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‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. This book is full of sorrowful people and places. Some of the places, the villages sacrificed to create the Aswan Dam and Canada’s St Lawrence Seaway, are literally drowned, leaving thousands homeless, while Warsaw, ruined in the second world war and rebuilt to a Disneyesque twin of its past self, is also submerged in loss. In and around these stories of large-scale dispossession and destruction weave personal losses — dead parents, a stillborn baby, an estranged daughter. The plot, like a magnet drawn to doom and mourning, follows Avery, an engineer charged with constructing the Seaway and relocating the temple of Abu Simbel during the building of the Aswan Dam, and his botanist wife Jean. When they separate, Jean becomes entangled with a Holocaust survivor named Lucjan and his memories of Warsaw.
Grief is always waiting to ambush people, especially at moments of joy. When Avery and Jean fall in love, he realises immediately that their happiness brings with it ‘inescapable sorrow’. A great building produces ‘a mortal sadness’ in Avery, and this feeling leads him to become an architect. His mother concludes that for better or worse, ‘love is a catastrophe’. Chief among these sad people is the motherless Jean, whose life, as she says, has formed around the absence of her beloved parent. This is a woman who is dismayed when her lover uses pages from old phone books as kindling (‘there’s a connection between those names that we’ll never understand’) and is certain that a used doll for sale in an Egyptian market means either ‘tragedy or unconscionable neglect’. (Maybe someone was just cleaning out an attic.)
Is all this a morbid over-sensitivity to the idea that ‘the world is a world of tears’ or is it wisdom? Is it wallowing or a profound realism? The answer will depend largely on the reader’s temperament, or his willingness to see the world for a time through different glasses. The sensibility of The Winter Vault is extreme, and I entered Michaels’ world with reluctance. Once there, though, I wouldn’t have missed it.
There is more here than lachrymosity. Michaels has a sly humour that can mock the book’s dominant mood, as in Jean’s imaginary botanica of healing plants: one is efficacious for those ‘who fear music sung by low-voiced women who have lost everything,’ another for ‘the vertigo of loss, very potent — for one-time use only — do not operate heavy machinery or make important decisions while under its influence.’ Like Michael Ondaatje, she loves arcane techniques and their vocabulary — the painstaking pollination of date palms, the paper engineering, including pivot points, rocker arms and angle folds, that goes into a moveable book. She understands the fuse that can be lit by the most innocuous contact, a hand on a wrist, and the relationship between Jean and Lucjan is powerfully erotic. A poet, as well as the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces, Michaels is a master of deft, pithy images: the sparse hair on Lucjan’s chest looks like ‘black threads sewing his skin together’; the pale Jean lies on top of her darker-skinned lover, like ‘snow on a branch’.
You may find the relentless sorrow in The Winter Vault trying, perhaps occasionally repulsive. But, unfortunately, there is truth as well as beauty in this dark world. Virgil’s melancholy summation, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, reads, in Fagles’ translation, ‘the world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart’. Few understand those burdens as well and sing them so eloquently as Anne Michaels.
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