Homage or Hoax?

In interviews regarding her new novel, The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels sets the stakes high for herself and her readers. Describing her goals to Eva Tihanyi, she expressed the need “to learn how to live better as a human being. To find a way to think about things that are essential to being a conscious, moral person.” There should result, she said, “a place for the reader inside these discussions. I think that often we live by a mess of generalities and untested beliefs. We need to pay attention, to be more precise about what we think and say. And it’s not enough to do no harm. One has to do good.” Ethical demands, then, motivate creator and audience as each addresses the historical and personal narratives offered in Michaels’s follow-up to her 1996 success Fugitive Pieces.

The historical context explored in The Winter Vault is complex and geographically diverse. The book begins with a meditation on the environmental and cultural calamity brought about as the reservoir of the Aswan High Dam begins to fill in 1964. It opens with a cinematic tableau of engineers dismantling Ramses’ temple at Abu Simbel, in order to reconstruct it on higher ground. In the shadow of this work, the book’s characters are intensely engaged with the impact on Nubian villages that must be moved from the Nile’s riverbed. “Nubia,” Michaels writes, “was a country without boundaries, currency, or government, yet an ancient country nonetheless.” Sudanese census takers study one area to be flooded and count “27 villages, 70,000 souls; 7,676 houses” and many thousands of goats, sheep and cattle that will be transported from the flood zone.

We view these events from the point of view of Avery Escher and Jean Shaw, a young couple who make their temporary home on a houseboat while Avery, who is employed as an engineer on the dam project, is increasingly burdened by the “feeling they were tampering with an intangible force, undoing something that could never be produced or reproduced again.” It is this premonition that underwrites much of The Winter Vault, even as the narrative shifts to scenarios set along the St. Lawrence River and in post–World War Two Warsaw. Just as Avery’s sense of his work’s impact is informed by the Aswan project, so his wife’s identity is entangled with the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959. This latter undertaking resulted in a smaller but similar swamping of communal life along the Canadian river valley:

Avery and Jean, initially a couple at great ease with each other, suffer the collateral damage of these immense projects and drift far enough apart to allow a third key character to enter Jean’s life. This is Lucjan, a Warsaw-born artist who shares his bohemian Toronto existence with her. Their late-night rambles and lovers’ talk provide Michaels with an opportunity to investigate a corner of contemporary Toronto and the story of Warsaw’s reconstruction after the Germans’ total destruction of the city. Toronto, it might be argued, is the setting least directly linked to the novel’s key thematic concerns. These Michaels has defined as “the way we forget historic events … The whole complicated idea of rebuilding after devastation—what does it mean to create an exact replica? Is it a kind of remembering or a kind of forgetting?” Alongside these concerns, Toronto is a place of respite, of domestic calm. For Lucjan and his compatriots it is a large open-air workshop where they pursue their artistic and artisanal goals almost entirely without an audience. From Lucjan’s coach house home, he and Jean set out for the city’s abandoned and wild places: “an alternate city of laneways—sheet metal garages and wooden sheds. They sought out all the streets leading to railway tracks, where night trains rattled back-garden fences and the scream of light tore across bedroom walls.”

In her time spent with Lucjan, Jean is surrounded by émigrés, and her experience of Canadian urban life is influenced by their narratives of catastrophe, loss and exile. Toronto, in The Winter Vault, is figured like the slim waist of an hourglass, with the wounds of the past and the possibilities of the future flaring away from it in opposite directions.

Since it is Lucjan’s portrayal of Warsaw that completes the novel and not Avery’s entanglement at Aswan, it is Lucjan’s outlook that ultimately guides the reader’s sense of Michaels’s goals. The outcome at Aswan is unambiguous: in the name of progress, a deep and ancient cultural presence on the land is swept away. In light of this, the rebuilding of the temple at Abu Simbel can be seen as a fraud, a way of replicating, in a meaningless touristic way, an aspect of what has been destroyed. The rebuilding of Warsaw’s old town has more complex resonances, although Jean points to the “false consolation” inherent in both undertakings. Somehow, this predicament of irony or ambiguity is less relevant in connection with Warsaw, where the Poles rebuilt the heart of their capital as the first meaningful counterstroke in response to the German effort to destroy Polish society. Warsaw today is a remarkable field of remembering, with plaques decorating one rebuilt building after another, denoting when the original was built, when the Germans destroyed it and during which years it was reconstructed. There is a dark narrative underlying this, which relates to the willingness on the part of Polish officials to pull down parts of lesser old towns in other damaged centres in order to meet the need for building materials in Warsaw.

Lucjan’s (and Michaels’s) dark reading of this project fits with the overall sepulchral feel of The Winter Vault. Late in the novel its unusual title becomes clear in relation to burial practice; the breakdown in Avery and Jean’s intimacy follows the death of an infant; contemporary Warsaw, with the ghetto a memory at its centre, is understood to cover the unburied dead; and as water floods the Nubian and Laurentian river valleys, the image of the dead rising from their tombs is a repeated motif.

One of Michaels’s notable triumphs is her ability to seed her narrative with detailed images, which are repeated and varied in their presentation, in the way that a musical score makes use of repeated motifs and flourishes. Her characters appear, nestled in these iconic, often cinematic scenes, and it is in this way that Jean, Avery and Lucjan inform the broader historical tableaux that are the centrepieces of The Winter Vault. It does not give away the novel’s conclusion to quote one of these, from late in the book, as Jean and her companion travel