Freezing point

The British winter of 1962–3, known as the Big Freeze, was one of the coldest and longest on record, with blizzards sweeping the country, lakes and rivers freezing over, and widespread disruption to national life. It was also an unwitting crucible of social and cultural change. As the frigid temperatures stretched into February the Beatles were beginning their ascent to the Toppermost of the Poppermost, while sexual intercourse, according to Philip Larkin, was just set to begin. The two young couples at the centre of Andrew Miller’s tenth novel, The Land in Winter, have already discovered sex, though they are still hamstrung by social etiquettes that will soon begin to vanish once the Sixties start to swing. It is this tension – between the old strictures and a permissive new generation – that drives the novel’s action.

That action, naturally enough for such a psychologically acute writer, is nearly all interior. Set in the rural West Country, the novel uses its snowy, isolated location as a mirror for mental landscapes. As the bad weather prevents the local GP, Eric Parry, from performing his rounds, he observes: “The ash tree was a frozen fountain … The cold descended and the land tightened”. This gelid description is apt, for Eric is spectacularly blocked emotionally. Arrogant and bluff, “with a Midlands accent he had no intention of trying to hide”, he is “not much given to thinking about love, did not much care for the word”. We quickly learn that he is cheating on his pregnant wife, the sensitive and educated Irene, who spends her days in bed planning his meals, and whose inner world is richer than her husband’s by a country mile.

Across the valley, a very different pregnant wife, the Nembutal-popping ex-showgirl Rita Simmons, dreams her days away in a chilly farmhouse. Her husband, Bill, is a rookie farmer whose relationship to the land is worryingly tenuous (“he lay awake at night thinking about silage”). He bought the place on a whim after leaving Oxford without a degree, this “farm you couldn’t possibly make money from”. When he’s not fretting about his cows he’s questioning his marriage to Rita, a woman “more suited to being a mistress than a wife”. For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives. What begins as John Updike’s Couples transported to Somerset (or even Middlemarch, with its two marriages and country GP) develops into something more devastating and uniquely English: four people trapped by traditions and social constraints that will, ironically, soon be swept away.

The novel’s centrepiece is the Parrys’ tense Boxing Day party, an event that Eric’s lover, Alison, and her husband attend. Full of “money confidence”, Alison is Irene’s antithesis, the kind of person “who might choose to bring the house down simply to find out what kind of noise it made”. As the booze flows, the first blizzards descend, and Irene and Rita strike up an unlikely friendship. The Big Freeze gives Eric the “distinct feeling of wartime … the uncertainty and boredom, the nagging hunger that was only partly to do with food”. However, it is a bestial sexual hunger that drives the repugnant doctor. The book’s single sex scene (a forbidden blowjob in a parked car) is steamier and more revealing of character than anything to be found in Sally Rooney. Later, when Irene discovers her husband’s affair, Miller gives us a brilliant description of a betrayed woman’s epiphany: she “sat back on her heels, peering around the room as if she’d never seen it before”.

If the final third of the book – which follows its characters in breathless parallel action around an ice-bound London – doesn’t quite cohere or compare with what has gone before, we forgive Andrew Miller because our investment in his stricken twentysomethings is by now total. The inevitable conflagration is explosive and abrupt. Ultimately the emphasis is on its women, and their own (and society’s) marital expectations. They bear their humiliations with dignity, while their caddish men get away largely undamaged. It is significant that one of the epigraphs is from Sylvia Plath’s “Wintering” (“Winter is for women”). The ghosts of Sylvia and Ted, and the tragedy of her suicide in February 1963, haunt this gripping novel’s brumal pages.

Jude Cook teaches Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. His second novel is Jacob’s Advice, 2020

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