“The second novel syndrome” is an albatross around the neck of every budding writer fortunate enough to have had a hit with their first. Anne Michaels’s debut novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), was a particularly hard act to follow: shortlisted for the Giller Prize, winner of Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction and Ontario’s Trillium Award, published in thirty countries and staying on Canadian bestseller lists for more than two years, it was even made into a feature film.
Wrestling with that albatross may be one reason it has taken Michaels thirteen years to publish The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart), her second novel. So, hundreds of readers waiting with breathless anticipation; a novel thirteen years in gestation: is The Winter Vault worth the wait? Well, that depends on your taste for sentences like this one (found in the first half-dozen pages): “He spoke to the river, and he listened to the river, his hand on his wife in the place their child would some day open her, where her mouth had already so often spoken her, as if he could take the child’s name into his mouth from her body.” “He” is Avery Escher, a young engineer in Egypt with “his wife,” Jean, to oversee the dismantling of the temple at Abu Simbel in 1964, as the waters of the Nile rise behind the Aswan Dam. Avery and Jean—all the characters, in fact—spend a lot of time inside their own heads, and interact at a sorrowful, languid pace.
Individual passages in The Winter Vault are visually evocative, and the settings—Egypt during the Abu Simbel temple relocation, the shores of the St. Lawrence during the construction of the seaway, Warsaw during the occupation—have excellent dramatic potential, but I longed for a broader spectrum of emotions, and a sense that real, hot blood might run inside these people’s veins.
