The Beautiful Years

The Flax of Dream #1

by Henry Williamson

The Beautiful Years is a tender evocation of West Country childhood in the golden years before the First World War. It is also the first volume in Henry Williamson's tetralogy T he Flax of Dream . All four volumes - The Beautiful Years , Dandelion Days , The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway - are being reissued in Faber Finds, and together they make up the life story of Willie Maddison.

The Flax of Dream is one of the major literary achievements of the twentieth century.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Henry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.

Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.

Reviews

[Hux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Move over Celine and Hamsun, there's a new Nazi sympathiser whose writing has stolen my heart. But seriously, this was one of the most exquisitely written things I've read in a long time; the prose often reaches heights which are unnaturally spectacular, and Williamson evokes the past with such charm and romance, creating a pocket of childhood magic within which to ease yourself into a comforting slumber. The nature writing alone is of such high quality that its beauty almost produces a fragrance. This is one of those books where you have to go back and re-read a sentence because it was so beautifully crafted. Here he is describing an old grandfather clock sitting quietly over time:

Every dawn for centuries it had seen the darkness paling before the flowing light, the room filled with spectral atoms not thrown in one direction, but moving in invisible silence everywhere. The sun had sent its broad beams through the elm trees in the morning, casting instant shadows behind them, had swung through lucent space, and lacquered the room with gold, changing at sunset to a purpurate red. One by one the stars had crept into the profundity of night, brilliant in winter and dusky in summer; the moon swam over the old hills, swollen and hazed with lavender and yellow; the great herald of night changing her blazoned shield, with its battle scars showing so dimly, from or to argent as it was carried into the higher solitudes of heaven.

I could read language like that all day. Meanwhile, the actual plot of the book is very straight-forward and gentle, this first instalment being part one in a collection of four books (making up the The Flax of Dreams tetralogy). The Beautiful Years relates to the childhood period of Williamson (albeit heavily fictionalised), set in rural Devon during the early 1900s, and focusing on seven year-old Willie Maddison. It is a small window into his village life, his relationship with his widowed father, his country adventures with his pal Jack, and the romance between a loner named Jim Holloman and a maid called Dolly. The whole book is drenched in childhood mystery and excitement. While the writing has so many moments of pure lyrical creativity.

In tones of silver it fluted, bubbling and rippling, a spring of song-water in whose brimming purity untarnished light was held in thrall.

One great faerie of cobweb was the sky, glittering with the dew of stars, and bearing a halved moon like the wing of a gold moth ravished and torn.

In the early spring the leaf-littered floor of the woods was one lambent flame of flower when the blue bells pealed their chimes of fragrance to call the dusky bees from nettle and apple blossom

Moving quietly over the grass, though unable to prevent the soft sighing of the dew-weighted stems under his feet, Mr Norman crept away. The moon had swung clear of the earth, and was moving into deeper heaven, leaving its tarnish about the pale summer vapour.

Willie has a strained relationship with his father, and often experiences the cane, but this, in part, is due to his father struggling with the death of Willie's mother. There is a stoicism at the heart of their relationship, something which, in the modern era, would be considered unhealthy but which, to Williamson, is nothing more than a demonstration of natural and human complexity (I'm with him on that). The whole book is a magical escape to a time and place long since elapsed despite possessing so many moments that, even now, a century later, will produce a sensation of intense familiarity. The school football team playing in cumbersome boots on a muddy pitch for example:

He had a dread of having his ankles kicked, and his three stone six pounds of bone, skin, hair, and boots made no impression on his weightier adversary and little upon the mud when he missed his objective altogether. Just as Mr. Maddison reached the climax of boredom and each individual member of the teams was thinking that his old superb form had returned, a long blast on the whistle announced that the match was over, and that 2a had won with thirty-five goals to twenty.

The story is simplistic, barely even necessary, and it clearly has an element of life-writing, As such, it goes without saying that the four books should probably be read in their entirety for the full life story to be appreciated. But this was beautifully written, with so many magnificent phrases and sentences, presented with inventive and fluid expression, with an obvious love of nature and season, of insect and bird, until it was genuinely mesmerising to read. There is a conservatism at the heart of it, in his love of the past, in his love of nature, a romanticism in his high calibre prose broken up by dialogue and humour, by the memory of yesterday. Not always gripping, and certainly of its time, but with some of the most sincerely beautiful language I've come across. Reading this was like releasing a great sigh of nostalgia and melancholy.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first in a series of four about a young boy growing up in the countryside before the First World War. For some reason, I read the second in the series (Dandelion Days) back in the early eighties, but I've only just read this one after coming across it in an online bookstore.
At the time I didn't know about Henry Williamson's fascist sympathies. However, setting that aside, it's a wonderful depiction of rural childhood in the early part of the 20th century (though some 'hobbies' like egg collecting, are thankfully now no longer acceptable, and for me it sharply brings home how much of our native wildlife has been lost in the time since it was written.

[Cameron Sloman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Williamson’s indulgence in natural description is simply captivating. In no way does it impede the narrative of dear Willie, but gives us access into the boys thoughts, his view of the world, and what he holds close to his heart: the natural world.
Very much looking forward to reading Dandelion Days!

[Beccy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative descriptions of nature and English countryside had me completely transported. I didn't know about the author's fascist leanings at the time - I read it as it was presented, a poetic narrative of a childhood lived outdoors.

[Paula R C R. C. Readman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful written. Of its time.

[Elaine Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this many years ago and loved it , enjoyed it again and will try to read the rest of the series too

[David]

Enthralling and well-written but we must remember his proto-fascist leanings.