Venturing out into dazzling morning light, he would have thought he had woken in a kind of heaven, were it not for the lingering sense that hell was flickering just out of sight, whichever way he turned his gaze. He knew he had been in hell. [p. 3]
In the first years of the twentieth century, Harry Cane marries a pleasant woman, fathers a daughter, and enjoys a quiet, well-appointed life. He realises that he is attracted to men, and has a brief passionate affair with an elocution teacher, which ends in blackmail and rejection. His wife's family encourage him to leave the country: he buys a bottle of laudanum, but after one sip is drawn to an advertisement for emigration to Canada. A man can be granted 160 acres without any financial outlay if he cultivates a quarter of that land in three years. Harry, who has never done a day's work in his life, signs up, and tells his family that he's going to seek his fortune.
He will never see any of them again.
Life in Canada is harsh, but Harry finds himself equal to it -- though perhaps not to the company of Troels Munck, who takes an unpleasant interest in Harry. Munck attacks Harry's friend Petra (the sister of his new lover), heralding another new chapter in Harry's life. There is love and loss, war and the flu pandemic: our first meeting with Harry finds him in a kind of asylum, a place of refuge, after he has been arrested for lewd behaviour. As his past is revealed, it seems easy to guess what form this behaviour might have taken: my assumptions, however, were wrong.
A Place Called Winter is beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of landscape and of the minutae of life as a settler. I'm still not sure that I liked it. The women -- who are really not the point of the novel -- seem to get quite a rough deal, and the most interesting character, a 'two-souled' Plains Cree Indian who goes by the name Ursula at the asylum, is packed off without any sense of closure. (Harry's response to seeing Ursula in male clothing: "It was disconcerting to feel a fluttering of desire for this man he had felt only respect for as a woman." [p. 185]). I'm not sure that I liked the novel, but I'm still thinking about it.
I've discovered that the novel is based, in part, on Gale's own family history: "[Gale] took the decision to honour such facts as he had pieced together but to concoct an emotionally satisfactory answer to the mystery by projecting his own personality back into his ancestor’s situation. He wanted to come up with a story which it was quite believable his grandmother would never have been allowed to find out for herself." It may not be a true story about that particular man, but Gale creates a credible scenario, with prejudice and contempt that seem horrendous now but must have been all too common in that era.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 02 SEP 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment