It does, however, along the way, get you invested in a few of its characters, an art that appears largely forgotten in many of today’s novels
It is a truth universally acknowledged that storytelling is essential to humanity, developing society and connecting the world as it does. It’s a mystery, therefore, that storytelling is anathema to the gatekeepers and practitioners of the modern ‘literary’ novel, and plots pariahs banished from their ivory-towered, exclusionary world. Although with riveting exceptions like Booker-winning Wolf Hall or the Pulitzer-shortlisted The Dutch House, prizewinning or nominated books wallow in the kind of navel gazing that have driven readers away in their gadzillions, even as ‘literature’s’ guardians, blinded by their own self-proclaimed brilliance, rue their shrinking foothold in the real world.
Having picked up Andrew Miller’s Booker-shortlisted Land in Winter, I was surprised, therefore, by its semblance of a story. It makes an excruciatingly slow start, bogged down for the first hundred pages with details no-one needs to know (we’re informed of every trip his characters make to the bathroom — completely unnecessary even had the story been about a consortium of plumbers), then hits its stride and becomes engrossing for the next two hundred, before letting us down again with a weak, wussy end.
It does, however, along the way, get you invested in a few of its characters, an art that appears largely forgotten in many of today’s novels. You don’t have to like them but if the author can’t get you interested in their fate then the story has failed, and Miller does succeed in making me care about Bill’s farm, his eccentric bull, and whether he lives or dies in the end (Bill, not the bull, though the latter provides some of the rare moments of humour in this book), and about mistreated Irene and whether she will ever escape her ghastly doctor-husband’s clutches or of the oddly sinister blind children’s home matron she finds herself beholden to after her misadventures in the snow. Gabby, the East European doctor, on the other hand, is an intriguing character left largely undeveloped, and what a waste of a good story that is! The trying-too-hard-to-be-interesting Rita, I couldn’t warm to, and Eric the Doctor, I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, or his married lover and cuckolded husband for that matter, but these things are subjective and they might float your boat.
The language is beautiful, the descriptions of the pivotal snow in particular, a character in its own right, but the author indulges himself with stylistics to such a degree, especially his love for layering each line with metaphor upon (sometimes mixed) metaphor, that these stretches not only go on forever, as a snowscape can seem too, but clog up the otherwise impressive literary flow.
In conclusion, dear reader, if you’re holidaying in the sunshine, with time on your hands, give this a go.
The Land in Winter
By Andrew Miller
Sceptre
pp. 384
