Ernie Sickert, the etiolated young man who had brought them news of the break‑in, had appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing what had become a uniform for him, grey flannel trousers, starched white shirt, and mulberry bow tie. Tall and so lanky that he verged on emaciation, Sickert had both hands up on the top of the door frame from which he hung like human drapery. An elaborate stack of towering pompadour crowned his narrow head, a hairdo that he had adopted during his days when he had played tenor sax for the Rhythm Alligators, a local dance band. Ernie had an expectant air, an I’m‑preparing‑to‑lick‑ice‑cream look on his face.
Guy Vanderhaeghe is a reliably excellent writer and his literary hallmarks are on full display in August into Winter — this is a very manly historical fiction, set firmly on the Saskatchewan prairie as only he can describe it, with good guys and bad guys, heart-thumping action and heart-touching drama — and I am delighted to have had an early read of this fine novel; I have no doubt it will be up for all the Canadian literary awards this year. Slightly spoilery from here, but not much beyond the publisher’s blurb. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“I’ve got a problem. A big one. The storm has cut Connaught off from the outside world. Completely. Telephone, telegraph lines, they’re all down. Roads are impassable.The foreman of the section gang came in on a handcar at six o’clock and said that the railway trestle bridge over Cutbank Creek to the east is ready to collapse and that the embankment on the west line has washed out. There’ll be no trains running to Connaught for days. Which means that I can’t contact any other detachments to let them know what’s happened here, can’t warn them that Ernie Sickert is on the loose. It all falls on me. I’ve got no one to turn to for help.”
It’s August of 1939 and Ernie Sickert — the twenty-one-year-old pompadour-wearing, hepcat-talking, sax-playing, commando-wannabe — has gone from playing bizarre pranks on his neighbours in the village of Connaught to committing an unspeakable act of violence. Thinking himself smarter than everyone around him and basically untouchable, the psychopathic Sickert picks up his “girlfriend” Loretta (a twelve-year-old orphan with stick legs and a threadbare hand-me-down dress) and drives his mother’s Oldsmobile into the heart of a torrential rainstorm. Once the car inevitably breaks down, Ernie and Loretta make a run for it and the town’s rookie cop enlists the help of a couple of locals to track them down. These locals, Oliver and Jack Dill, are WWI veterans who still carry the mental aftereffects of their time in combat (Jack is a religious obsessive, writing an interminable opus on The City of God, and the reclusive Oliver is a recent widower whose dead wife had befriended the Sickert boy when he was a child), but with their horse skills, knowledge of the area, and combat experience, the Dill brothers are soon in hot pursuit of the runaways.
The great glacier of anger that was Oliver Dill was grinding the bedrock of his being to gravel. The pressure of it was inescapable; sometimes he felt it a little less, sometimes a little more, but it was always present. For the last three years the glacier had been moving toward some unknown destination the way an icefield moves, inch by inch. This afternoon it had brought him to this point: Would he act as Judith would want him to act and try to spare the boy’s life? Or would the glacier follow the natural course of its inclinations, implacably inch forward and crush Ernie Sickert?
Along the way, the posse adds the local schoolteacher to their number (Vidalia was a recent transplant from Winnipeg; a fiercely independent woman who finds herself stranded in Connaught after the schoolhouse burns down), and as her history unspools, we learn that she is mourning the death of her lover: a Communist intellectual who was recently killed when he joined the Canadian Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. As the action of this novel mainly takes place from August into November of 1939 (hence the title) — the timeframe in which Europe was bracing for another World War and Bolshevik sympathisers like Vidalia were stunned by Hitler and Stalin’s nonaggression pact and subsequent carving up of Poland — the very specific moment in history affects everything that happens (and as each chapter opens with a headline and news snippet from the Winnipeg Evening Tribune, we are always aware of the larger events playing out in the background of the very local drama). When Oliver Dill eventually offers Vidalia a job typing up his brother’s manuscript, we are treated to long passages of Jack’s religious mania; and when Vidalia then decides to spend some of her time typing up the diary that her dead lover had kept in Spain, we then intimately learn of the unimaginable hardships faced by the Mac-Paps.
Vidalia was stalled. Coming to the end of Dov’s journal left her wondering if life wasn’t a court convened and presided over by idiots. Left her wondering why she had clung so tenaciously to optimism, to belief in a better future if those things could be taken away as easily as they had been taken from Dov, by an accident, a stumble in the dark, by a politically motivated arrest.
All of Vanderhaeghe’s characters in this novel are incredibly complex — with complicated histories revealed at length — and I found them, for the most part, to be frustratingly unknowable. Vidalia is prickly and standoffish — a self-satisfied intellectual and a feminist whose ambition outstrips her opportunities — but Oliver Dill falls for her, acting puppyish and playful in a way that I wouldn’t have predicted from the gruff loner we meet in the beginning. Vidalia does not want to be taken care of (even if she has few options), Dill can’t help but be a caregiver (he has taken care of Jack for twenty years, took care of his late wife in her final years), and I’m not certain that I loved (or completely bought) how their storyline ended.
For many years, in his mind Dill had been trying to correct the past. But the past was beyond correction. If the past led to death then death was surely beyond correction too. You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step. His heart was where it was.
This is a longish novel (my kindle app clocked it at around eleven hours for me), and with so much at play — Oliver’s memories from WWI, Dov’s account of the Spanish Civil War, the news from Europe on the eve of WWII, everyone’s personal backstories, and Jack’s manuscript — it got to feel like a bit much. But the muchness is rather the point: Everyone is carrying their pasts into the future, and it’s undeniably a burden. The plot of August Into Winter has plenty of truly heart-in-your-throat moments and I found the conclusion to the main conflict to be perfectly satisfying. This is a long road and definitely worth the trip; that Ernie Sickert is one creepy piece of work.
Take your lead from me, Mayfield. Do as I do. Creative havoc, well‑played, leads to victory. Creative havoc is the jazz of war.
