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sunnyskywalkerIt isn’t often that you get perfect examples of why you shouldn’t follow common writing advice off a cliff. One of those commonplaces is that you should never open with the weather. This is often sound advice, since descriptions of the weather are liable to be perfunctory throat-clearing before the real story and could be cut with no loss. But not always. The Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters almost invariably open with two things: an update on the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and a description of the weather. And it’s glorious.
Take the opening line of An Excellent Mystery:
The golden lion evokes majestic fields of golden grain and warm sunshine, and the purring cat adds the feeling of contented domesticity, all of which gives you a vivid feeling of those August days in a few beautiful words. But more importantly, it encapsulates so much about the book to come and the series as a whole. The lion also evokes heraldry and war, and the war is never far from Shrewsbury. The housecat turns the focus to the ordinary people who are our main characters, the monks and artisans and elderly nurses and villeins, who live on a smaller scale than the knights and monarchs of the war—yet who, like housecats, are not entirely tame. Just as lions and housecats are both cats, so the high and low are all people, with comparable needs and feelings.
The opening line is followed by a couple of pages about the effects of the weather on the harvest and the quality of wool, partly as a discussion between Cadfael and his friend Hugh Beringar. They also mention that Flemish merchants made it to the abbey fair to buy that wool despite the country’s disorder, due both to their hardiness and to a stalemate that’s slowed the fighting. They expect the tension to break into action soon—just as the sleepy cat will wake and “When this golden weather broke at last, it might well break in violent storms.”
This parallel between the weather and the war, and the consequences of both, is crucial to the series. The weather affects and even drives much of the action. A storm might swell the river to facilitate an act of God. A heavy snowfall might cause a leak in the abbey guest-house roof, and repairing it might cause one of the brothers to fall and be terribly injured, and thus make what he thinks will be his last confession—which then kicks off a pilgrimage that uncovers a mystery. The war likewise might prevent an uncle fighting for the other side from sending agents openly into Shropshire to search for his missing niece and nephew. It might send an emissary north only to see him disappear near Shrewsbury. It might bring sudden attacks and prisoner exchanges whose circumstances prompt both love and murder. It might lead to the destruction of a southern monastery and the dispersal of its brothers, who bring mystery in their wake. The war, like the weather, is something over which ordinary people have very little control, and rolls over them like storms.
But they do have some power to act. Just as they can shelter lambs from cold and divert streams to turn millwheels, they can murder those emissaries or let them pass unmolested, steal treasures intended to fund one side or restore them, allow villains to use the war as cover for personal misdeeds or insist on justice even when it seems to make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
That last is a critical point: the ordinary people aren’t just important because their small actions can affect the course of war and the fates of kings, but are important in themselves. The weather determining whether people freeze or starve matters even if it doesn’t change a battle’s outcome. (The books don’t just open with the weather; it’s present throughout.) The series is a long examination of the idea that while ordinary people might have little or no effect on anyone beyond their small circle, and might be much alike, they’re still vitally important.
Cadfael notes that you can put young men in identical Benedictine habits and send them through identical rounds of daily offices, and nevertheless they’ll keep their individuality. The remarkable number of earnest young people he meets who are bowled over by first love might seem much alike to older, wiser bystanders, but that’s irrelevant to the young people to whom the experience is singular and new. And it might be true that “After every extreme the seasons righted themselves, and won back the half at least of what was lost” (no less than the warring monarchs, who can never keep the upper hand over each other for long)—the books themselves might follow a formula of the steady rounds of seasons and daily offices being disrupted by war and storms and murder, only for everything to be righted as far as possible and the natural cycles restored—but the fact that life will go on regardless and everything balance out in the long run doesn’t mean that any person’s individual love, or grief, or murder is meaningless, “for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many.”
If you can do something that beautiful, ignore the advice and start with the weather.
Take the opening line of An Excellent Mystery:
August came in, that summer of 1141, tawny as a lion and somnolent and purring as a hearthside cat.
The golden lion evokes majestic fields of golden grain and warm sunshine, and the purring cat adds the feeling of contented domesticity, all of which gives you a vivid feeling of those August days in a few beautiful words. But more importantly, it encapsulates so much about the book to come and the series as a whole. The lion also evokes heraldry and war, and the war is never far from Shrewsbury. The housecat turns the focus to the ordinary people who are our main characters, the monks and artisans and elderly nurses and villeins, who live on a smaller scale than the knights and monarchs of the war—yet who, like housecats, are not entirely tame. Just as lions and housecats are both cats, so the high and low are all people, with comparable needs and feelings.
The opening line is followed by a couple of pages about the effects of the weather on the harvest and the quality of wool, partly as a discussion between Cadfael and his friend Hugh Beringar. They also mention that Flemish merchants made it to the abbey fair to buy that wool despite the country’s disorder, due both to their hardiness and to a stalemate that’s slowed the fighting. They expect the tension to break into action soon—just as the sleepy cat will wake and “When this golden weather broke at last, it might well break in violent storms.”
This parallel between the weather and the war, and the consequences of both, is crucial to the series. The weather affects and even drives much of the action. A storm might swell the river to facilitate an act of God. A heavy snowfall might cause a leak in the abbey guest-house roof, and repairing it might cause one of the brothers to fall and be terribly injured, and thus make what he thinks will be his last confession—which then kicks off a pilgrimage that uncovers a mystery. The war likewise might prevent an uncle fighting for the other side from sending agents openly into Shropshire to search for his missing niece and nephew. It might send an emissary north only to see him disappear near Shrewsbury. It might bring sudden attacks and prisoner exchanges whose circumstances prompt both love and murder. It might lead to the destruction of a southern monastery and the dispersal of its brothers, who bring mystery in their wake. The war, like the weather, is something over which ordinary people have very little control, and rolls over them like storms.
But they do have some power to act. Just as they can shelter lambs from cold and divert streams to turn millwheels, they can murder those emissaries or let them pass unmolested, steal treasures intended to fund one side or restore them, allow villains to use the war as cover for personal misdeeds or insist on justice even when it seems to make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
That last is a critical point: the ordinary people aren’t just important because their small actions can affect the course of war and the fates of kings, but are important in themselves. The weather determining whether people freeze or starve matters even if it doesn’t change a battle’s outcome. (The books don’t just open with the weather; it’s present throughout.) The series is a long examination of the idea that while ordinary people might have little or no effect on anyone beyond their small circle, and might be much alike, they’re still vitally important.
Cadfael notes that you can put young men in identical Benedictine habits and send them through identical rounds of daily offices, and nevertheless they’ll keep their individuality. The remarkable number of earnest young people he meets who are bowled over by first love might seem much alike to older, wiser bystanders, but that’s irrelevant to the young people to whom the experience is singular and new. And it might be true that “After every extreme the seasons righted themselves, and won back the half at least of what was lost” (no less than the warring monarchs, who can never keep the upper hand over each other for long)—the books themselves might follow a formula of the steady rounds of seasons and daily offices being disrupted by war and storms and murder, only for everything to be righted as far as possible and the natural cycles restored—but the fact that life will go on regardless and everything balance out in the long run doesn’t mean that any person’s individual love, or grief, or murder is meaningless, “for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many.”
If you can do something that beautiful, ignore the advice and start with the weather.
