Tag: snow

5 books, Book lists

5 books about snow

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5-books-200pixSo, here in London, after a deliciously mild winter, it decided to snow last night. I quite like snow when it first arrives — the magic appearance of all those little snowflakes falling from the sky and turning everything they fall on a pristine white makes my heart leap — but then, fickle contrarian that I am, I quickly grow sick of it. Too slippy to walk on, too cold, too ugly when it turns slushy and grey, and too difficult for London Transport to deal with!

That’s why I think the best kind of snow is the snow you find in a good novel. That way you can see it in your imagination but you don’t have to deal with the reality of it.

Here’s five snow novels arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. Hyperlinks take you to my review.

Until-thy-wrath-be-passed

‘Until Thy Wrath Be Past’ by Åsa Larsson (2011)

Many Scandinavian novels feature snowy settings, but the wintry landscape is a key component in Åsa Larsson’s haunting crime thriller. Set in rural Sweden, it tells the story of two teenage lovers who disappear while diving in a secluded —and frozen — lake one winter’s day. When the body of one of them resurfaces during the springtime thaw an investigation is launched into her death and a search begins for her companion. The fast-paced narrative, which is set over three weeks, is filled with moody descriptions of the landscape emerging from the big sleep of winter. Try not to shiver.

Snow

‘Snow’ by Orhan Pamuk (2004)*

This political thriller set in the eastern Turkish city of Kars (kar is Turkish for ‘snow’) is a deeply atmospheric read. In telling the story of a Turkish exile returning to his homeland in order to report on a spate of suicides, Pamuk does a terrific turn at describing the political, cultural and religious tensions of the country. And he writes so evocatively of the weather — heavy snow cuts off Kars for several days — that you feel like you’re actually in Kars, stuck in a remote location cut off from the rest of the world, and the best you can do is hunker down and try not to shudder from the imagined cold.

Tenderness

‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ by Stef Penney (2007)

The rugged beauty of the Canadian wilderness in the late 19th century is the setting of this award-winning novel, which is part crime fiction, part epic adventure tale. In a frontier township on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a French settler is found murdered in his shack. His neighbour decides to track down the killer when her teenage son is accused of the crime. What follows is a fast-paced cat-and-mouse hunt across some of the most isolated, and dangerous, terrain on earth. Penney’s descriptions of the landscape, the coldness — and the fear — are pitch-perfect. 

GlassFeet

‘The Girl With Glass Feet’ by Ali Shaw (2009)

Ali Shaw’s debut novel is like a modern day fairy tale. It is set on a fictional wind-swept and snowbound island, St Hauda, where strange and unusual events take place. Ida MacLaird visits the island in search of a cure for a mysterious illness that turns her feet into glass. She falls in love with a young man who helps her on her mission. But it is the descriptions of the beautiful snowy landscape, the fragility of which mirrors Ida’s painful condition, that makes the story an evocative, if occasionally oblique, read.

Touch

Touch by Alexi Zentner (2011)

Set in the icy wilderness of Canada in the early 20th century, this Giller-longlisted tale is ripe with adventure, hardship, tragedy, murder, romance — and dark fairy tales. Told in the first person by a 40-year-old Anglican priest returning to the place of his birth, it spans three generations of a fascinating family history, beginning with the founding of a frontier town. The ferocious weather, including a 30-foot snow storm in which the town’s residents are cut off from civilisation for one long, unbearable winter, plays a key part in the story. Zentner’s descriptions are eloquent and often poignant.

Have you read any of these books? Can you recommend any other snowy reads?

* Not reviewed on the blog.

Alexi Zentner, Author, Book review, Canada, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Vintage Digital

‘Touch’ by Alexi Zentner

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Touch

Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 272 pages; 2011.

Good old-fashioned storytelling lies at the heart of Touch by first-time author Alexi Zentner. Set in the icy wilderness of Canada in the early 20th century, the tale is ripe with adventure, hardship, tragedy, murder, romance — and dark fairy tales. Oh, and there’s a teensy bit of cannibalism, too.

Spanning several generations, cut and spliced into interwoven narratives that jump backwards and forwards in time, Touch is told in the first person by Stephen, a 40-year-old Anglican priest returning to the place of his birth, where he is to take over the local church from his step-father. Or, as Stephen puts it, “to live in the shadows of my father and my grandfather in a logging town that has been drained of young men headed off to fight in Europe for the second war of my lifetime”.

As it happens, Stephen’s elderly mother is on her death bed, and he sets to work writing her eulogy for her up-coming funeral. As he sifts through his memories, trying to find the right words to write, he recalls events — and stories — from his own life and the lives of his relatives.

Chief among these is the death of his father and his younger sister, Marie, when he was 11 years old. This tragedy had a marked impact on Stephen’s life, but the return of his grandfather, Jeannot, left just as much of an impression.

In fact, Jeannot is the patriarchal heart of this novel, the character whom everything ultimately revolves. It is the stories he has passed down, across the generations, that Stephen remembers, and, in turn, shares with us, the reader.

Legend has it that a teenage Jeannot — who “had quit his training for the Catholic priesthood, left the orphanage, and traveled across the whole of Rupert’s Land”  — founded the town of Sawgamet when his dog discovered a nugget of gold as they were passing through. This sparked a gold rush and the town quickly grew in size. But Jeannot was clever and knowing that the gold would eventually run out, he set up a lumber company that helped cement his fortune.

But life in this frontier town was dangerous:

Men I knew had been killed by falling trees, had bled to death when a dull ax bounced off a log and into their leg, had been crushed when logs rolled off carts, had drowned in the river during a float. Every year a man came back dead or maimed.

