Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris
Black
Swan, 2000
Like
many readers, I often make my purchase decisions based on a quick
perusal of a book’s first paragraphs. Blackberry Wine by
Joanne Harris hooked me with the very first sentence:
Wine
talks.
She
continues:
Everyone
knows that. Look around you. Ask the oracle at the street corner; the
uninvited guest at the wedding; the holy fool. It talks. It
ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue,
teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even
knew.
How
could I not read further, as soon as it became clear that the
narrator of this lush fantasy novel is a bottle of wine? A Fleurie
1962, to be exact, bottled in the same year as the novel’s
protagonist, thirty seven year old Jay Mackintosh. As the novel
proceeds, you tend to forget the wine is speaking, but every now and
then the sharing of a special bottle unleashes some particular magic
and you remember.
In
his twenties, Jay wrote one prize winning novel, based on three
golden summers in his teens spent under the tutelage of “Jackapple”
Joe Cox. A coal miner retired after losing several fingers, Joe lived
in a run-down district by the rail line, cultivating his remarkable
garden, telling tall tales, instructing, entertaining, challenging
and infuriating his young apprentice. Jay visited during the summers
to escape the wreckage of his parents’ marriage, and Joe filled
some need in him that no one else could.
The
literary world lavished its praise on that first novel, but Jay has
never managed to write another. He drifts through life, nagged by his
manipulative girlfriend Kerry, trying without success to write
something “serious”. Jay makes a decent living penning lurid
scifi stories under a pseudonym, but the inspiration that fueled his
first creation has died. That is, until one night when he opens one
of six ancient bottles of Joe’s fruit wine and something wild and
true rekindles in his soul.
With
totally uncharacteristic decisiveness, he purchases a crumbling
farmhouse and vineyard in rural France—because this was Joe’s
dream—and rushes off to take possession. Thus he becomes part of
the community, and the story, of the village of Lansquenet, and the
variant inhabitants become part of his own. In particular, his
mysterious neighbor Marise D’Api teases and haunts his imagination.
Everyone in town tells different tales about the reclusive widow and
her deaf daughter.
The
book flips back and forth between Jay’s summers with Joe and his
present in France. Gradually, Ms. Harris unfolds the truth of Jay’s
relationship with Joe, the ache of betrayal Jay still feels more than
two decades later. Still, with every page, the author encourages us
to question what is “truth”. Is there such a thing, or are there
only a variety of stories?
I
adored Blackberry Wine, even more than Ms. Harris’ famous
Chocolat, for which this book forms a loose sequel. The
writing is gorgeous, full of vivid sense impressions. The characters
jump out from the page, quirky and distinctive. Most of all, I
cherished the sense of everyday magic with which the author infuses
the story. Are Joe’s special wines powerful potions that bring dreams to life? Or do they do no more than summon memory and coax the spirit toward something new?
Highly
recommended!
