Audiobook review – “The Land in Winter” by Andrew Miller

It is late February and the weather has turned very cold, and very windy. The winter solstice is long past and the meteorological start of spring is only a little over a fortnight away, but in much of the UK right now there is the stark reminder that the winter is not yet done with us. Thus it was in Britain in the winter of 1962/63, a particularly harsh year where snow lay in deep drifts as late as mid-March. This is the setting of Andrew Miller’s tenth novel, a study of two couples, four individuals, trapped by the weather, as well as by social expectations, class and their own caged personalities. 

Eric Parry is the local doctor in a village in south-west England. He is married to Irene and they live in an attractive cottage on the outskirts of the village. Across the field from their home is a farm run by Bill Simmons. Bill is from a humble background but is Oxford-educated, and is a man who aspires to expand his farm, currently dairy-based with a single sullen bull, to something more modern and efficient and on a more industrial scale. He is married to Rita, a colourful but troubled woman, who has a past life in the bars and clubs of Bristol which she can never quite escape. The two women strike up an unlikely but easy friendship when they find that they are both pregnant and at around the same stage. In the 1960s in Britain young women were taught little about sex, married life and pregnancy and there is a kind of welcome relief in being able to compare notes. 

There is no such chemistry between Bill and Eric; they meet at a Christmas party that Irene hosts but it is clear that not only do they hail from different worlds, but that they are also prisoners of their background. What they have in common, however, is a profound sense of disappointment, of hopes dashed, a feeling that they will never be able to create the kind of life that they might have hoped for. At the start of the book this is not the case for the two women, Irene and Rita; they have hope, the optimism that comes with the burgeoning of new life inside them, although, as we will later discover, for Rita this brings back memories of past trauma. 

As Christmas passes and the familiar January gloom sets in, the snow lies ever deeper. The characters, having been thrown together initially, find themselves going in different directions, emotionally and geographically: Bill must visit his unrefined but cash-rich father to ask for money and Rita revisits past haunts and acquaintances in Bristol in an attempt to exorcise her demons. Eric and Irene become increasingly estranged and on a journey to visit her parents Irene becomes trapped on a broken down train and must take shelter in a nearby school for the blind where she is overwhelmed by a sense of isolation.

The breakdowns in the relationships and the individuals are slow, as life in the winter slows, almost to a frozen halt. We observe the gradual decline in slow motion. This is a powerful novel about the human condition that hits you almost without you realising it. The coldness of the world the characters inhabit is both the literal cold of the frozen landscape and the spiritual chill of England in the 1960s where status, the necessity of observing strict social rituals and behaviour and emotional illiteracy caused so much human misery. 

This was the perfect book for January and I listened to it on audio, read very well by the author. Recommended.