Nature, too, is ominous, and the breadth and scale of the landscape belittles its new human residents — and this scares them:

My chest started to pound with urgency. I was thinking of all of the things that might lurk — the dangers of the woods: bears and wolves — but I had not expected it to be something as innocuous as the mountains that always loomed above.

And if it is not the mountains or the never-ending wall of trees, the woods are also populated with dangerous creatures. In Australia, we contend with snakes and spiders and the mythological bunyip, but in the Canadian wilderness there are bears and more — the wehtiko (“a man turned into a monster as a punishment for cannibalism”), the ijirait (also known as shape-shifters), the loup-garou (werewolf), the mahaha (a demon, from Inuit mythology), the adlet (a blood-drinking monster, also from Inuit mythology) and the qallupilluit (also known as a sea witch).

It is testament to Zentner’s writing ability that he makes these creatures seem wholly believable. I had a heart-hammering moment when Stephen recalls an incident from his childhood in which he encounters a qallupilluit:

I looked up to see the creature — I could not tell if it was a man or a woman — standing above me, its scaly skin fish-pale and bumped, mottled like it had been submerged under the water for a very long time. It had a large pouch on its back and stringy hair, and despite its milk-white eyes, the creature stared directly at me. The creature took a step toward me with unmistakable menace; it grabbed my wrist and dove into the water, pulling me after it.

The ferocious weather is a central — and dangerous — character in this novel, too. There’s a 30-foot snow storm in which Sawgamet’s residents are cut off from civilisation for one long, unbearable winter. But there is beauty in the weather, too, as this poignant paragraph demonstrates:

There is something about clear nights in the winter, the perfection of snow and ice in the light from the stars and the moon that always reminds me of the existence of God. When it’s cold enough, the sky seems to empty, and there is an infinite darkness, a sense that there is something unreachable and never-ending, something past the idea of heaven.

As you would expect from a novel narrated by a priest, there is a (slight) religious element to the story. Stephen has been damaged by events, not just the loss of family members, but of his unspoken time “behind the lines as a chaplain when we took Vimy Ridge and held Hill 70” during the Great War. Despite this, he claims that “my whole life is, in some ways, about faith”. Indeed, it is the stories of his family’s history and of the town’s history that he takes on faith — he doesn’t question their validity, although he is aware that there are gaps in his knowledge “that I cannot fill with anything other than speculation”.

In part, Touch is about loss — loss of family, loss of property, loss of life — but mostly it is about how we separate myth from reality, fact from fiction, experience from logic, and faith from doubt. How do we unravel the stories from the past in order to understand the stories we are writing for the future?

And while the supernatural elements in the text occasionally troubled me — there’s a touch of magic realism at work here, and I’m not much of a fan of that genre — I loved the fairy tale element. There is an especially compelling story about a golden caribou (depicted on the cover of the UK edition) that will stay with me forever.

On the whole, I have to say I loved this book. It is a gorgeously absorbing novel, perfect to curl up with in your favourite reading place.

Touch has been longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize. For another take on this novel please see KevinfromCanada’s review.

Author, Book review, Canada, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Publisher, Quercus, Setting, Stef Penney

‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ by Stef Penney

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Tenderness

Fiction – paperback; Quercus; 466 pages; 2007.

When Laurent Jammet, a French settler, is found brutally murdered in his shack in the frontier township of Dove River a whole chain of events is set in motion.

It is 1867 and life on the edge of the Canadian wilderness is tough. It’s even tougher when you decide to hunt the killer by trekking through the Arctic snow, which is what Mrs Ross, an immigrant from the Scottish Highlands, decides to do when her teenage son, Francis, is accused of the crime.

But this is more than one woman’s tale. There are stories within stories in this cleverly crafted novel, which scored Stef Penney the Costa Book of the Year in 2006. We meet a whole cast of divergent characters, each of whom has their own reasons for finding the murderer.

There is Parker, a half-breed Cherokee, who is arrested for the crime but later escapes and helps Mrs Ross on her trek; John Scott, a wealthy landowner who runs a dry goods store, and is privy to local gossip; Andrew Knox, the elderly magistrate, and his two daughters, the beautiful Susannah and the plain but intelligent Maria; Donald Moody, the young somewhat green Company employee who is charged with investigating the crime, along with his colleagues Mackinley, the factor of Fort Edgar, who has a penchant for taking the law into his own hands, and Jacob, a half-breed who serves as Donald’s bodyguard; and Thomas Sturrock, an old journalist, who once befriended the dead man and seems intent on finding a special bone carving that he feels should be willed to him.

To complicate matters further, there are two sub-plots running throughout this book. The first involves the mysterious disappearance of two teenage girls 15 years earlier. Amy and Eve Seton, daughters of the local doctor, went on a picnic with their friend Cathy but were never seen again. The second involves Line, a Norwegian immigrant, who lives in a religious settlement north of Dove River but wishes to escape with her children and her lover.

All these characters and storylines combine to create a rather powerful if somewhat disjointed narrative. This is further complicated by Mrs Ross telling her side of the story in first-person while everyone else takes it in turn, chapter by chapter, to have theirs narrated in the third-person. I’m not sure this narrative approach entirely works, especially when it comes to the climax which is told from so many points of view it loses its immediate impact.

The greatest failing, in my opinion, is the lack of resolution in several narrative threads, which weakens the novel and leaves the reader slightly frustrated when they finally get to the last page.

But Penney’s writing style, on a whole, is confident and perfectly captures frontier life. Her descriptions of the snowy wilderness and the resultant isolation and loneliness are pitch-perfect. Perhaps that’s why this book has been so lauded, as you’d be hard pressed to read another debut novel that so expertly conveys an unfamiliar world in such an immediately familiar way. But personally, I just felt The Tenderness of Wolves lacked the narrative hook to keep me reading — and judging by all the glowing accounts online I may, just possibly, be the only person to feel this way.