The Winter Vault transcends

THE WINTER VAULT by Anne Michaels [Bloomsbury]

This is the review I wrote for Your Weekend magazine's Anzac Day 2009 edition. I found it in the letterbox and took it with me rolled up in my bag to read while I waited for the ceremony at the local Anzac memorial to begin. An apposite book for that particular day and for me, still fresh from a winter in Canada.


Anne Michaels’ writing finds the epic in the intimate and the intimate in the epic in a way that is both astonishing and demanding. At the start of The Winter Vault, Avery is an engineer in 1960s Egypt involved with moving the temples of Abu Simbel so they aren’t drowned by the new Aswan Dam. While local Nubians are forced to leave their dead to drown in ancient graveyards and move to mock villages where they have no history, the temples are moved stone by stone to a place without meaning.

Avery and his new wife, Jean, watch this exodus from their houseboat, exploring each other’s bodies and trading family histories. Among other things they talk about the work Avery did back in Canada when he presided over villages being shifted and drowned to make way for the St Lawrence Seaway. This is a world where people and history are dispossessed by cataclysmic man-made events, and Avery and Jean move inside it unsure what it is they possess, especially when faced with a tragedy of their own.



The neutral authorial voice that characterises this novel shifts back and forwards from factual descriptions of the two river projects to intimate moments more akin to prose poems. These two elements lap at each other to the point that when the statue of Ramses is sawed through in preparation for moving, Jean expects to see blood.



Back in Toronto separated from Avery now, Jean meets a man who helped rebuild Warsaw following the devastation of World War II. The novel focuses then on the stories Lucjan has to tell about his own experience of dislocation and the agony of building a replica city on the bones of the dead. The ‘pact of words’ begun in the desert continues with Jean and Lucjan’s encounters in bed.



Meanwhile, Jean plunges her hands into the frozen Canadian soil and tries to create a garden from her late Mother’s cuttings: transplants too. This is where we hear about the winter vault which provides storage for bodies through the Canadian winter until the earth defrosts enough to allow them to be buried. It is a place of silent ceremony, where death itself is delayed, and somehow made manageable.



Michaels knows about the importance of taking time. At 50, she’s produced three poetry collections and two novels: the Orange award-winning Fugitive Pieces was published twelve years ago. In many ways, Michaels writes fiction like her compatriot Michael Ondaatje – also a poet. There’s the same disjointedness in the narrative, and the concise, freighted language which gives remarkable insights into the human condition. Winter Vault is not always an easy book to engage with, but patience renders up something utterly transcendent.

This ain't a song for the broken-hearted.

We were on the highway from Quebec City to Ottawa. We'd been driving for hours and for much of the way we'd been in the middle of a blizzard which had whited out everything except the power poles. Black ice had made the Cherokee rental car slide badly but Alastair with his Indiana Jones hat on had wrestled it back each time, and Caroline had kept things calm with that gentle Canadian way she talks about things, and every now and then handed out homemade cookies. Gaby and Issy screamed at the top of their lungs when the car aquaplaned and slept through the rest of it, Nicky snapped away with Caroline's camera (odd shots of dilated nostrils and the whites of eyes), and I just did a lot of talking, I guess, and filming snow-ploughs and glimpses of men fishing through the ice.

After four hours or so, we were nearly on the home stretch - tired, cramped, bored. I slid an unknown CD into the slot and pressed play.... and up it came: the rough-edged listen-to-me sound of Bon Jovi, and a song that is more than a song it's an anthem about being well and truly alive despite life's vicissitudes. And we all sang along, or rather shouted, despite the ice and the under-pressurised wheels of the car, despite the bitter cold, despite the distance travelled. And we played it over and over and over until our voices were hoarse, too, and - adapting a line from Elizabeth Bishop - victory filled up that rented car.

