Review: The Winter Vault – Anne Michaels

Before I left on a short trip to France, I heard the news that a new book, by Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault, was imminent and I managed to obtain a copy to take away with me.  Back in the late 1990s, I had been greatly impressed with Anne Michaels first book, the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces and it had been a long wait for her next novel.

The book is primarily about a young couple who move to Egypt where the husband, Avery, is working as an engineer on the project to move the great statue of Abu Simbel before it is overwhelmed by the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Avery’s wife Jean, who has an interest in botany spends her time learning about the country and collects local plants to transplant to a safer location.

Last Thursday I had a free afternoon, so sat in a public park in Pays de Loire and read the first hundred pages.  Alas, I found The Winter Vault annoying to the point of wanting to leave it in the local Emmaus (the French charity shop chain), but decided to force myself to finish it, a five day slog through cloying prose, which made me think of a teenage diary, full of carefully-crafted sentences milking every conversation of its last shade of meaning.  Does any married couple really speak with such pretentious profundity as this:

- You’re like a man seen from a distance, a man who we think has stopped to tie his shoelaces but who is really kneeling in prayer.
- Our shoelaces have to come undone, said Avery, before we ever think to kneel . . .

Earlier, Avery has lain next to Jean his wife, thinking that, “only love teaches a man his death, that it is in the solitude of love that we learn to drown“.  Later, he takes Jean’s hand, saying

Please close your eyes . . . Your thumb is the Atlantic, your smallest finger, the Pacific.  Your fingertips are Egypt, and the heel of your hand is Africa . . . Your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate is the river Nile.

But its not just the conversations which exhibit this over-written preciousness, the thoughts of the characters too . .

Jean felt the blow, the disaster to a soul that can be caused by beauty, by an answer one cannot grasp with one’s hands.  The hunger for a home was much worse here unbearable.  The village, the way the houses grew out of the desert – it was as if the need of Avery’s heart had invented them. And, too, the kinship with those who made them . . . It was also the knowledge that they would be forever changed, their bodies already changed, attuned to each other.  (Avery) could almost imagine that the houses in Ashkeit rose out of the sand at the very moment of his sight, born from the intensity of his desire.

Picking up a word from the last sentence, “intensity”, this perhaps describes the whole book.  Even simple things have to be exploited for every opportunity of a deeper meaning:

Luckan made a late supper.  He threw all the ingredients into one pan, the vegetables, the meat, the eggs; he crushed and rubbed the dust of herbs over the puckering oil . . .  Jean watched him.  No one had ever cooked for her in all the years since her mother died.  She had not known that this had hurt her . . . she wept as she ate . . . and he let her cry, only taking her hand across the table, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, this gratitude. To eat and weep.

Almost everything these people do is has an air of preciousness – later when Jean is sadly bereaved she eases her sorrow by planting herbal plants in the flowerbeds of public parks in order to remind immigrants of their homeland.

The cuttings would grow un-noticed, except for their fragrance . . . flowers that would remind them of their Greece, Lithuania, Ukraine, Italy, Sardinia, Malta . . . so that if they came to sleep on on the grass, familiar scents would invade their dream and give them inexplicable ease. . .  One might think this gave her pleasure.  But after a night of planting, she was stunned with loneliness, as if she’d been tending graves.

Perhaps the problem is that Anne Michaels is a poet foremost, and a writer second.  She seems unable to write a sentence without forcing her readers to stop and think about the convoluted wording and seems not to understand that intensity is fine in small portions, but is easily overdone. Imagine a piece of orchestral music with just the slow, emotional slow movement, and no allegro to set the scene – The Winter Vault is like this, its all “andante” and it becomes too much for a whole book. There is no lightness here, and not a touch of humour, just the relentless over-thinking which dogs so many books these days.  Basically, The Winter Vault is not an easy book to read because the writing does not flow with ease, but keeps stopping you in your tracks to work out what the subtext is:

Jean dug, wishing she had acres to upturn with only a trowel; the meditation of lifting the earth one scoopful at at a time, submerged in thought, for hours moving toward an understanding that is at first merely visceral and then becomes conscious knowledge.

The book would be better if it actually had some sort of story going on among all these meanderings.  However, what story there is seems to be merely a vehicle on which Michaels’ hangs her beautiful thoughts about the displacement of peoples whether caused by the building of dams or by acts of war.  It would be too cruel to summarise the story in one sentence, but not at all difficult.

It is interesting to read other reviews of this book:

Sylvia Brownrigg wrote in The Guardian, “At the heart of Anne Michaels’s graceful, melancholy new novel is not so much a story as an argument”.

Lesley McDowell in The Scotsman writes, “Very little actually takes place in front of our eyes”, and “Jean and Avery only ever talk to each other like characters in a very literary book, which is, of course, what they are. It’s beautiful to read, but it’s not a reality that reaches the heart”.

Clare Colvin in The Daily Mail wrote, “Avery and Jean . . . lie next to each other at night telling the stories of their lives, laced with gnomic utterances on love and world events.  The characters never come to life, serving only as mouthpieces for the author whose tendency towards the portentous weighs as heavily as the Abu Simbel stone”.

On the whole, I think this book was lucky to be saved from the Emmaus shop but it now graces my shelves as a sort of extended Leonard Cohen song, rather like Suzanne, or The Sisters of Mercy, designed to give an impression rather than to actually relate anything memorable.