Snow Country

 Novels are not like albums. Most bands have a career that grows to a pinnacle, and once you have heard The Great Album there is very little to convince you that they will ever reach the same dizzy heights again.

I’m glad that novels do not work like that. If it was the case, I don’t think Sebastian Faulks would ever have recovered from the majesty of ‘Birdsong’.

And yet here is another novel as deep and as moving, about another corner of Europe, with characters just as real.

I have been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes his writing so special. The closest that I can get is that it stays with you. The characters are so complete and real that they linger after the last page. It’s something about their voices that make them like ghosts that keep coming back to you for days. Perhaps ghosts is the wrong term, because there is nothing frightening about it.

 I am not sure if it is a peculiarity of the British, but both World Wars seem to still loom in our fiction, film-making and popular history. Do the French and Germans dwell on the two wars as much as us?

As a result, almost every angle of what happened to the Fighting Tommy has been thoroughly explored. However, Faulks is able to write fiction that continues to mine the two greatest tragedies of the last hundred years. He knows that the tragedy of war is as much in the commonplace as the heroic. He writes in order to illuminate the ordinary lives of people, to bring them to life, and then tell you how the war twisted and damaged them.

In ‘Snow Country’ the perspective is Austrian, and particularly Viennese. British readers will rarely think, ‘I wonder what it was like for normal Austrians in 1916?’, and yet here it is. The view from the other side of the fence. The same loves, career struggles, visits to the theatre, favourite meals, and all the other things that we know, are described from the point of view of a young journalist called Anton. The story follows his progress from the schoolroom to the Russian front and back to his home city in the 1930s, still reeling from his experiences.

The focus of the story is a sanatorium that is familiar to readers of ‘Human Traces’, Faulks’ previous novel about the damages sustained by the mind. It is a contrast to the sort of places that we think we know about in Britain between the wars. We picture long corridors, the smell of disinfectant, ageing men trapped by wartime experiences, ‘The Mad House’. I think it’s a damaging part of British culture that for many people the issue of mental health still plays out against this terrifying backdrop. In ‘Snow Country’ the sanatorium is open, filled with light, clean, welcoming, and a place of learning and exploration. My father told me that there were old men who were committed in Northern England in 1917 who were still there fifty years later – whole lives wasted. The contrast to the sanatorium in ‘Snow Country’ is clear. Schloss Seeblick is a place of research and healing.

 There is a love story. I struggle not to draw back to ‘Birdsong’ at this point, because the long story is full of tenderness in the same way. From 1914 to 1933 there are points when you think some elements might be resolved, and the voices of the characters are so authentic that it’s hard to leave them and put the book down. You root for them.

 There is something that Sebastian Faulks does better than anyone else writing fiction in English at the moment. Since ‘Charlotte Gray’, he has created female characters that are as complete as I have read. In the centre of this story is Lena. Faulks develops her voice in a way that sticks in your head. She begins an almost-orphan, and spends all her life looking for belonging.

How does she do? You’ll have to pick up the book to find out.