Baby, it’s hot outside. Where I live, we recently emerged from a record-breaking heat wave; as I write this, the temperature is expected to top 100F tomorrow…for the eighth time this year. All over the country, it’s been stifling and thoroughly gross. Now, maybe you love beach weather and can’t get enough fun in the sun, but if you can’t stand the heat, why not retreat? Why not escape into a romantic, beautifully-crafted tale that celebrates, among other things, the wild beauty of a winter storm?
First published in 1983, Mark Helprin’s classic Winter’s Tale is a difficult book to categorize. Saying “It’s about a well-meaning career criminal who leaps from 1916(-ish) to 1999 on the back of his flying white horse in a desperate attempt to bring his teenaged heiress bride back from the dead” is, while technically accurate, also terribly reductive. There’s more to this book than science fiction or romance; it’s also a long philosophical meditation on the nature of justice, as well as a love song to New York City, winters, and love itself.
Winter’s Tale begins shortly before the Great War. Peter Lake, trained as a mechanic but forced by circumstance into the somewhat more colorful yet precarious profession of safe-cracker, has managed to run afoul of Pearly Soames, one of the most fearsome gangsters in New York. One day, cornered by Pearly’s men, he is unexpectedly rescued by a magnificent white horse. The horse’s name is Athansor, and he can fly, literally, although at least at first he reserves this talent for special occasions. Shortly thereafter, Peter Lake (who always goes by both names) breaks into the home of fabulously wealthy Isaac Penn and unexpectedly encounters Penn’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Beverly, who is, among many other things, both courageous and a straight shooter:
“If you don’t make love to me,” she said, “I don’t think anyone ever will. I’m eighteen. I’ve never been kissed on the mouth. I don’t know anyone, you see. I’m sorry. But I have a year…and you can do with me whatever you want.”
Peter Lake, who was both decisive and brave, thought for a moment. “That is exactly what I will do,” he said as he sat down on the bed to gather her in his arms. He pulled her in and swung her over and began to kiss her forehead and her hair. At first she was as limp and shocked as someone who has begun to fall from a great height. It was as if her heart had stopped.
She had not counted on affection. It startled her. He kissed her temples, her cheeks, and her hair, and stroked her shoulders as tenderly as if she had been a cat.
Oh, yeah, about that whole “I have a year” business: Beverly is dying of tuberculosis, and her wealth, youth, and beauty cannot save her. And when she does die, Peter Lake mounts Athansor and flies into the mysterious Cloud Wall that hovers around New York, hoping to find a way to stop time and bring back the dead.
Eighty years later, give or take, world-weary Hardesty Marratta arrives in New York, guided by a tea-tray (no really) on a wild quest for the Perfectly Just City, where “all forces would align, and all balances would be brought even.” (What he thinks he’ll do in such a place, were it to exist, remains unarticulated.) He meets Virginia Gamely, descendant of some of Beverly Penn’s friends, and they both drop hard and fast:
“These winters have not been for nothing. They are the plough. The wind and the stars are harrowing the land and battering the city. I feel it and can see it in everything. The animals know it is coming. The ships in the harbor rush about and have come alive because it is coming. I may be dead wrong, but I do believe that every act has significance, and that, in our time, all the ceaseless thunder is not for nothing.”“I believe it too,” Hardesty said, taking her hands. And thus, as fast as a whiplash, a marriage was made one evening in winter, in a city sure to rise.
Eventually, Peter Lake turns up, and although it takes a while for the two men to meet, meet they eventually do. It turns out that their separate agendas are perhaps not so very far apart. Athansor and Pearly Soames also remain at large, both searching for Peter Lake. Meanwhile, around them, the city prepares for the Millenium, when everything will change.
This book. This book! It’s wildly romantic (of course) and sad and funny and thought-provoking, and it also contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever encountered. Ever. Behold this description of a sleigh ride:
Above them, in the cold, was a confused hiss of clouds and stars racing past in islands and lakes. It was such a hypnotic sound that they tilted their heads to stare at the chirping, cracking, rhythmically beating sea of starlight and fast-flowing cloud. On they traveled, on and on, smooth as the wind, gliding selflessly over ice and snow on the strong steel runners.Athansor, the white horse, moved in time with the diffuse static from above…He was running in a way that they had never seen. His strides became lighter and lighter, harder and harder, and more and more perfect. He seemed to be readying himself to shed the world.
Helprin also creates dozens of memorable secondary characters. There’s mysterious time-traveling engineer Jackson Mead, whose goal is to build a bridge constructed entirely of light, and his two oddball assistants, the Reverend Mootfowl and Mr. Cecil Wooley; Beverly Penn’s brother Harry, who is amazed to live long enough to see the impossible; and best of all, Harry Penn’s rival Craig Binky, a Rupert Murdoch-style tabloid king who seems to speak in his own made-up language and never goes anywhere without his two blind bodyguards, Alertu and Scroutu. We also get the charming love story of Asbury, a boat mechanic, and Christiana, who finds herself tethered to a vile Donald Trump-esque real estate mogul. Even Binky gets a surprise romance at the end, rendered in delicate blink-and-you’ll-miss-it strokes, but still.
And finally, the snow. Most of the important action in the book takes place in the wintertime, and it’s worth noting that Helprin’s winter landscape does not include damp socks, cars that won’t start, black ice, or H1N1 influenza. Instead, we read about stars that crackle and pop in the clear night air, roaring fires, cozy furs, sparkling lights, and rosy cheeks, all poetically rendered. Seriously, read this book and you’ll be praying for a blizzard, just so you can load up on steaming hot cocoa before you ski to work.
There’s a lot going on in Winter’s Tale, some of which doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to the logical mind. And the ending is, perhaps a little ambiguous (or maybe not). But overall, this book is pure poetry. When Craig Binky declares “How the day is! The sun shines in blarts and twines, and everything sustantiates,” you can’t help but know exactly what he’s talking about. So mix yourself a hot Antwerp Flinders, cut a generous slice of saxophone pie, curl up in front of your fireplace, and lose yourself in this wonderful book that will have you shivering in delight even as it warms your heart.
Kate Nagy is Editor at Large of Geek Speak Magazine.
