Edwardian gentleman Harry Cane is sitting in a Lyons Corner House, contemplating knocking back an overdose of laudanum to rid himself of a broken heart and the shame of social scandal. An ostensibly happily married man, he has been discovered in a homosexual affair with an actor who takes a rather more pragmatic view of matters (“I preferred you married and unobtainable. In fact that’s how I prefer all my men”). Suddenly, he spots a sign through the window calling for emigrants to Canada and is presented with a way out.
As Patrick Gale explains in an afterword, his own antecedent – his mother’s grandfather – was one of hundreds to take up “the extraordinary opportunity” of claiming 160 acres of Canadian prairie land in return for fencing and cultivating it. But although Gale drew on family letters and papers, his interest piqued by “a cloud of disapproval hanging over him, of that particularly fascinating kind where details are too distasteful to be put into words”, the life he imagines for Harry is primarily an invented one.
That life ranges from the harsh realities of subjugating an alien landscape – “like some impossible task set the innocent hero of a fairytale” – to something even darker, Harry’s eventual incarceration in a psychiatric institution given to administering brutal water treatments. Transferred to Bethel, a more experimental, less cruelly regimented private facility, Harry begins to piece his life and his past together, both for himself and for the reader, including the terrifying story of his encounters with sadistic fellow immigrant Troels Munck, and the relationship between the colonists and Canada’s first nation tribes.
Switching between radically different settings – the England of the Gaiety Girls, the bleak prairie landscape and institutional isolation – means that the narrative advances apace, consistently engaging the reader in new developments. And while A Place Called Winter is not written in high style, it is a dramatic and affecting portrayal of dislocation, extreme environments and the traumatic effects of enforced secrecy.
A Place Called Winter is published by Headline (£7.99). Click here to order it for £5.99
