I knew the Winter sisters from high school. We moved in different circles at university, but I’d see one or both from time to time and, like everybody else, they seemed to be intrigued by my apparent friendship with the Great Chase. If I could have seen the future, it wouldn’t have surprised me that, one day, he and Peggy Winter would be close. They were beings from the same genetic pool. Like Allan, she was tall, athletic. She followed sports, and could discuss team standings as if they really mattered to her. She was, physically, unlike her sister, Annie, who was classically blond with startling blue eyes. Peggy’s hair was auburn, her eyes deep-set and dark, some days green and some days hazel, depending on the light. Allan never seemed to notice Peggy at the time, which I found odd. Then I discovered that feigning indifference is sometimes a subtle tactic to get attention. And it worked for Allan. Peggy wasn’t used to being overlooked.
The Winter Wives is an intriguing, moody read. Author Linden MacIntyre sets us down in medias res — a round of golf with two old friends, we learn that their wives are sisters, one of the men collapses — and it takes the rest of the book to fill in just who these people are, how they met, what they do, what compelling circumstances led to that golf game...and what happens next. And even with all of these questions answered, the reader is still left wondering: can we really ever know another person, or for that matter, ourselves? I see that the publisher is calling this a “thrilling psychological drama”, and I don’t know if that quite captures what’s going on here — but as an examination of memory, relationships, lies, and losses, MacIntyre has written a compelling novel that left me with plenty to think on. Four stars is a rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When Allan fell, we were at the tee on the tenth hole of a golf course. It would take a long time to absorb the full impact of what happened there. Up close, death is like a mountain we happen to be standing on. Maybe we can see a piece of it, but the whole remains unreal until there’s distance.
We follow the first person POV of Byron — a rural Nova Scotia lawyer who helped his widowed mother run a farm and a lobster boat while attending university — and as his recollections meander across the events of his life, we learn that his friendship with the imposing Allan (a fellow student, on a football scholarship from Toronto, who’ll do anything to get rich) is his most important and pivotal relationship. When Allan eventually marries local beauty Peggy Winter and whisks her away to a jetsetting life in the sun, Byron will more or less stumble into a marriage with her sister Annie; an apparently less ambitious woman than her sister who is satisfied to stay home on the farm and help take care of Byron’s mother as she deteriorates with Alzheimer’s. Although the two couples don’t seem to spend much time physically together over the years, their business affairs will become intricately enmeshed; and as Allan’s health rapidly declines via a series of strokes, Byron will need to get to the bottom of what has really been going on for all this time.
Annie once explained her theory that memory is a parallel reality. Basically, an extended falsehood, a lifelong lie. At best, a kind of literature. But for me, memory is embedded in sensations, not narrative. Sound and smell. Touch. Music. Aroma. Colour. Revulsion from the smell of blood. Muddy lanes and sodden fields in spring. Fresh-cut hay in summer. The tang of apples in the fall. I associate particular events with certain seasonal conditions.The sharp heat of August feels unlike the warmth of a mellow morning in September or October; autumn has its own unique sensual pungency. And so I can, with relative certainty, “remember” that the series of events I am going to try to reconstruct happened mostly in the autumn and the winter of an extraordinary year. Ironically, I clearly remember the moment when I was told that there was a very real possibility that I could lose important aspects of my individuality. Memory, for one. Ultimately, my independence. Specifically, I recall the particular chill of a winter rainfall.
Due to a traumatic childhood injury (that left him with a limp, repressed memories, and an enduring concussion-related brain fog), Byron seems oddly detached from himself and his own experiences. As he approaches sixty, and having had a mother with dementia, Byron worries that he’s about to lose even more of himself — right at the moment he learns that the people around him may not be who they appear to be. Reality is confused by what people are led to believe (especially in the courtroom and in the gossiping community); people have fake names and nicknames (even “Byron” is a nickname that Peggy gave to the main character in high school because of his limp); the narrative explores foggy questions of consent, abuse, and suicide (medically assisted and a leap from a bridge); and I’m left wondering why this book is titled The Winter Wives instead of “The Winter Sisters” (if they kept their maiden name after marriage, it’s never mentioned, so I wonder if MacIntyre is hinting at a fundamental marriage-long lack of commitment by the sisters?)
There’s a lot to unearth in The Winter Wives, and with Byron’s faulty memory and disconnectedness, it makes for a compelling, if nebulous, examination of reality and selfhood. Moody is the word that feels most fitting and that ultimately made for a satisfying experience.
