“The Winter Vault,” by Anne Michaels
That Anne Michaels’s second novel, The Winter Vault, is a work of enormous and earnest intensity is indisputable. It is painstakingly researched, minutely detailed in the particularities of a vast number of arcane topics (bookbinding, cabinetry, early children’s book illustration) and ambitious in scope. Perhaps this is the reason that it does not succeed as a novel but reads more like a series of passionate essays on the problem of lost lives, people and places as they are played out in various displaced worlds of the late unlamented 20th century.
The novel is preoccupied with landscapes of erosion, loss and salvaging, and Michaels works hard to connect the three great sites of destruction in and around which her novel takes place. These are the desert lands condemned to flooding by the construction of Egypt’s Aswan Dam in the ’60s, the displacement of Ontario towns and farmlands a decade earlier through the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and finally the reconstruction of the city of Warsaw after it had been decimated by Hitler’s army. In this way her novel “flows” backwards, decade by decade, ostensibly connecting each site of loss or salvage with its predecessor in another time and continent. The idea is an elegant one but it doesn’t work; for despite the ubiquity of river imagery, the novel is static and encumbered by the moral ideas and philosophical precepts through which her characters struggle on their way to work out their various scattered salvations.
The characters themselves—Avery, an engineer who seems to specialize in moving rivers about, Jean, his botanist wife, and later Lucjan, her lover—spend a lot of time in bed. But they aren’t having sex so much as engaging in long, earnest, high-flown conversations that in their very writerly-ness rebuke the notion of talk (“pillow-talk” no less) as a vernacular, largely casual, slightly elliptical event. So when Lucjan promises to entertain Jean with her first “bedtime story,” the language he uses is portentous, fulsome and shot through with weighty significance:
I can only speak if you are lying next to me, he said, as close as my voice, my words throughout the length of your body, because what I am going to say is my entire life. And I have nothing really but these memories. I need you to listen as if these memories are your own … I need you to hear everything I say, and everything I can’t say must be heard too.
Lucjan really talks like this. All the time. And even though he was a child when he experienced the violent destruction and equally disorienting reconstruction of Warsaw, he is never less than orotund in his recounting of the traumas of the past. Despite his caveat to Jean that she needs to hear everything he “can’t say,” Lucjan is obligingly thorough in his narration of the traumatic past, an artistic decision that flies in the face of conventional wisdom where trauma typically leads to silence and repression, or at the very least halting speech and an unwillingness to return to the site of memory and loss. Not so for Lucjan who, it seems, only needs to lie next to his lover for the words to pour forth in unbroken paragraphs.
As in her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Michaels is preoccupied in The Winter Vault with notions of witnessing and the answerability of history before which the individual is inestimably dwarfed. Jean, contemplating the destruction of Nubia, feels her personal suffering to be “unconscionable”: “What was personal loss in the face of universal devastation—the loss of Nubia, the destruction of cities. Her misery shamed her.”
Jean’s lofty high-mindedness in the face of her personal loss—she has, in fact, suffered a personal tragedy in the course of the novel and has legitimate cause to mourn—emphasizes the abstract over the personal, the idea over the action, the telling over the doing. Somewhere in all this the reader loses sympathy with Jean and Avery and Lucjan who, because they speak in exquisite aphorisms or image-laden monologues, never seem quite real. Michaels’s characters are creatures of air and rare metaphysical buoyancy. They occupy an ethereal realm composed of memory, musing, melancholy and the aptness of the beautifully inflected gesture. So it is, perhaps, little wonder that they turn out to be too grand and too gorgeous and too good for their own good. ❚
The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels, McClelland & Stewart, 2009, hardcover, 352 pp, $32.99.
Méira Cook is a Winnipeg writer.