tamaranth | 2026/006: The Land in Winter

2026/006: The Land in Winter — Andrew Miller

It was, he knew, outrageous to watch her, but how rare the chance to see someone sitting in the maze of herself, all unsuspecting, bare as a branch. Doctors should be trained like this, at windows, at night. [p. 274]

The novel opens in December 1962, in an asylum. A man named Martin Lee wanders the halls at night and discovers the body of another patient, Stephen Storey, who has killed himself. Martin is haunted by memories of the Second World War: The Land in Winter, set in a village near Bristol, plays out in the long shadow of that war, and the 'Big Freeze' of winter 1962-63.

Neither Martin nor Stephen are protagonists, but they have connections to the quartet at the centre of the novel. The focus is on two married couples, near neighbours: Dr Eric Parry and his wife Irene, incomer farmer Bill Simmons and his wife Rita. The women are pregnant: the men work hard. Eric is having an ill-advised affair, and Bill has secret plans for the deserted airfield near the village. Rita likes to read science fiction novels, while Irene is busy planning a Boxing Day drinks party. The past of each character is slowly revealed, and their secrets uncovered. And each suffers sudden change.

What I loved most about this novel was Miller's writing. There were so many sentences that snagged my attention, brought me up sharp and made me slow down and reread. The Sixties setting -- tuna croquettes, institutional racism, Mariner 2, green grass over bomb sites, Acker Bilk's 'Stranger on the Shore' -- felt impeccably accurate. (It was before my time, but not by much: when I was a child 'the war' was still very much on my parents' minds, and a frequent subject of discussion between adults. Of course, it was more recent for them than 9/11 is for me...)

Glorious: and a reminder of how much I like Miller's work, and how many of his novels are in my TBR.

...though he was not much given to thinking about love, did not much care for the word, thought it had been worn to a kind of uselessness, gutted by the advertising men and the crooners, and even by politicians, some of whom seemed, recently, to have discovered it, it struck him that in the end it might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life. [p. 82]