I have always liked seeing a complete world within the glass walls of a snow globe. It’s comforting to think that somewhere, even if just in children’s playrooms, the chaos of ordinary life is confined, controlled, and on full display. In a snow globe, things get shaken up, flakes begin to swirl, the storm passes, and all comes back to rest. Ordinary life is rarely so predictable, or its contours so evident to the observer attempting to hold a world in her hand.
Andrew Miller explores exactly this reality in his evocative Booker-prize short-listed novel, The Land in Winter, set in the English countryside in 1962 just before the historic Big Freeze. Like miniature figures in a dollhouse, Miller’s small cast of characters enact different scenes of sleeping, dreaming, bathing, party-planning, visiting banks and grocery stores, raising livestock, expecting babies, and visiting the sick. Yet, just under the surface, complex histories, contradictory desires, and naïve imaginings break through just as the land is blanketed in deep snow.
The book opens in the midnight hush of an insane asylum, where patient Martin Lee follows a hunch that a young man about to be released home has taken his life instead. Discovering both the body and the goodbye note in the laundry drying room, Martin smokes a cigarette before sounding the hospital alarm and exiting into dense fog, the asylum lit up behind him as people wake up to attend to the crisis.
Next, we meet Dr. Eric Parry and accompany him on his house calls. At first blush, he seems a diligent general practitioner. But soon, he comes into clearer focus: his wife, Irene, is pregnant, and he is having an affair. His response upon hearing the news of the young man’s death is not sorrow, but self-interest: will he be blamed, since he was the one who prescribed the pills?
We then meet the Parry’s neighbors, another newly married couple similarly trying their hand at business and family life. Bill Simmons has earnest-appearing dreams for the farm he has purchased, and his wife, Rita, is relaxing in the early weeks of her own pregnancy. We soon learn, though, that Bill has failed to take his degree at Oxford and is estranged from his father, and Rita has left behind a questionable career. Darker revelations and thematic connections across the storylines come to light with every inch of falling snow.
Critic Lucy Scholes of the Financial Times describes The Land in Winter as a book about “the difficulty of loving in an unlovely world.” That may be true – the interlocking, post-war stories carry the indelible imprint of the Holocaust and World War II. But Miller’s universe is unquestionably one of possibility, not only of despair. In The Land in Winter, a world buried in snow is a world waiting to be revealed and remade.
As is the case with all great books, The Land in Winter is in conversation with other texts steeped in a particular space and time – Claire Keegan comes immediately to mind. Miller captures the complexity of small moments with precision and resonance. There can be no doubt that The Land in Winter is also in dialogue with James Joyce’s iconic short story, “The Dead,” from The Dubliners:
“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”