‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. This book is full of sorrowful people and places. Some of the places, the villages sacrificed to create the Aswan Dam and Canada’s St Lawrence Seaway, are literally drowned, leaving thousands homeless, while Warsaw, ruined in the second world war and rebuilt to a Disneyesque twin of its past self, is also submerged in loss. In and around these stories of large-scale dispossession and destruction weave personal losses — dead parents, a stillborn baby, an estranged daughter. The plot, like a magnet drawn to doom and mourning, follows Avery, an engineer charged with constructing the Seaway and relocating the temple of Abu Simbel during the building of the Aswan Dam, and his botanist wife Jean. When they separate, Jean becomes entangled with a Holocaust survivor named Lucjan and his memories of Warsaw.
Grief is always waiting to ambush people, especially at moments of joy. When Avery and Jean fall in love, he realises immediately that their happiness brings with it ‘inescapable sorrow’. A great building produces ‘a mortal sadness’ in Avery, and this feeling leads him to become an architect. His mother concludes that for better or worse, ‘love is a catastrophe’. Chief among these sad people is the motherless Jean, whose life, as she says, has formed around the absence of her beloved parent. This is a woman who is dismayed when her lover uses pages from old phone books as kindling (‘there’s a connection between those names that we’ll never understand’) and is certain that a used doll for sale in an Egyptian market means either ‘tragedy or unconscionable neglect’. (Maybe someone was just cleaning out an attic.)
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