The Winter Vault
by Anne Michaels
McClelland & Stewart (2009), 340 pp.

Thirteen years after the acclaimed Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels returns to the world of fiction with The Winter Vault, an evocative story of loss and redemption. Her first novel won accolades worldwide, and The Winter Vault will be measured against it, especially after such a long wait. I’m reluctant to review it on these terms, however; it is a thing of beauty unto itself, with pleasures and merits of its own.

The Winter Vault tells the story of Avery, a young engineer in the ’60s, part of a team responsible for relocating and thus preserving the sacred temples at Abu Simbel prior to the damming of the Nile River. While in Egypt, Avery’s young wife, Jean, pregnant with their first child, suffers a stillbirth. It is a personal tragedy of epic proportions, but one she nonetheless struggles to contextualize within the greater public loss — of villages, cultures, history — caused by the dam. The Winter Vault is characterized by Michaels’ signature prose, lyric and sensual, but she skilfully pulls back in the face of the lost baby, replacing her layered imagery with a few swift strokes. The result is effectively unsettling — we are left wondering what the inner landscape of such a troubling experience might look like — and when the book returns to this crucial event in the final, brief chapter, the effect is heart wrenching.

The second part of the novel focuses on Jean’s new friendship with Lucjan, a Polish immigrant she meets serendipitously during a hiatus from Avery. Their intimacy primarily takes the form of conversation. There are long, meandering pages during which Lucjan tells Jean about his childhood after the war, about his own understanding of what it is to suffer. The characters in The Winter Vault live in a world of intense emotion and ethical grappling, “an engagement of mind…almost shattering in its pleasure.” Freed from the shackles of groceries and telephone bills, their essences appear distilled or concentrated on the page. Luckily this paring down, under Michaels’ sure hand, makes them not less human but more so. Her gift for subtlety reverberates throughout the rest of the book as well. The temple, for example — broken into blocks, moved piece by piece, creating a perfect replica, with something nonetheless lost in the process — there’s a metaphor here, but one is hard pressed to say exactly what. The temple could be Jean and Avery’s relationship, the perfect past compared with the invisibly fractured future; it could likewise be the universal loss compared with the individual (the smaller displacement of Jean’s mother’s garden, in jars on the floor of her apartment). The temple is in fact both of these things, and neither. The irreducibility of the world to human terms, Michaels seems to imply, is at the core of its inherent value.

Like Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault deserves to be savoured on the tongue, like the date trees on the banks of the Nile at summer’s end, the “sweetness reaching its deepest concentration.”

More book reviews: Eric Siblin’s The Cello Suites