The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

How long can you carry on and pretend everything is right in a marriage, before it all comes crashing down?  

A village in the West Country, 1962: between treating terminally ill locals and being on call at the psychiatric hospital, GP Eric Parry is having an affair. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife, Irene, is trying to make the best of being a housewife, but feels isolated and out of place. They don’t talk much anymore. Bored of housework and leafing through the only-slightly-more interesting magazines sent by her sister in America, Irene befriends Rita Simmons, a former club dancer who misses her motley crew of friends from her former life. Her husband, Bill, is the son of a shady businessman and has never really fit in anywhere in his life. Bill doesn’t quite understand Rita, nor she him.  

Although the friendship between Irene and Rita provides a few scenes of genuine companionship and the joys of female friendship, it remains glaringly surface-level, and despite glimmers of hope, they never manage to be each other’s way out of despair. The monotony of their lives is striking: planning to make dolmades for her Boxing Day party seems to be the most interesting thing in Irene’s life for about a month. At the party, of course, is more of the unfulfillment that plagues the protagonists, as even Irene’s friend Tessa, who has been having affair with a married playwright whose wife apparently “doesn’t mind”, is tortured by her own actions.  

As dissatisfactions grow, melancholy mounts, and secrets threaten to come out, it’s hard to stop reading

The biggest moments of the book come in quiet, aptly frozen-over moments, during the “Big Freeze” of 1963. While Bill and Eric continue to have business to get on with (for Bill, his big plans for the farm, and for Eric, his patients and mistress) and can still get out and about, their pregnant wives are left at home, increasingly stranded and isolated, even from each other. As dissatisfactions grow, melancholy mounts, and secrets threaten to come out, it’s hard to stop reading, sensing it can’t be long until one, or both, does something drastic.  

The Land in Winter is really a story about four characters and two marriages, rather an incisive social commentary, even if their actions (particularly Irene and Eric’s) seem to be widespread amongst their friends and acquaintances. Neither a romance nor a tragedy, when something does break for each protagonist, the primary feeling is of uncertainty. 

Their isolation from human connection, whether due to physical weather phenomena, or simply from a lack of communication, even when living in the same house, leads to near-catastrophic consequences. As a result, as Miller steers us slowly towards a desolate, surreal ending that leaves you feeling slightly empty and confused, he succeeds in creating a treatise on the minutiae of the tensions of life and of marriage. The human effects of these are no different now than they were 60 years ago, and what they provoke in each of the four distinct protagonists will stay with me for a long while yet.