1 April 2025, A Place Called Winter, Patrick Gale, 2015
Harry Cane’s photograph in the last pages of this book show a handsome, fine featured Edwardian man. He is Patrick Gale’s great grandfather who in the early years of the last century was one of the hundreds of young Englishmen who took up an extraordinary opportunity to claim 160 acres of free land in the Canadian prairies in exchange for fencing it, living on it and bringing it into cultivation. Harry Cane left England for Canada leaving behind his wife and young daughter (Gale’s grandmother) and did not return until the 1950s. Out of these curious bare bones and with a notebook found in his grandmother’s possessions, Patrick Gale weaves his great grandfather’s story, part factual and part imagined. The result is as one reviewer put it, is ‘An Edwardian Brokeback’. Harry’s story moves from well healed Edwardian suburbia to theatrical London, to the isolation and hardship of Canadian homesteading. Gale frames his story with a series of flashbacks, perplexing at first but building to the denouement. He writes tenderly of Harry’s relationships with the men and women he loves uncomplicatedly, (if for the time, unconventionally) but he does not shy away from the cruelty and brutality of other encounters; the juxtaposition is shockingly effective. Readers were divided in their opinion; some were not sufficiently engaged by Gale’s writing or subject matter to complete the book; some felt that historical detail in the novel lacked authenticity and this hindered their satisfaction; and others that this was great story told with immense emotional intelligence.