So often we look back and see things differently given what has happened in the meantime. But how can that be? Each one of us experienced the drive from Quebec City differently, there's no doubt, but we all felt - I think - that we were on a mission, brought together because some of us were family and the rest of us cared enough. When Bon Jovi played in the car that day, the last vestiges of whatever it was that separated us were forced out of the window and we became something overlapping and noisy: that open highway, Bon Jovi talks about. We can't ever go back to the trip in mid January 2009 with the blizzard and It's my Life blaring, but each time I play the song, I am inside the car again, feeling the marvellous thing we became; and it seems to me that the experience is independent of us all, and of all we've done since and will continue to do. Complete and unassailable. Alastair, Caroline, Gaby, Issy, Nicky, me and Bon Jovi.

I dedicate the song to Alastair and Caroline for all those reasons.

The Wonder of Alice

I am still in Canada - until tomorrow. And I am still reading the inimitable Canadian author Alice Munro who recently hung up her skates because she'd apparently said all she had to say. Here's a slice from her short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage which I bought the other day in an Ottawa bookstore:

'I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida - not of that in particular - but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories, The cries of the crowd came to me like heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.

This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.' Family Furnishings

In the story Family Furnishings, Munro has a character who comes to the point where she knows she wants to write. The description above is what she feels writing is, and being a writer is. It could be my thoughts on the matter.

This is the first time I've read Munro's work in Canada. Suddenly, stories which mention Ottawa or Quebec or the thawing of the snow or a field of corn resonate differently, feel different. Even the voices I'm reading sound different here.

One day they were out in the fields of stubble playing with my father's dog whose name was Mack. That day the sun shone, but did not melt the ice in the furrows. They stomped on the ice and enjoyed the crackle underfoot. Family Furnishings

There was no fence. The cornfield just petered out into the yard. She walked straight ahead into it, onto the narrow path her arms like streamers of oilcloth. She had to remove her hat so they would not knock it off. Each stalk had its cob, like a baby in a shroud. There was a strong, almost sickening smell of vegetable growth, of green starch and hot sap. Floating Bridge

What hasn't changed is the way Munro is able to write the fine filigrees of feeling, and the equally fine shifts in those feelings. The way she makes a feeling an event, an event a place, a place a person, a person a feeling, and on it goes.

It seemed to her this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving , a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied. Floating Bridge

Munro's good on kisses. She had a great kiss in her collection Runaway that helped me write a kiss in The Blue. She also knows just when to open something out, to let it breathe and gain weight, and be suddenly bigger than, weightier than the sum of its parts.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given. Floating Bridge

And all this because Munro must listen to those distant sounds of 'inhuman assent and lamentation', really listen, and then suddenly - like a insect-eating bird - grab them from the air. Swallow that humming. Make it into words.

One guesses that for the character of the writer in Family Furnishings she listened to a sound already swallowed.

And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself...

To finish with, here are some photographs from the Rideau Canal today in Ottawa. Minus 34 degrees C with the wind chill and yet there were so many people skating on the ice, all ages and backgrounds (it's free), wrapped up tight, together.

There isn't much noise except the scratch of the skates, the odd snatch of conversation in English and French. But there is that wave of sound Munro talks about - the sound humanity makes at its best one cold Saturday out on a canal.

O Canada

Bienvenue a Quebec City. On the way there by car from Ottawa, the traffic signs said: 'froid intense' and the road was 'glissant'. It was in the minus 30s and a blizzard hit us on the way home, but our first day shone brilliantly in this 400-year-old fortified city on the narrowest part of the St Laurence River.

Ah yes, books. A whole bookstore full of French books including Quebecois Literature. I was looking for a novel by a former sister-in-law and another by a nephew. Neither were there. Meanwhile, I've started on Carol Shields' novel Unless. Good to read a Canadian.

Back to Ottawa.We've been very domestic and 'family' here since arriving with the only outing a spot of shopping at the local mall. We hit the city centre tomorrow. Maybe try some ice skating on the canal or a snowball fight?
A demain.