Personal losses in the context of history

FICTION

Loss of love and life is a familiar literary theme. The emphasis, though, is usually on the personal, but noted Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels, in "The Winter Vault," sets her story of personal loss in the context of historical events that irrevocably affected thousands.

The events she evokes -- the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway (begun in 1954) and the Aswan Dam (in the 1960s)-- ask larger questions than the "Why me?" of individual tragedies. And her protagonists, Avery and his wife, Jean, are appropriately sensitive and thoughtful observers of the destruction wrought by these two giant engineering projects.

To build the seaway, numerous towns became " 'lost' -- a term for which Avery had once felt contempt but now appreciated for the sting of its unintentional truth. Thousands would become homeless as though through some act of negligence."

The Aswan Dam, too, not only resettled communities dependent on the annual flooding of the Nile River but also required the destruction and then reassembly on higher ground of the ancient Abu Simbel temple.

The story begins in Egypt, where the newly married Avery, an engineer, and Jean, a botanist, live on a houseboat on the Nile, while Avery supervises the work on the temple. In a place where "at dusk the light was a fine powder, a gold dust settling on the surface of the Nile," the two recall their childhoods and how they met in Canada, where Avery was working on the seaway.

This is a luminously beautiful introduction to a story of heartbreak and loss that is best when evoking the larger forces at work. While still in Egypt, Jean becomes pregnant, but the baby she bears is stillborn; the work on the temple complete, husband and wife return to Toronto.

There they separate: Jean studies botany and Avery, architecture. Both are haunted by death and grief, but Jean finds some solace in a brief affair with Lucjan, a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising. Lucjan as he recalls the Holocaust and the family he lost, reminds Jean that "history does not hear us."

As Jean begins to accept the displacements of war, water and her own loss, she finds some consolation in propagating plants.

Even happier outcomes for the couple seem likely in a story that is as much a thoughtful meditation on life and death as it is an affecting and original love story.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.