The Land in Winter

Susan Midalia's Review 

I always look forward to a new novel by British writer Andrew Miller, and his tenth novel The Land in Winter is surely one of his best. Set mainly in a West Country village during what became known as the Big Freeze - the coldest winter in England for over 200 years – Miller’s new book is as unsettling and hauntingly beautiful as the storms and snowdrifts that assailed the UK from December 1962 until March 1963. Evoked with lyrical precision and arresting imagery, the unrelentingly harsh weather serves as a metaphor for both the inner turbulence of the novel’s four main characters and the social upheavals that characterised the 1960s. But there’s nothing schematic about Miller’s use of that central metaphor; on the contrary, he subtly alternates the perspectives of his four central characters so that we come to know them with all their flaws, apprehensions and desires. At the same time, they are made to seem unfinished; like the decade in which they reach adulthood, they are still evolving, their futures uncertain and precarious.

Bill Simmons is the son of a successful but shady immigrant businessman living in London. Having rejected his family’s obsession with money, he is striving to become a serious dairy and cattle farmer. His relatively new wife Rita, a former nightclub hostess, alternates between boredom and a sense of abjection which sees her plagued by voices that humiliate her. Their newly married neighbours are similarly fractured, both as individuals and as a couple. Eric Parry, having seemingly discarded his working-class origins to become the local GP, is having an affair with a married woman to alleviate his vague sense of discontent. His wife Irene, from a well-to-do middle-class family and indifferent to her new life of domesticity, finds solace in booze, cigarettes and parties. Miller’s exploration of the nature and consequences of class and gender differences is complex and nuanced; it can even be, as in the set piece of one of Irene’s parties, utterly hilarious. We also come to understand how the class snobbery and typically thoughtless sexism of the time creates divisions and antagonisms that cannot always be resolved. It will take the fact that Rita and Irene are both pregnant to begin to bridge the distance within and between the two couples. Another fact – that the women smoke and drink their way through those pregnancies – is simply presented as a feature of the 60s, without Miller superimposing a contemporary criticism of its dangers. Indeed, the novel as a whole presents the past practices of everyday life, such as the conspicuous consumption of cocktails and the entanglements of sexual morality, in all their vivid particularity, without the distortions of using a modern lens.

As well as the novel’s wonderful creation of characters, and as with many of Miller’s previous fiction, The Land in Winter is a treasure house of detail about the nature of work. You will learn about, for example, how to handle a recalcitrant bull and how to perform an autopsy! The novel is also skilled at creating the textures and rhythms of village life. Home visits by the local GP. Friendly shopkeepers. Far less benignly, a culture of surveillance: while an adulterous affair in London, for example, is tolerated by friends, Eric understands that should his affair with Alison become public knowledge, he will be forced to leave the town.

The Land in Winter is also shadowed by the experiences of the Second World War. Stories from the past are rendered obliquely, as if people in the present cannot bear too much reality. Rita’s father is traumatised by his experiences as a soldier and ends in an asylum. Eric’s colleague Gabby is a holocaust survivor, but his story is literally cut off when a guest at a party nervously decides to move on and away. Buildings in London still bear the marks of the Blitz, and rationing persists. But counterpointing the darkness of the past are hints of a more liberated future: two men kissing and dancing in a London bar, for example, is a reminder that homosexuals were among the ‘categories’ of people murdered in concentration camps.

Framed by the past and anticipating a more progressive future, the focus of The Land in Winter is a gloriously rendered present, as the four characters struggle to make sense of themselves and their lives. They are unforgettable literary creations:  at once self-absorbed, frivolous, high-minded, lost and suicidal, and capable of great acts of kindness. Andrew Miller’s exquisitely written new novel, which combines an absorbing plot with a gentle unfolding of character, is ultimately a depiction of the forces that people battle to control: the cruelty of the weather, the intensity of their desires, and the voices of judgement that afflict them from both within and without. Unmissable.

Publisher's Review 

December 1962, the West Country.

In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage.

Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm he bought, a place where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering.

There is affection - if not always love - in both homes: these are marriages that still hold some promise. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards - a true winter, the harshest in living memory - the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.

Where do you hide when you can't leave home? And where, in a frozen world, could you run to?