August: A Novel [Paperback]

Gerard Woodward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2008

Shortlisted for the Whitbread Award, August is the life of a family through fifteen summer trips to Wales.

Little did Aldous Jones know when he careened over his bicycle handlebars back in 1955, landing next to farmer Evans’s field, that it would turn into the idyllic start to a series of camping holidays in that same field. With Gerard Woodward’s deadpan wit and poignant evocation, August encapsulates the portrait of the Joneses and their growing family. Strangely enough, the rural site seems to change in conjunction with their city life, creating a parallel universe instead of a getaway. The Jones family also is featured in I’ll Go to Bed at Noon and A Curious Earth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shortlisted for the Whitbread in 2001, Woodward's novel is the first in a trilogy focusing on the expansive, deeply troubled Jones family. (The books have been published out of sequence in the U.S.) An accident on a Welsh bicycling tour in 1955 leads Aldous Jones to discover the farm that will be the site of subsequent holidays. Every summer that follows, Aldous pitches tents for his rapidly burgeoning young family in the pastures of the good-natured, seemingly unchangeable Evans family, which serves as an annual mirror for the Joneses. Alas, Jones family life, despite its simple joys of mountain climbing, practical jokes and bicycling, is not nearly so idyllic as among the Evans clan. Eldest Jones son Janus, a brilliant pianist, develops dark fixations and antisocial tendencies. Aldous's wife, Colette, originally a vivacious, nurturing mother, rapidly descends into drug use. Quiet, unassuming Aldous, the figure at the eye of so much drama, becomes the novel's most compelling character only near its anticlimactic, elegiac end. Woodward's vision of family life is bleak indeed; although tempered by moments of levity, whimsy and descriptions of the lovely landscape, the narrative is virtually devoid of solace or redemption, finding only heartbreak in familial evolution. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

This first novel to feature the Jones family was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award in 2001 and is being published in the U.S. for the first time. The previous two novels in the series are I’ll Go to Bed at Noon (2005) and A Curious Earth (2008). In its first incarnation, the Jones family exhibits all the symptoms of the dark impulses that will ultimately decimate the family, but it is a far sunnier portrait that opens the story as Aldous sets off on his bicycle to find the perfect camping spot for a Wales summer vacation for his young family. His blithe, eccentric wife, Colette, is delighted with the farmer’s field that will be their holiday destination for years to come and turns their spare tent into a home away from home, while her children enthusiastically participate in games and treks up the mountainside. But as the years pass, the spirited young mother sinks into drug addiction, while their gifted musician son appears to be emotionally disturbed. In this heartbreaking portrait of the unraveling of a family, Woodward captures, with utmost humanity, the elusive nature of human connection. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (August 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393332713
• ISBN-13: 978-0393332711
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,374,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The problem with tents...is that they don't have windows. Once you've zipped up, you have no viewpoint upon the world.", September 9, 2008

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: August: A Novel (Paperback)

August, the first book in Woodward's Aldous Jones trilogy, introduces the Jones family in 1955, when Aldous Rex Llewellyn Jones and his wife Colette are a happy, young married couple with two young children. By 1970, the family, now numbering four children, is facing a series of crises, many of their own making. Author Gerard Woodward, an author who captures scenes and thoughts in unusually vibrant prose filled with unique images and observations, focuses on the domestic life of this family and its interactions, both within the family and within their social milieu.

During the fifteen years of this novel, the Jones family vacations during the month of August in a tent on farmer Hugh Evans's farm in Llanygwynfa, Wales, each chapter representing a different year in the family's life. Life in the tent becomes a microcosm for Woodward's careful examination of family dynamics and change, as the inner lives of the characters are explored in detail. Aldous is an artist and teacher whose education has been subsidized by Lesley Waugh, the brother of Colette, whom Aldous eventually marries. Colette is the primary care giver for Nana, her (and Lesley's) senile mother. Since her siblings feel unable to care for their mother, Colette sometimes has difficulty escaping for a vacation, and on one occasion, she is forced to put her mother into a nursing home.

Janus Jones, Aldous and Colette's eldest son, is brilliant, a boy who eventually develops into a talented student at the Royal Academy of Music. Despite his talent, he remains unsure of his long-term career path. His traumas, his lack of confidence, and his uncertainty about his sexuality color the family dynamics throughout much of the novel, leading to innumerable confrontations. The other children--James, Juliette, and young Julian, sixteen years younger than Janus--pretty much fend for themselves during the crises, occasionally creating issues of their own. Colette escapes into her own world. Ultimately, Aldous must decide whether to continue to vacation in farmer Evans's field or whether that phase of their family life is over.

