FICTION: CATHERINE HEANEYreviews The Winter VaultBy Anne Michaels Bloomsbury, 340pp. £16.99
CANADIAN AUTHOR Anne Michaels's first novel, Fugitive Pieces, published in 1997, was a universally acclaimed, international bestseller, described by John Berger as "the most important book I have read for forty years". Inevitably, then, there has been much anticipation of her second, The Winter Vault, which – her readers will be glad to hear – bears some of the hallmarks of that earlier work.
The novel opens in Egypt in 1964, as Avery Escher, a young English engineer, oversees the dismantling of the Great Templeat Abu Simbel to make way for the waters of the Aswan Dam, which will submerge the sacred site. By day, Avery makes calculations for the almost inconceivable job of moving and re-erecting the temple, block by massive block, to a new site 60 metres higher; by night, he shares his anxieties with his wife Jean, a botanist, on their houseboat on the Nile. Central to Avery's doubts, and in stark contrast to his mission of preservation, is the destruction of the surrounding Nubian villages, and the heart-wrenching displacement of people forced to leave behind their ancient homeland and the graves of their ancestors. This vast backdrop both literally and metaphorically gives Michaels the chance to delve deep into history and explore some very big themes, as the epic scale of the task raises questions about identity, place, human sacrifice, betrayal, memory and the honouring of the dead. Michaels brilliantly evokes the anguish of the villagers' exile, and the injustice of it, and uses this as an opportunity to weave into her story a similar tale of dispossession – the permanent flooding in 1958 of a series of villages in Ontario to make way for the St Lawrence Seaway. It was in this melancholy landscape that Jean and Avery first met, as Jean collected plant cuttings from the empty riverbed (her own act of preservation), and as the narrative moves back and forth between Canada and Egypt, the couple reveal themselves to each other through long, poignant accounts from their personal histories, related in Michaels's lush, delicate prose.
Both have suffered losses – Jean, of both parents (“My life formed around an absence,” she says), Avery, of his beloved father – and their tender courtship and quiet joy at finding each other provides the emotional core of this part of the novel: “Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous”. But this happiness is always tinted by the sorrow both have known (Michaels is particularly eloquent on the nuances of grief), and when another personal tragedy – the loss of a child – strikes, they become isolated once again, cut off from each other in their own private desolation. In a simultaneous blow, Avery comes to realise that, after all his toil, the reconstruction of Abu Simbel is itself an empty act of commemoration, “a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance”.
At this point, the novel takes a sharp turn. Now back in Toronto, the stricken Jean encounters Lucjan, a Polish refugee and guerilla artist, and eventually becomes his lover. Though a gentle man, Lucjan has witnessed unimaginable devastation and remains haunted by his experiences – as a child, he survived the horrors of wartime Warsaw, later escaping the murderous Soviet regime to Canada, where he lives among other bohemian Polish exiles, painting replicas of the cave paintings of Lascaux on broken-down fences around Toronto. Lucjan and Jean’s intimacy grows as he shares his dark memories with her, delivering them in long streams of consciousness, peppered with gnomic pronouncements. A typical utterance is “The winter dead wait . . . for the earth to relent and receive them. They wait, in histories of thousands of pages, where the word love is never mentioned”. This kind of highly stylised speech, while profound and often beautifully rendered, hardly seems believable as the dialogue between two people. Similarly, Lucjan’s vignettes, taken individually, are illuminating and harrowing and kaleidoscopic in detail, allowing Michaels to draw parallels between displaced peoples throughout history and across continents, but their cumulative effect becomes wearing, the tone portentous. Jean, for her part, says and reveals little – she is chiefly listener in this part of the novel, a prism through which Lucjan’s stories are refracted – while Avery all but vanishes into the background. This is a pity, for as the character who unites the two halves of the book, Jean is crucial to the reader’s involvement and investment in the story; distanced from her, we care less about her fate and that of her lover and husband.
And yet, it takes a writer of Michaels’s stature, undaunted intelligence and immense lyrical talents to explore themes as grand and wide-ranging as those in The Winter Vault – it is an uneasy read, in every sense. Every page brims with exquisite images that bear the poet’s linguistic imprint, while the sheer density of factual detail compressed within the narrative – from engineering to botany to history – points to the master novelist’s breadth of scope and research. Over a decade in the writing, The Winter Vault is, in its own way, as ambitious in scale and intent as the colossal monument at its core, a finely crafted work of beauty and gravitas – but like Avery’s perfect rendition of the pharaoh’s temple, there is a remoteness in that perfection.
Catherine Heaney is features editor of The Glossmagazine
Anne Michaels will be appearing during the Dublin Writers Festival, at an event chaired by Eve Patten on June 4th at 6pm in the Project Arts Centre. dublinwritersfestival.com