By Anne Michaels
Bloomsbury, £16.99
Fans of Anne Michael’s have been holding their breath for a decade. Published in 1997, her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, won her several international awards as well as rapturous and near-universal critical acclaim. It holds an extraordinary position in contemporary fiction, spoken of with reverence — those who loved it felt changed by it.
Of course, there were those who could not see what all the fuss was about, and many who found her highly crafted, poetic language impenetrable. But, to her devotees, Fugitive Pieces was transcendent.
Michaels created an instant following with the weight and beauty of her prose in that single book. So, unsurprisingly, expectations are high for her second, appearing, as it does, 12 years after the first.
The Winter Vault takes us to Egypt in 1964, where a young engineer, Avery, and his botanist wife, Jean, are beginning their married life together, transplanted from Canada so that Avery can supervise the relocation of the great temple at Abu Simbel.
A vast team of builders and craftsmen is slicing up each monument with precision and moving the temple 60 feet higher, rescuing it from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam: “If one could be fooled into believing he stood in the original site, by then subsumed by the waters of the dam, then everything about the temple would have become a deceit. Only his wife understood: that somehow holiness was escaping under their drills… that by the time Abu Simbel was finally re-erected, it would no longer be a temple.”
Also forcibly relocated are the hundreds of Nubians living in villages along the Nile whose new homes will not be equipped with the electricity generated by the dam that necessitated flooding their old homes in the first place.
Jean has her own personal connection to dams, to flooded villages and re-directed rivers, and she and Avery speak to one another in their own languages — he in the shaping of space: planes, lines and tonnes of stone, and she in seedlings and soil and germinations. Each is defined by his or her respective passions, and passion for the other.
That neither truly convinces as a character will not matter to readers who turn to Michaels for the way in which she explores such ideas and definitions, but it is true to say that Avery and Jean do not come to life in the way that Jakob and Athos did in Fugitive Pieces.
This matters much less than it would in the hands of another author. Michaels is inescapably a poet and, whatever she might claim (“it’s not heightened, it’s plain!” she protested about her prose in an interview in The Guardian), anyone who has read her will know that her language is rich and dense, almost every sentence heavy with thought, allegory and image.
This second novel does take time to get going, but anyone who’s waited for 12 years understands the need for patience. It’s not Fugitive Pieces, but it’s almost there.
Francesca Segal is a freelance writer