Like writers of The Michigan Daily Book Review past, our fearless reviewers are once again tackling the Booker Prize Shortlist. Every year, six English-language books published in the UK and Ireland are nominated, and six Daily reviews follow. Join us as we make our way through this year’s list over the next couple weeks, and, before the announcement Nov. 10, tune in for our final predictions piece, where we will share who we think will win (and who we think should).
— Cora Rolfes, Senior Arts Editor, and Alex Hetzler, Books Beat Editor
Set in a secluded English village in 1962, Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter” follows the deteriorating marriages of Bill and Rita Simmons and Eric and Irene Parry. The two couples are tied together by their proximity to each other and mutual disorientation within the quaint West Country hamlet they call home. Haunted by the lingering trauma of World War II, the Simmonses obscure their pasts from each other while the Parrys wrestle with Eric’s adultery.
Small-town infidelity is not a novel topic — and neither is Miller’s approach. The central drama of these spouses unravels predictably and prosaically, with all the classic trappings of an unhappy conjugal story. Each beat unfolds as expected, the details muddled by incessant ambiguity about the characters, which is often unsatisfyingly revealed in dull exposition or dry dialogue.
The novel’s chapters alternate between following each of the four members. The effect of this oscillating focus is amusing at first, but disruptive as the story drags through a tedious, inevitable plot. In the book’s final third, this device is jarring as the author seeks to simultaneously progress each character’s storyline. Threads get lost and trampled over each other in Miller’s attempt to concurrently merge and conclude four character arcs. With disparate plots competing for the reader’s attention, key incidents fail to convey their desired impact, resulting in a flaccid ending that neither resolves nor evokes anything.
Considering the deftness of Miller’s descriptions, this weakness of his narrative is particularly disappointing. The novel contains delicate moments of beauty — smoky bedrooms and arctic landscapes, religious moments of realization and despairing scenes of disillusionment — but these palpably evoked vignettes are burdened by large swathes of circuitous prose and dry, comedic asides. Miller overindulges in diatribes and the minutiae of an English countryside he is intimately familiar with.
With minimal action and a plot devoid of dynamism, the novel heavily leans on the interiority of its central cast: the paranoid musings of Eric, Bill’s persistent worries of incompetency and the foil lonely natures of Irene and Rita. Their lives intertwine with a supporting cast of family members and other villagers, but the latter are treated as auxiliary. The author has no intention of fleshing out these characters beyond his contrived inclusion of their melodramatic backstories. Miller’s narrow focus on this foursome would be excusable if they were more interesting, yet their psyches are as pallid as the story itself.
Bill’s character is particularly pedantic and vacuous despite the potential he displays in the novel’s first chapters. For example, his secretive family drama is built up as a major hurdle when first introduced — posed as the chief motivation for his relocation to the village — yet that narrative importance dissipates during the novel’s third part, causing readers to question the initial angst he felt toward his relatives. His business dealings share the same dull, utilitarian farmer’s deliberations as Tolstoy’s Konstanin Levin, but without any of the intricacy of “Anna Karenina.” Bill’s tension and stress feel completely devoid of consequence, making audience sympathy hard to win. Such a mishandling of a key protagonist reveals Miller’s failure to illustrate a captivating character — or narrative, for that matter.
Miller seems capable of painting a setting that mirrors that of his childhood, yet appears oblivious to the soul’s vicissitudes during marriage, with characters whose depth does not match the novel’s pacing. Miller delivers a trite domestic melodrama befitting of daytime television, rather than offering a unique perspective on matrimony, unfaithfulness and the complex emotions and dynamics that arise from both. If Miller’s goal was to test some unusual literary experiment on the plain canvas of this story’s events, it would be an admirable effort. He instead settles on delivering new pablum to occupy bookstore shelves until the next bland historical drama replaces it.
Perhaps nostalgic for an age just out of his grasp, Miller’s excessively detailed narrative certainly seeks to grasp the complexities of a dynamic, post-war era. Yet whether as a tribute to his parents’ generation or the culmination of his longing to experience the past, the outcome of Miller’s historical drama is fundamentally unsatisfactory.
Daily Arts Writers Lorenzo Norbis and Ethan Rogers can be reached at lnorbis@umich.edu and ethanrog@umich.edu, respectively.
