Review: Vivien Horler

The Land in Winter, by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)

If you’ve ever lived through an English winter without central heating, this novel will strike a chord. The story told is of a West Country unendingly cold and unusually snowbound. Transport almost grinds to a halt, side roads are not gritted, trains stop running.

And in the midst of it all, four people, two very different young couples, live their lives in a village near Bristol in late 1962.

It took me back to a different time of my life  – 1975 – of paraffin heaters (and concern that you and your clothes would smell of it), two-bar electric heaters and the danger of sitting too close, gas heaters which called for a shilling for the meter, a lot of tinned food, the battle to keep warm indoors, the laxness  about about smoking and drinking and driving.

Then there was class, and race. ( I worked with with an unpleasant young man called Malcolm who referred to black people as nig-nogs, and was outraged that I, a white South African, didn’t agree with him.)

But all that’s not in the book, as such.

Eric Parry is a GP, married to Irene, who is pregnant. Across a field and through an orchard lives Bill, a young cattle farmer, and his wife Rita, also pregnant.

Both couples are fond of each other, but Eric has a secret – he is sleeping with one of his patients, distinctly upper-middle class and wealthy. Her home does have central heating (which he finds uncomfortably warm). She writes to him, saying things he finds scandalising (from a woman).

He knows he is treading on thin ice – often quite literally. This is, after all, 1962/1963, and it wasn’t done then – nor now – to sleep with a patient, let alone a woman who, like him, is married.

You might get away with it in the city, Eric muses, but not in a village.

Bill is the privately educated son of a Polish WW II refugee who has done well financially but who (embarrassingly) tries too hard to show how British he is. Bill has refused to join his father’s firm, instead buying a 32-acre farm, with about a dozen dairy cows and a bull. He loves his move.

But he knows he understands very little about his profession. He says if he were a sailor who knew as much about the sea as he does about farming, he’d have drowned by now.

His pretty wife Rita, who survived a dodgy childhood on her wits, used to work in a Bristol night club. Bill avoids knowing too much about her past or exactly what she did there. She is certainly not what one would expect of a farmer’s wife.

Rita is lonely. One day she walks across the snowy field to Irene’s house with a basket of eggs. Despite their different backgrounds, the women are neighbours, they are pregnant, and bored.

They hit it off. Impulsively Irene invites Rita and Bill to their Boxing Day party. Eric has already invited his lover, and her husband too.

The winter clamps down. Is there enough oil for the heating? Do they have enough wood for the fire? The village shop has shut – is there enough food? The milk guy can’t collect the churns, and Bill is reduced to pouring milk down the drain.

There is anger, resentment and muted fury. Things are picking up to a climax. But how will they handle it, these two very English, very different, couples?

Apart from the unrelenting grimness of the weather, this is a gently told story, shortlisted for the 2025Booker Prize. The judges referred to “a community precariously balanced between history and future: between the damage wrought by the [second world] war and the freedom for women that lies ahead”.