Novel Readings

The car, the moon, Eric’s face . . . were all changed. She looked at him, his concentration (there was ice out there), his frowning into the onrush of night. She might just sit there, do nothing, say nothing, but it no longer felt inevitable. Her anger, at that precise moment, was absent. The anger, the fear, the shame, the wound that had to be tended like a wayside shrine. And what had replaced them? Only this: the rattling of the little car, the whirr of the heater, the shards of light beyond the edges of the road. A sadness she could live with. Some new interest in herself.

I greatly admired Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and The Slowworm’s Song, so my expectations were high enough for his latest, The Land in Winter, that I treated myself to it in hardcover. For a while—nearly the whole first part of the novel, actually—I wasn’t sure if it was living up to them. I was liking it fine: Miller knows how to conjure both characters and settings with the kind of concreteness and specificity that I always appreciate. But it felt slow-moving. The novel never really changes its pace, but all the pieces so carefully assembled in Part One are put into motion in Part Two, the characters’ lives—fully of tensions, secrets, and lies as well as hopes and desires—intersecting in ways that become increasingly fraught, both for them and for us as we wonder how it will all play out. By the end I was thoroughly engrossed and, again, admiring.

The novel takes place during the legendary winter of 1962-63 in the UK. Bill and Rita live on a farm; Bill has stepped away from his family’s questionably acquired money and Rita has left behind a life of clubs and dancing and performances—also a bit questionable. Their closest neighbors are Eric, the local doctor, and his wife Irene. Each of them is uneasy in their own way: Eric, for example, is having an affair, while Rita, we learn, hears voices, which is particularly unnerving for her as her father is a patient at a nearby asylum. Rita and Irene are both pregnant. Across their current lives lies the shadow of the war, recent enough to have lingering effects; its horrors are most explicitly present through Eric’s colleague Gabby Miklos, who oppresses Bill at a party by cornering him and telling unwelcome stories about persecution and suffering:

When Gabby began again—Häftling, Sonderkommando, Judenlager—Bill, staring at an abandoned cheese stick on the tablecloth, began to withdraw his heart. He did it as subtly as he could, an inching back that might, with luck, seem no movement at all, a disappearing act, a party trick . . . but all was glass to Gabby Miklos and he sensed it at once. He looked up and smiled at Bill. It was, after all, not his first failure.

I wondered for a while if Gabby was meant to be providing an interpretive key to the rest of the novel. “How it happens is perfectly understood,” he says to Bill; “There is no mystery. So please, tell me, what is the question we must ask instead?” It is easy to imagine a novel that explores possible responses to that question, and to the problem Gabby embodies of how people are supposed to carry on, to re-engage, “normally,” after what has happened, after what he has seen and knows. As The Land in Winter went on, though, that didn’t seem right to me. I’m not really sure, in fact, that the novel has any such focus or thematic core, that it’s trying to answer (or ask) any particular question.

This is not a complaint or a criticism at all. Some novels work that way; others don’t. My sense of The Land In Winter is that if it has a unifying idea, it is that we all get through winter (and life) as best we can, and that what exactly that looks like depends on who we are and where we are. By the end of the novel there was something very satisfying about the richness with which Miller showed me who his people were and how they were getting from day to day. There are plot developments, not twists so much as consequences or revelations, some of them wrenching but none of them surprising because they all come so organically from the world Miller has created.

In particular, it is a wintry world, and Miller writes about it meticulously and often beautifully:

In the afternoon, the blizzard blew away towards the north. For an hour the air was perfectly still. The ash tree was a frozen fountain. Several times they said to each other how beautiful it was. The dusk came swiftly. In the garden, the snow lay in subtle undulations, each with its deepening blue shadow. The cold descended and the land tightened.