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.
The aspect of the novel that I found the most thought-provoking is that the act that precipitates Stephen’s subsequent descent into alcoholism and despair is (relatively speaking) quite a small-scale one. There’s a lot of build-up to it, a lot of manipulative anticipation created. In the lead-up to the revelation, we hear about a range of horrifying atrocities—booby-traps and bombs; gangs kidnapping, torturing, and murdering people; cold-blooded shootings of people pulled from their cars in front of their families—so it’s almost an anti-climax when we find out that what Stephen did (“all” Stephen did) was shoot an unarmed teenager. It happens during a house search, a routine but also very tense operation: everything, we have learned by this point, is unpredictable in Belfast, and being on edge is a way of life for the soldiers on patrol. Stephen is posted in the alley; when the boy comes out of the back door, all Stephen registers is that “his hands were not quite empty.” Afterwards, Stephen is encouraged to dwell on the perceived threat: “if I’d believed my life was in danger then I’d had every right to do as I did.” He does as he’s told, and in the end there are no formal consequences beyond his being relocated out of Ireland.
Wine and unsuspected depths of loneliness have produced in him an effusiveness he would not, sober, trust or like in another. Nearly, very nearly, he tells Armand what he is in Paris to do, for surely Armand would be impressed, would see what he himself (in the ruby light of tavern wine) has come to see — that destroying the cemetery of les Innocents is to sweep away in fact, not in rhetoric, the poisonous influence of the past!
Over time the finds vary: the miners Jean-Baptiste has imported to do the excavation find well-preserved coffins (“inside is a skeleton, the residue of a man, his bones connected by patches of leathery sinew”); a school’s worth of children, laid head to toe; two young women, astonishingly preserved by “a form of mummification” (“skin, hair, lips, fingernails, eyelashes“). These last are of particular interest to the doctors consulting on the dig, using its finds for their own experiments. One is Dr Guillotin, not yet famous for his advocacy of the swift and relatively painless means of execution that came to bear his name. His presence is one of many reminders that this literal purification process is taking place on the cusp of a different kind of transformation, a purging of the past to make way for an as-yet unimagined future.
Maybe that’s what Miller wanted: to evoke a scene (which he does pretty brilliantly) and a moment, without attaching it to a larger narrative, whether personal or political. But it frustrated me that so many of the novel’s elements felt seeded with meaning that then didn’t bear fruit. I wanted something from the novel that it didn’t give me, some momentum or culmination. That is about my expectations as much as Miller’s accomplishment, I suppose. Still, when the church they are demolishing breaks open to let the light in and Jean-Baptiste observes, “How filthy everything below now appears! How much the place had depended on its darkness!” it seemed to me that the moment was crying out to be read symbolically in a way that the novel more generally didn’t support. Miller writes wonderfully, though, and if you want a really vivid sense of what it would look, feel, and especially smell like to dig up thousands of old corpses, though, you won’t be disappointed!
I won’t give more specifics about the plot; I’ll just note that it sets up a structure that is at once simple and increasingly suspenseful. Miller makes good use of the common trope of a geographical voyage also being a voyage of personal discovery, so that the cat and mouse game over time becomes something at once subtler and more complex. Though the plotting is very precise, even the moment when hunter and quarry coincidentally and unwittingly cross paths didn’t feel contrived: it just added to the evidence (shared eventually by at least one of Lacroix’s pursuers) that they are not really seeking a legible or reasonable form of justice but are carrying out a more arbitrary exercise of power, playing their parts in a game none of them can ever really win because those who made the rules don’t care who they really are–or who they could be, if they were free to choose.
Novel Readings 