Winter's Tale

Mark Helprin wrote “Winter’s Tale” in the years before I was born and it entered the world in 1983, as did I. But whereas I’ve had to wait 22 years for my moment in the spotlight (and, let me tell you, being a FantasyBookSpot Associate Reviewer is a glamorous business *wink*), “Winter’s Tale” has hogged the critical airwaves (and the bestseller lists) since the beginning. Such was its effect that the New York Time’s book reviewer, beyond ecstatic, declared: “I find myself nervous, to a degree I don’t recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance.” Having turned the final page myself I recognise this as an understandable mixture of praise and awe: “Winter’s Tale” is, undeniably, a tour de force of fantastical creation, a “classic” of the genre (as SFSite puts it). And Helprin is an erudite and gifted author, a lucid conjuror, a supreme lyricist with a daunting word-hoard at his disposal. It is very easy to feel daunted. But still, this most lauded novel is not above criticism, even mine, and indeed, it is deeply flawed even unto its own brilliance.

Set in an alternate New York beleaguered by interminable winters, clarified by sieges of snow and ice and bordered by an inexplicable wall of cloud, the novel centres on Peter Lake, mechanic and burglar. Some time around the turn of the nineteenth century, Lake, an orphaned immigrant washed up on the banks of the Hudson, meets dying visionary Beverley Penn while burgling her father’s fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Without further ado and possessed by some esoteric spirit of coincidence, he falls madly and truly in love with her. Peter, however, is also a fugitive, on the run from diminutive crime moghul Pearly Soames, and, a short time later (after Beverley’s death) finds himself engaged in a series of chases across the city that bring him into sudden contact with the equally mysterious white horse, Athansar. These two connections, intimate meetings of body, mind and soul, change the trajectory of his life and propel him through an entire century into the year 2000 (a future 17 years distance when Helprin was writing), where his role in changing and redeeming the whole winter-bound city of New York slowly becomes clear. A number of other, eventually related narratives interweave with Lake’s – San Franciscan Hardesty Marratta renounces his fortune after his father’s death and goes off in search of the truly “just city”; Virginia Gamely and her son Martin leave the mythical environs of the Lake of the Coheeries for New York; Asbury Gunwillow looses his brother at sea after ignoring a promise to visit the winter city; Christiana Friebourg, drawn into the city’s dark places by business magnate Marcel Apand, dreams of the white horse she saw fall from the sky as a child; New York’s two rival newspapers The Sun (run by Beverley’s surviving brother Henry Penn) and the The Ghost battle to get the latest scoops; and Jackson Mead, a nineteenth century engineer, dreams of building a bridge like no other…

First it seems important to make clear something that characterises the whole novel, and transforms it utterly: Helprin’s alchemical grasp of the English language. One of the novel’s peripheral characters, Mrs Gamely, is so verbose that even her own daughter needs a dictionary to understand her, and its difficult not to read this as a self-reflexive parody on Helprin’s part. He is the master of the well-formed sentence and can generate a weird simile or metaphor for every occasion, thus smelting the real and the fantastic (very much in the style of the Colombian fantasist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez). And, more impressively, he can suggest the metaphysical and the visceral in the same few words, and create extraordinary philosophical discourses. The shorter, cryptic chapters that open each section of the novel are representative:
“Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is – and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought back together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and when all this perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.” (p402)

Nevertheless, the opening 200 pages, which focus on Peter Lake, are infinitely superior to the middle 400, which introduce the other narratives and have a tendency toward bagginess and chaos. In the early stages of the novel Helprin keeps his garrulousness under some kind of control, using literary flourishes sparingly and to good effect. In the middle, and into the latter, third, however, he forgoes this careful editing and spews similes, metaphors and authoritative statements like a geyser, often loosing the essential thread of the story in the process. Still, passages of great brilliance frequently break through and encourage the reader onwards.

The sheer magnitude of the work is evident in the above – this is a novel, rooted in fantasy and filled with “narrative high-jinks” and comic flights, but essentially a moral and ethical parable dealing in ideas of time, justice, salvation and redemption. This strikes the reader primarily through the impossibly full vision of the narrator. Helprin uses an omnipotent, God-like eye throughout, which opens windows in psyches – human and animal – with surgical precision, and slips from one scene and one individual to another with a pointed awareness. You’re left in no doubt: there is some hand moving Helprin’s characters behind the scenes, some force which penetrates flesh and time to the get to the centre of his world. The narrator, who controls the unfurling story completely, engineering meetings and revelations in all the right places, represents that force. So much so that, in many ways, the characters of “Winter’s Tale” have no independent agency: they are ruthlessly marshalled to the higher power’s requirements. Other reviews have picked up on this, noting that Helprin’s characters are eloquently described but essentially lacking in any spontaneity or creativity – they’re shaped like men but used as pawns. And, more often than not, they know it, admitting that their role in things is “beginning” or “done” and that they have acted as simple composite cogwheels in a drive towards a pre-ordained ending. Indeed, only New York city itself has real independent character. A huge, swarming beast, described as both organic and mechanical, and coming alive at points, it strikes the same apocalyptic chords as Mieville’s New Crobuzon.

It is impossible not the return to Helprin’s central moral and ethical concerns. A relatively high status Republican speech-writer and, it follows, a political conservative, he has some interesting ideas about media, urban renewal and rich vs. poor which I won’t venture into (or pretend to wholly comprehend). What is perhaps most controversial for a liberal like myself is the self-evident use he makes of the Gospel Story and that old chestnut the “American Dream” – “Winter’s Tale” can be read as a kind of Passion/Annunciation story mixed with patriotic parable. Its notable that the New York Helprin describes is a virtual city-state, cut off from central government and only connected to the dealings of the outside world through trade and immigration. It is an entirely insulated place, existing outside the established networks of geographical time and space, and notoriously difficult to get in and out of. In other words, it is a mythical New York – an imaginative and magical body on which Helprin can play any number of cosmic themes. And they are cosmic, and also polemical in their way. The “just city” is made, not through politics and hard work, but through simple belief in the power of sacrifice and tricks of light, by ascribing to the realities of heaven on the horizon. Whether this is corrupting or a “flaw” is questionable, and whether you ascribe to the doctrine that faith (in anything) is an anecdote to our problems is a matter of personal opinion. For my own part, I think that stories like Helprin’s have their place in keying into the mythical narratives that lift us above the mundane and into the realms of hopeful possibility. After all isn’t this partly what fantasy is for? Despite its flaws – its over-verboseness, its baggy middle sections, its occasionally wooden characters - “Winter’s Tale” does this with a great deal of panache and literary style, inviting us to imagine a city in which beauty is innate, change is always potential, and justice is perfect. And if you happen to believe that the world is a magical place after all, then all the better.

Finally, whether this book is for you or not depends largely on your reading tastes, because “Winter’s Tale” makes for a rewarding but hard and faulty read. If you need and want to be challenged do right ahead, if not, beware. I likened it before to wading through snow drifts and I stand by that analogy: the valley your wading through may be perfectly untouched, the moon and stars might be dazzlingly beautiful…but its cold and windy and sometimes you’d rather be home, tucked up in bed…you only keep going because of the promise of a golden sunrise. And trust me, it does come and it is worth it, but you have to be prepared to plough onward through the difficult parts, and you have to suspend your disbelief and loose yourself to the telling.

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