The Enchanted April [1922] Author: Elizabeth von ArnimFormat: Audiobook, narrated by Eleanor Bron Genre: Fiction, Classics

So what is the conclusion? Is April cruel or enchanted? I quite like April and its unpredictability. This year we had snow the 1st of April (snow in London is rare at any time of year) whereas other days felt like summer. And even if only in small glints, I love how April indicates that warmer (and better?) days are ahead. Maybe even an enchanted holiday in Italy?

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