"THE WINTER VAULT" IS BEAUTIFUL AND WISE

“The Winter Vault” by Anne Michaels

Twelve years have passed since the Canadian poet Anne Michaels published her first novel, the Orange-prize-winning “Fugitive Pieces”, but no one can deny that its successor has been worth waiting for. Taking as its theme the relationship between humans and the landscape they inhabit, “The Winter Vault” begins in mid-1960s Egypt, where a British engineer, Avery Escher, is overseeing the removal of Abu Simbel’s giant figures before the opening of the Aswan Dam.

Avery and his wife Jean have already witnessed the flooding of the Canadian countryside to make way for the St Lawrence Seaway, and as they watch the grief of displacement re-enacted in the desert, a tragedy in their own lives drives them apart. Returning to Canada, Jean is consoled by Lucjan, a Polish artist who roams the streets at night painting guerrilla artworks; but he too carries memories of a lost homeland, as a survivor of the Nazis’ razing of Warsaw.

Although the suffering evoked goes to the heart, there is plenty to set against it: the tenderness of the characters’ relationships, the beauty of the poetic prose, and a wisdom which seems at times to encompass the whole of human experience.

~ ANTHONY GARDNER

"The Winter Vault", Bloomsbury, May