Anne Michael's The Winter Vault is a story about dismantling and recreating and what is lost forever in between. It centres on Avery and Jean, a Canadian couple who travel to Egypt so that he can participate in the relocation of the temple at Abu Simbel. While in Egypt the couple suffers a devastating loss, one which is compounded by the psychological impact of the relocation project, how the act of taking the temple apart has corrupted its beauty, and how the dislocation of farmers living along the Nile has devastated those communities. The marriage is broken by these events, though not irreparably, and on their return to Canada, Avery and Jean separate and begin drifting. Jean becomes involved with Lucjan, a Polish artist who has his own tales of loss and suffering, but her love for Avery is not quite dead, it's simply waiting to be rediscovered and reconstructed.
Michaels, a celebrated poet before publishing her debut novel, the great Fugitive Pieces, has a dreamy style that blurs the line between the characters' interior and exterior lives. The story flows easily through different time periods and locations - in addition to their time in Egypt and their separate lives afterwards, the novel also explores the beginning of Avery and Jean's relationship and some of their lives before meeting; it also spends a great deal of time with Lucjan in war torn Poland - and between character perspectives. Jean ends up carrying the bulk of the narrative, but Avery, Lucjan, and several supporting characters including Avery's mother and Lucjan's group of Polish expat friends, are all drawn with clarity and compassion.
Michaels' style is engaging and passages of The Winter Vault are achingly beautiful and profound. That being said, however, the language does sometimes get a little too densely poetic. This doesn't happen frequently, but there are passages where it reads like there's one brush stroke too many. For the most part, though, The Winter Vault is a beautiful and intensely readable novel.
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