A Place Called Winter is a tale of heartbreaking hardship, a book that seems to combine Pride and Prejudice with E.M Forsters’ Maurice, against the backdrop of the 1908 settlement of Winter, Saskatchewan, Canada – which is, in fact, a real place.
Protagonist Harry Cane’s adventure is loosely based on the experience of author Patrick Gale’s own great-grandfather, who was mysteriously banished from England, leaving his wife and young child behind to face the wilderness of Canada alone.
Nothing could seem more unrealistic, perhaps, than a married man who would decide to leave his young child and private income in England in order to sail toward a life full of hardship and uncertainty in Canada. By the time Harry boards the immigrant ship, however, Gale has established his character with precise, economical strokes.
Harry is apt to stammer and feels constrained by everything that is expected of him. What changes his life utterly is the realization that he loves men, in an era where homosexual acts are punishable by law and met with social disgrace. Harry meets Mr. Browning, and soon after they begin a sexual relationship, a relation of love and passion through Harry’s eyes. Yet when a blackmailer exposes their relationship, Harry is told by his wife’s family to remove himself from his wife, child and country.
Gale retraced Harry’s steps while writing the novel.
“I spent three months there, and although Winter is a ghost town now, I had the coordinates for Harry’s farm, so I was able to track it down precisely. I found it terribly moving that his acres were still being ploughed,” Gale said.
The opening scene of A Place Called Winter takes place in a Canadian psychiatric hospital, where Harry’s sessions of hypnotic therapy reveal the events that led up to that moment. According to Gale, “the challenge was to inhabit homosexual life in a time when there are no words to describe any of the things the character feels or does. It is quite literally a story about the unspeakable.”
The classic story of a man finding himself through labor on his own land is derailed almost as soon as it begins to take shape. Harry is pursued by a nightmarish figure by the name of Troels Munck. This virtually fairytale villain has a knack for spotting weakness in others, a superb animal instinct and a prowling capability for destruction. Unvexed by any concept of mortality, he haunts Harry’s career as a homesteader.
And yet through Troels, Harry finds both great happiness and a neighbor whom he comes to love. Critics have highlighted compassion as one of the uniting qualities in Gale’s fiction, but I am still surprised by Harry’s willingness to see past Troels’ brutality.
“Munck is probably a psychopath,” Gale explained, “but my difficulty with writing a negative character is that, in the course of the book, I come to understand some of their behavior and at least halfway forgive them.”
A Place Called Winter neither resolves itself nor offers a closed ending, but it does offer hope that emotional truth and loyalty to that truth may be a way forward for Harry. Through his struggles, he transforms into an intensely sympathetic character. Harry’s tale reflects the experiences of many – the myriad hidden members of society, shunned by their families, their stories stained with shame. This fascinating novel is their requiem.
Booking It: A Place Called Winter
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