The novel differs from most other studies of dysfunctional families because the writing is so compelling--filled with thoughtful descriptions, unique imagery, and careful observations, every word perfect. And even though the focus is firmly domestic, without much focus on the world at large (except as the family represents universal problems of all families), Woodward wields his pen like a stiletto, cutting to the quick and exposing the innermost thoughts and feelings of the characters, often with dark humor. While the final novel of the trilogy, A Curious Earth: A Novel, contains much more wry humor and often comes close to being laugh-out-loud funny, August introduces the characters, makes them "real," and firmly establishes Woodward as one of the premier prose stylists writing today. n Mary Whipple

I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Novel

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (4.5) "Not for the first time he felt the power of the landscape resided in the ability to unglue you from the world.", July 28, 2008

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: August: A Novel (Paperback)

For fifteen years the Jones family of London spends three weeks of August in a tent in the field of a Welsh farm, Aldous grows from young father to the mature parent of four, each summer etching its own particular memories of a family growing past the easy days of childhood. In August even the predictable is magical, when camping, hiking and biking adventures in Wales are anticipated as a release from everyday concerns, long nights under starry skies, picnic lunches and the routine of the Evans' working farm. Aldous and Colette savor this time; as their family grows, so does the bounty of this environment, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the city, from the financial problems and petty squabbles, an idyllic allotment of time and place untrammeled by progress.

Aldous Jones first flies into Hugh Evans' field in 1955 via a collision with an automobile, separated from his bicycle on impact, landing unhurt in the very place that will become a yearly respite for his family. Evans allows them to annually set up a tent in the field, there to enjoy the beauty and bounty of the lush landscape, a time to rejuvenate and enjoy a simplicity too seldom available in the city. The oldest Jones boy, Janus, is musically gifted; his parents have imagined a stellar career for their exceptional son. Two other boys, James and Julian, and a sister, Juliette, fail to match Janus' promise but are, nonetheless, a contented assemblage of siblings, keeping Colette hopping with the duties and demands of a growing household. But for those three weeks, they all bask in the luxury of an existence hampered by few constraints.

These summers define the Jones family as life intrudes, the children becoming individuals with their own plans, straining against parental oversight: "The thought occurred to Aldous that one's life was a series of little deaths, particularly the life of a child as observed by its parent." An artist and teacher who has filled their London home with paintings of Wales, Aldous has either an enormously generous heart or is too timid to rise to the constant challenges that arise, ever making accommodations for his children and his wife. Janus is the first to rebel, straining against his parents' expectations, Colette all but defeated by her elder son's antipathy. After her mother's death while they are on holiday, Colette develops her own unique set of problems, a gradual unraveling that deeply affects her husband and children, Aldous reluctant to embrace the challenges wrought in his family over the years.

In lyrical prose, in settings both magnanimous and poignant, Woodward captures the essence of the Jones' tribe, the fresh affection for life at its fullest and the attrition of time. This is an intimate view of a family once shining with promise and their love affair with the Welsh countryside, a metaphor for renewal. Like all such liaisons, even this one must end, but not before the reader has participated in a provocative experience, a magnificent landscape where nature absorbs human pain and disappointments into her great beating heart. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Dark and The Light, November 10, 2011

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: August: A Novel (Paperback)

I am very puzzled by the other three reviewers of this first book of Woodward's trilogy. Perhaps the other two books become darker than this one. I don't know. I have yet to read them. First things first with me, so to speak. Yet they all speak of the book as "dark" and the Jones family as somehow "dysfunctional" and remark on Woodward's, again, "dark" sense of humour being very British.

The book concerns a London family's - that London family being the Jones family - annual August outings to a Welsh farm spanning the fifteen years from 1955-1970, as well as the family's time in London. Ahem, fifteen years! Quite a lot happens in fifteen years of any person's life, don't you know, and most of them take place in the context of families. People are born. People die. People go through trials and tribulations as well as periods of happiness and security with counterparts of grief and despair. And, eventually, we all die. There is nothing that struck me as particularly dark about Woodward's chronicling of all these events. What struck me was his absolutely silken prose. If anything, Woodward's exquisitely deft touch with language leaves the sharp edges of life less sharp than they otherwise would be. I suppose what others find so dark is that Woodward insists on chronicling these sharp edges at all.

But even the "professional" reviews here insist on stressing the unravelling of this nuclear family, as if all families don't eventually unravel, and, again, all these reviewers can't resist mentioning that wife/mother Colette develops a "drug habit" but are apparently too squeamish to mention that this habit is sniffing bicycle glue, of which she is cured at the end of the book. So, she probably still takes too much Valium. So what? Give the old dear a break please.

Again, what makes this book so worth the reading of it is the stylism with which Woodward writes about the family, even in its darker moments. The only reason I'm giving it four stars is that it has a certain incompleteness to it, to be remedied, I trust, by the reading of the the following two books.

Here is how "dark," "drug-addicted" Colette remains in my memory after this first third of the trilogy:

"Colette was laughing as she returned to the little encampment of towels and cushions that marked their space on an almost empty beach. The wind had caught her dress and her hair. Ripples were passing through her. She was shimmering."

To expect her to remain like this for fifteen years is, sorry, so American.