Andrew Miller constructs his novels like a good craftsman. His approach is slow, methodical and thorough. His latest, The Land in Winter, follows two couples through the minutiae of their daily lives in the rural England of the early 1960s. Eric is a newly appointed doctor and Bill has abandoned his life of privilege to live in a draughty, rundown farmhouse. The men find it difficult to connect, but their wives, Irene and Rita, both pregnant, are bonded by the shared boredom and disillusionment of married life. As the cold sets in, their interlocking lives unfold, and buried tensions simmer to the surface.
The Land in Winter evokes a certain kind of Englishness: cups of tea, quiet despair, and the endurance of the soul. This is not London’s Swinging Sixties, but the drab, postwar West Country. Miller is attuned to the slightest shifts in the quality of the light, which filters through the thick clouds “like cream through muslin”, or glints off the frozen fields so sharply it hurts to look at.
His prose is plain; there are no shortcuts or sleights of hand. Entire pages are given up to the domestic details of his characters’ lives: shopping lists, budgeting, meal planning, tidying up. He is not afraid of a plodding sentence. “She carried the cup and saucer to the kitchen, left them in the sink and went to the hall.” Yet the unrelenting realism of these sentences builds up gradually, layer by layer, to produce an astonishing depth and tenderness.
Early in the novel, Miller gives Eric a reflection that might apply equally to his own craft: “And 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 the willingness to imagine another’s life. To do that. To make the effort.”
Caricature and the Irish: Satirical Prints from the Library of Trinity College, Dublin c 1780-1830
Eve in Ireland: Controlling and Silencing Irish Women, 1922-1972 by Ailish McFadden
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller: A beautiful, slow-burning novel
She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark: Punchy, funny and unapologetically perturbing short stories
Miller’s painstaking attention to every movement of his characters’ minds, however dull or ugly, makes them real. The Land in Winter is a beautiful, slow-burning novel that exemplifies the act of imaginative empathy the form does best.
