A Novel Ian Likes: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin

Peter Lake is a cat burglar. One night he breaks into the mansion of Isaac Penn, newspaper magnate and whaling enthusiast, and meets Beverly, Isaac’s daughter. They instantly fall in love and embark on a mad, whirlwind romance that they know will end in tragedy… because Beverly has tuberculosis, for which, in late Nineteenth Century New York, there is no cure. When the inevitable happens, Peter disappears… but not forever, because in this version of New York, the city casts a spell on the inhabitants and it’s not unusual for those who have been lost to come back…

Mark Helprin is a wildly-talented writer. He’s won prizes across most fields of literature and is more famous now as a conservative commentator on some social and political issues of the day. But his voice, for all that I might disagree politely with a lot of his views about today’s world, runs wildly, lyrically free on the page, building up images that make you swoon, cheer and cry, often in the same paragraph.

Winter’s Tale (1983) is probably his most famous book. It bears some similarities to John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981), in that both novels feature New York, with characters living in a magical town upstate, with stories that cover several generations. However, Crowley’s novel owes more of a debt to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, while Helprin’s book is flavoured by Melville and Fitzgerald (Little, Big is wonderful, though: you should check it out).

I mentioned Peter Lake in my teaser up the top there, but he is far from the only character: indeed, for several hundred pages in the middle of the book he doesn’t even rate a mention. Winter’s Tale covers pretty much a century of ground but focuses mostly on turn-of-the-century New York. That’s the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries turning, that is: the novel spends its time in both periods, neglecting a vast amount of time between them, although they are mentioned. The other characters include the Penn family, vastly rich and influential; Virginia Gamely, who hales from the magical town of Lake Of The Coheeries and who journeys to New York to make her fortune; Hardesty Maratta, who gives up an insane amount of wealth to seek his fortune; Pearly Soames, gang leader and art enthusiast, who pursues Peter Lake across time; and Athansor, the white horse who attaches his fate to Peter Lake and accompanies him on so many of his adventures…

There are other characters but these are the major ones who tell vast parts of the story. And I have mentioned New York and Lake Of The Coheeries as locations for this tale, but I also have to mention the Bayonne Marsh, where Peter Lake is discovered as an infant in the rushes (the symbolism is rampant and wonderful in this novel) and raised by the Baymen of the marsh as one of them until he is cast out because he very obviously isn’t one of them. Every location, no matter how small or fleetingly passed through is described lavishly and with care so that you know what it is like instantly.

Which is the absolute joy of Winter’s Tale: the characters and their journeys are nothing that you haven’t read dozens of times before, but Helprin’s prose changes them into something amazing and new. Here’s something from very early on:

“The air was motionless, but would soon start to move as the sun came up and winds from Canada came charging down the Hudson.” (p 15)

I grew up in a waterfront city and I know exactly what he means by this (our winds came straight from Antarctica, with only the occasional Japanese trawler to block them), but it wasn’t something that I really noticed or thought about until I’d read this book.

Or

“After twenty minutes of groping along dark paths in a hissing subworld of hidden streams and mocking echoes, they came to what they sensed was a great chamber, for the sounds of their footsteps fled away from them as if into the open air.” (p 316)

I know very little about caving but that instantly put me in the picture with the characters as they groped their way through an underground chasm.

There’s also the way that the characters insinuate themselves into the city until it becomes an integral part of their lives, and they of the life of the city, so much so that it can barely let go of them, even when they are taken by death.

Or the fact that the vast majority of the book takes place across various Winters, or in wintery conditions. The coldness of the world is something that the characters always feel but never mention. The weather – in particular the eerie fog that sometimes creeps up and swallows people – is as much a character as the city and the people in it.

It’s a fantasy novel, of course – or more accurately (and to the relief of people who had to review it in fancy magazines), a magical realism novel. It was one of the first examples of that subgenre that I recognized as being in that category although I had read several like it before. The time travel and the magic horsey kind of give it away a bit, but critics have been known to bend further backwards to deny something that they might like as being part of a genre that they despise professionally.

Miraculously, I found it in the Fantasy/SF section of a local bookshop in 1985. I was attracted to it by the price, initially ($6.95 for a 799-page paperback was pretty good value for 15-year-old me) and that feeling of a bargain well-found lasted until I started reading it on the bus home and I realized that I had something really special in my hands. Fortunately, it was the middle of the school holidays (and it was Winter, as well, which really helped atmospherically), so I tore through it in just a couple of days. The writing dazzled me: I didn’t realise that an author could be that clever on the page, or that sometimes there were passages that just begged to be read aloud simply because they were so beautiful.

I was moved to tears by a couple of moments in the story, as well as reduced to fits of laughter on a regular basis. And the climax featured some moments that were simply spine-tingling and awe-inspiring.

I read it several more times over the course of the next few months and began to probe its mysteries further. I also sought out other books by Helprin but found them largely impenetrable and dull, which gutted me because I wanted to enjoy everything else he wrote in the same way. However, that numinous spark of joy that Winter’s Tale inspired in me remained elusive in his other work so I just became thankful that I had that (I’ve noticed that there have been a lot of authors whom I have loved one particular book by but have found the rest of their back catalogue leaves me cold, so I tend to just be thankful for what I have read).

I’ve kept that old paperback since then. As you can possibly see from the photo, it has seen better days, but I’m almost too frightened to replace it, despite now having the means to do so. And that’s for reasons well beyond sentimentality: a different edition might use a different font. The Linotron Sabon that this edition is set in really did help to transport me to Helprin’s New York, and I’ve read different editions of enough books to know that the choice of font is supremely important to creating an atmosphere – especially in a book that you’ve read previously. As an example, David Lodge’s Small World (coming soon to this blog) was published in an anthology with two other linked novels. I’d read it in a single volume first and when I came to it with a different font – but still one of Penguin’s famously readable typefaces, I might add – I just couldn’t take it as seriously.

That font-phobia goes beyond the printed page as well: I was as excited as anyone a few years ago when there was news of a filmed version of Winter’s Tale coming out. I may have moaned a little, but then I uttered the ancient mantra of book fans faced with adaptations of their favourite texts – “don’tbecrapdon’tbecrap” – and waited to hear the news. It was unfortunately not well-received upon release and while I’ve often made up my own mind about how successful filmed versions of books are, I chose not to see it then and I still haven’t to this day. Not because I’m precious about how my beloved stories get filmed (although I have been known to be), but because I know that a version that leaves out vast chunks of the text (as this one apparently did) will only ever be a partial and imperfect retelling of the tale. And given the size of the original story, no filmed version will ever be adequate for my needs.

So I’m stuck with my weathered old paperback for the time being. But that’s okay because the budget and time limit inside my skull has no limit save what I can imagine.

You can find out more about Mark Helprin at https://markhelprin.org/