(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Christmas is, we are constantly assured, supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year.
But sometimes that feeling of perfect wonder doesn’t arrive at all, or it’s so late in making an appearance that you can begin to wonder if it’s ever going to turn up.
You could forgive the impressively memorable ensemble characters of Veronica Henry’s A Country Christmas (previously published as Honeycote) for wondering if all the hype is going to find any sort of festive substance as their lives are turned upside down and back again in the lead up to a Christmas which is looking pretty dire indeed.
Mickey Liddiard, father of a clan that for a good few generations has overseen the village-based brewery, Honeycote Ales, has long felt out of his depth.
Awarded the running of the family business, which sustains ten pubs and a host of villagers and which is the centre of the universe for many people in the local area, simply because he was the eldest, his younger brother James, far more capable and savvy, grievously overlooked, Mickey is cautious and not at all the sort of person who should be running any sort of business.
He has so far managed to avoid disaster but as his three twentysomething and teenage children Patrick, Sophie and Georgina, from two different relationships – he is married to the girls’ mum Lucy who is likeable, brilliantly competent and in love with her husband – look ahead to a life full of the grounded, family-first privilege they have come to enjoy, disaster beckons.
But he [Mickey] was going to do it. He didn’t owe it to himself, worthless scumbag that he was. But he owed it to Lucy. And Patrick, and Sophie and Georgina.
The question is – can anything be done to avoid it?
You have to wonder if it can be averted that more than once in A Country Christmas which feels like a warm and cuddly soap opera, if such a thing exists, full of adulterous affairs, betrayal, lies and gross misunderstandings, and that is far from an exhaustive list, and yet which is anchored by the fact that the Liddiards who should be completed and utter entitled a**eholes, are in fact, delightfully so, not.
They aren’t perfect by any means, well, at least the men of the family aren’t with Mickey an incorrigible womaniser and Patrick almost sociopathic at times in the disposable way he treats people, but they are a close family and one of the things that sustains them, and Lucy in particular, is that they love and have each other’s backs.
But that’s not the whole story, and while Lucy knows Mickey has a past and the brewery has definitely seen far better days, she busies herself with Sunday roasts, and doting on her horses and making sure everyone she loves never loses sight of how much they are cherished and loved.
She’s the last person who should be served up any sort of grim reality check, and yet, as A Country Christmas barrels through what the back cover blurb enchantingly describes as “more than a few surprises under the Christmas tree”, you know that that is exactly what is coming her way.
There are times during A Country Christmas, which feels like a TV program thrown gleefully onto the pages in all the best ways – not a surprise given the background of the author who brings a career of storytelling to her novels with substance and a compelling sense of involving humanity – when you do begin to wonder if any one is getting out of the mess of being alive with anything approaching dignity, happiness or any sense of expectations fulfilled.
Forget whether it’s going to the most wonderful time of the year – is it going to be remotely enjoyable at all?
As a host of people tangentially and directly connected with the Liddiards grapple with a host of challenges, poor decisions and huge life shifts, it seems as if the constant element for anyone is just how much change is going to be foisted upon them.
While some of the change is good and will make life better for everyone concerned down the road, some of it is distinctly not and there’s a real sense, much of the time, that after falling into a thousand messy pieces, everyone’s lives are going to stay that way.
Somehow, and quite miraculously, and with more than a little narrative convenience (but hey, who doesn’t love that when it comes to storytelling happy endings at Christmas?) everyone ends up with some sort of festive miracle and while it may not be what they were expecting, it’s better than what looked in the offing for much of A Country Christmas.
This must be why people had affairs — because the sex was so highly charged, so electric, so powered by the allure of the forbidden. Lucy almost laughed out loud at the realization [sic] that by being the perfect wife all these years she had been seriously missing out.
What’s particularly enticing about A Country Christmas is that it doesn’t pretend at any point that life is an easy thing to navigate nor that bad decisions don’t come with some seriously impactful consequences.
Unlike many Christmas novels which race to keep the frothiness and festive joy bubbling away even when things are grim – and honestly, I am totally there for that; just not all the time – A Country Christmas lets characters sit in messes of their own making for a good long while, and in fact, rather than getting better, which given the novel it is, is all but inevitable, things are actually get worse and worse and, yes, worse.
All anyone wants is happiness but a great many of them seem pathologically incapable of finding it or of holding onto when they do, and while that may forestall ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- the found family happy ending of A Country Christmas which is as glorious as a warm hug and all kinds of deck the halls wonderful and carol singing spirit raising, it does mean that the novel never feel like a fairytale without grunt or raw, honest humanity.
It’s sudsy yes, sometimes, and you often despair at the way some of the characters behave – the fact that you care is testament to how well Henry writes all her characters, balancing the good and the bad and making them come memorably alive – but you will stick with A Country Christmas for the duration because it’s real, because love underpins it all, sometimes very deep to the point of being possibly unfindable, and because you get the sense, at the very worst of times, that the very best of times await and that it all might come together at the much-hyped most wonderful time of the year.