Review: The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels

Before I left on a short trip to France, I heard the news that a new book, by Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault, was imminent and I managed to obtain a copy to take away with me.  Back in the late 1990s, I had been greatly impressed with Anne Michaels first book, the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces and it had been a long wait for her next novel.  

The book is primarily about a young couple who move to Egypt where the husband, Avery, is working as an engineer on the project to move the great statue of Abu Simbel before it is overwhelmed by the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Avery's wife Jean, who has an interest in botany spends her time learning about the country and collects local plants to transplant to a safer location. 

Last Thursday I had a free afternoon, so sat in a public park in Pays de Loire and read the first hundred pages.  Alas, I found The Winter Vault annoying to the point of wanting to leave it in the local Emmaus (the French charity shop chain), but decided to force myself to finish it, a five day slog through cloying prose, which made me think of a teenage diary, full of carefully-crafted sentences milking every conversation of its last shade of meaning.  Does any married couple really speak with such pretentious profundity as this:

- You're like a man seen from a distance, a man who we think has stopped to tie his shoelaces but who is really kneeling in prayer.
- Our shoelaces have to come undone, said Avery, before we ever think to kneel . . .