The Booker Review

“The snow had changed things. They were in the world differently now, people understood that.”

I have always found that there is a magical quality about snow: it creates a liminal space out of the ordinary where everything stops, and somehow, there, life happens. People come together or are pushed apart.

Eric and Irene, Rita and Bill. Two couples living next door to each other in rural England, during the Big Freeze of 1963. How to describe them? Eric is the village doctor. His wife, Irene, is pregnant. Rita is also pregnant, and fascinating: a former club dancer who reads books on the farmhouse floor by the Aga, she hears voices, and is friends with the Black projectionist at a Bristol cinema. Her husband, Bill, tries to raise the money to be a commercial farmer (one of their cows is called Nefertiti), leading his single bull around the yard: “When they fell out of step he felt the sudden tug, as though he were holding a planet on a kite string.”

The Land in Winter is a story about big things found in small things. Pregnant women drinking Guiness together (a different time!), a man having an affair, a doctor on house calls. Life and death, but in a tiny way. There is nothing extraordinary about these lives, but somehow the story feels extraordinary.

As we follow these four protagonists in their turns, the narrative knits together and apart like train tracks, their stories sort of drifting along next to each other like snow flurries – sometimes meeting, sometimes parting. We follow these characters into the storm (Where is Bill going? Where is Irene going??), their progression gentle yet strangely intriguing.

These people seem stuck in the war somehow. Eric’s partner at the doctor surgery tries to process his Holocaust scars while at a party; Bill’s father repurposes his Anderson shelter as a home-made sauna; everyone remembers the Blitz. There is, too, a certain sense of Black Comedy – like the Peter Shaffer play – to the proceedings at times: a wife meets a mistress in a bedroom without recognising her; a woman fumbling around a literal School for the Blind in the dark. And the whole middle section of the book dispenses with chapter numbers: like snow drifts, we too are lost in the storm, in the blackout.

As Irene walks home from the village shop, she contemplates: “And then the child would grow old and die, and the child’s child, and so on until it all stopped, countless little lives, her own perfectly invisible among so many.” Yet she finds this thought comforting, and so do I.

Looking up at the stars – a cosmic ant – knowing that the biggest things you’ll ever experience are still tiny.