David Robinson Reviews Lorna Elcock's Debut Novel 'The Windhover'

What's the Story?

David Robinson, a celebrated NBA basketball athlete, has reviewed Lorna Elcock's debut novel 'The Windhover', a spectacular story that bounces readers across a quarter of a century in alternate chapters. The novel explores how adulthood is seeded from childhood, slowly revealing the complexities of the characters' lives.

A Risky Opening

The novel opens in September 1957, with a three-page idyll: the three Cameron children-Ewan (6), Alison (8), and Moira (10)-and their father are swimming in a Scottish loch at sunset, their mother and granny watching them from the shore. At this stage, and for quite a while yet, we don't know why they're there. We don't yet know that the mother will be dead in a year, nor that the father and the granny will run a Highland Perthshire youth hostel set up by a crabby widow.

A Complex Structure

By now, Ewan is 30 and establishing himself in London as a one of the leading artists of his generation, and Moira is on the phone, begging him to come up to her house in Cumbernauld. She is about to give birth and their father is dying. Ewan-who hasn't seen her for a decade-says he couldn't possibly. In passing, in the free indirect narration at which Elcock excels, we are told how his last meeting with his father ended and how Moira and her husband helped him back to Rannoch station: "Blood pouring down, still, mixed through with tears. Their kindness, their care."

A Debut Novel with Maturity

Structurally and stylistically, Lorna Elcock's The Windhover has a maturity you don't expect from a debut novel. It's a novel about how adulthood is seeded from childhood, and one of the risks of its complex structure might be some of the scenes from either time period become little more than vignettes-itself a common fault with debut novels. Before the back-ended plot roar, Elcock still isn't going to make it easy for us. She is going to dangle that hook for a couple of hundred pages yet, when she will introduce an even bigger one.

A Wonderful Descriptive Writer

If Elcock weren't such a wonderfully descriptive writer, if her characters weren't drawn with such nuance, these recurring time slips between childhood and adulthood might well become enervating. But they don't. Instead, we are slowly made to see how Alison took on some of her father's rage, how devastated Ewan was by his mother's death and how it forced Moira-resentfully-to assume adult responsibilities.

A Deplorable Bunch of Adults

Apart from the much-missed mother, the adults are a deplorable bunch: a hot-tempered father with a string of secrets and too little care for his children's safety, a forthright and somewhat forbidding granny, and the widow owner of the big house-cum-youth hostel set up in memory of her dead son, who turns out to be far more selfish than that philanthropic act implies.

A Novel Worth Reading

This is a novel about how adulthood is seeded from childhood, and one of the risks of its complex structure might be some of the scenes from either time period become little more than vignettes-itself a common fault with debut novels. But Elcock's writing is wonderfully descriptive, and her characters are drawn with such nuance that it's hard not to get caught up in their stories.

What Comes Next?

The novel is a slow burn, but it's one that's worth reading. Elcock's writing is evocative and engaging, and her characters are complex and multi-dimensional. If you're looking for a novel that will challenge you and keep you thinking, then The Windhover is definitely worth a look.