The Land in Winter (2024)
Why this one?
Continuing with a few selections from the Booker longlist.
Andrew Miller (1960- ; active 1997-) was born in Bristol, England. He grew up in the West Country, studied English at what was then Middlesex Polytechnic before completing the prestigious MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Before becoming an author he had a fairly varied career, including working as a social worker and teaching English in Japan and Spain. 3
His first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published in 1997 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His third, 2001’s Oxygen, was Booker-shortlisted in a year in which Peter Carey’s …Kelly Gang won against a very strong shortlist. He won several Costa awards for 2011’s Pure and has now been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction three times (for Pure, 2018’s Now We Shall Entirely Be Free and winning with The Land in Winter). In 2012, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Thoughts, etc.
The Land in Winter takes place in a remote community in the West Country of England during the famously harsh winter of 1962-63 (known as the ‘Big Freeze’). It focuses on two couples, neighbours separated by a field. Eric Parry is a local doctor, well-established in the community and married to Irene. They’re ostensibly a picture-perfect upper middle class couple, hosting dinner parties and very much conscious of their elevated status in their small community. The farm nearby has recently been bought by Bill Simmons, on something of a whim. He lives there with his relatively modern young wife Rita, who is adapting from her previous party life in the bars and clubs of Bristol. While Bill is also not exactly poor, he’s from an immigrant family (though not obviously) and the status of ‘farmer’ in the 1960s still very much carried an implication of lower social status than the Parrys. While Eric and Bill struggle to connect (or even really contemplate that they would), their wives are both pregnant and begin to form an unlikely bond.
While this is in many ways a book about relationships - both the marital life and strife of the two couples, and the awkward interactions that take place in a rigidly class-dominated society - its backdrop (both location and time period) is far from random. Chronologically, we are on the cusp of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ (with its early signs represented by Rita and her more youthful, progressive and fun outlook on life), but despite almost two decades having passed we are still very much living under the looming pitch-dark shadow of the events of the Second World War.
The isolated countryside location is perfectly chosen to allow the events of the ‘Big Freeze’ to have maximum impact. While we see that Bristol and London have come through the worst effect relatively quickly, in the immediate locale of the story, it brings isolation and claustrophobia. Eric can’t attend to his patients (or to his other, somewhat more nefarious, ‘business’) and Bill’s animals are shuttered away: both men have their distractions removed and are forced to focus on elements of their lives that are normally safely put on the back burner. In the process, secrets come to light which raise tensions, escape from which proves deliciously difficult.
It’s a book of many layers. On the superficial level, its concerns are relatively domestic. Its most memorable moments of drama relate to the unravelling of the two relationships, with the exposure of Eric’s slightly less than ‘upstanding’ behaviour having explosive effects, and a more slow-burn breakdown occurring in Bill and Rita’s marriage as the former fixates on his farming ambitions and the latter misses her former life. Alongside this the solace Rita and Irene find in each other offers a warmer counterpoint. But the more interesting aspects of the book to me were the underlying currents of darkness at a wider, societal level that can seem merely contextual but ultimately seem to be much more fundamental.
The book opens with a suicide of a young man in a mental asylum, in an extended section in which we do not meet any of the novel’s major players. Although Eric has a direct connection to this incident, it’s more broadly there to set the book’s tone. We are reminded that this is an era in which trauma is purposefully shut away, both physically in dilapidated old buildings and also psychologically, by a nation unwilling to confront the horrors of its recent past. We later learn that one of the key characters’ fathers is also resident in that same asylum: an old soldier who was present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, permanently scarred by the horrors he witnessed.
Elsewhere in the book, those horrors seem to be constantly trying to find a way to break through - most notably in the shape of Eric’s colleague Gabby Miklos, who has ‘numbers on his arm’ and tries to confront Bill with stories of those times at a party. Bill turns away from this conversation, but it clearly troubles him. Gabby has identified Bill as a kind of ‘fellow traveller’ with family connections to the heart of Europe during the war, but Bill’s learned instinct is to repress and push aside any references to this period, as his father has done. It’s this uneasy undercurrent that simmers through the book and makes it more than just a claustrophobic domestic drama - beneath the surface there is something much darker that wants to push through, but in these emotionally-shuttered times, it never quite can.
Score
9.5
Quiet brilliance. Up there with the best books on recent Booker shortlists, for me, and one I’d desperately like to see on this year’s.
Next up
A slight diversion.
