A Place Called Winter (4*)

There's nothing quite like a book that taps an unmet need.  I devoured Patrick Gale's gay love story, set in the Canadian prairie, with the same fervor that I read as a child.   At first, the novel seems to belong to the misery porn genre (A Little Life, Young Mungo), when Harry, a stuttering boy who prefers the company of women to men, is banished from the 19th century British mercantile class after discovering his need to be ploughed by a music hall chorus boy who conveniently works as a speech therapist.  Oscar Wilde has recently been convicted and Harry is worried.

“The ones who are caught are the fools who stray beyond their class or age group,” his lover insists. 

Not just.  Harry leaves behind a wife in love with another man and a young daughter and catches the next boat to Halifax, where he passively meets the man who determines his future, a brute who attracts and repels himself in equal measure.

Wait!  Am I describing a romance novel?  You bet, and it's told from the perspective of woke 21st century author who grounds it in fascinating research and lyrical descriptions that made me realize I'd much rather homestead than marry. 

As for the cold, he had never experienced anything like it: a dry, iron clamp upon the land, like death itself, full of unexpected beauty, like the hard crystals that formed on the inside of the windows. The cold did something strange to the quality of sounds around the farm, deadening all background noise so that the smallest scratching or whisper was emphasized. It was easy to see how the unwary settler could die in such a scene, lulled into marveling at its deadly beauty even as his blood began to freeze.

Gale manages to hit all the right notes, including this lovely one which occurs during a conversation between Harry and the sister of the man he loves, who eventually becomes his wife and provides the perfect cover for their relationship until World War I and the Spanish flu intervene:

“May I ask one more question” [Petra] asked.  

“Of course,” [Harry] told her, happy that her mind should think of other things rather than brooding on the attack.

She tapped her glass with her fingernails, shy of meeting his eye.  “Is it…is it emotional or simply a physical need the two of you are answering?”

“When I’m with Paul?” 

She nodded, glancing up and away.

“I suppose in a different world,” he began carefully, "it would be both.  When a thing has always been forbidden and must live in darkness and silence, it’s hard to know how it might be, if allowed to thrive.”

I could have done without the narrative device that enables Gale to go a bit overboard with his wokeness (an indigenous trans person befriends Harry in a therapeutic community . . . huh?) and the cruelties of earlier age (ice baths to cure homosexuality) but those are minor quibbles in a story of personal awakening sensitively and perceptively told.