Unheard Voices, Unseen Lives

Set initially in London at the beginning of the twentieth century, A Place Called Winter is the story of Harry Cane, a conventional married man, quite unaware of his true nature until a chance encounter with an actor makes him aware that he is homosexual.

When Harry's affair is discovered, he is disgraced. Forced to leave his wife and family, he sets off to make a new life in Canada where he falls prey to an entrepreneur called Troels Munck, a predatory, controlling individual who comes to dominate Harry's life to such an extent that their relationship culminates in dreadful violence.

Harry ends up in an asylum from which he is eventually rescued by a progressive doctor who has set up a pioneering therapeutic community. Here he is befriended by a bisexual Cree Indian, an individual who thinks of himself as having two souls but who is tortured by guilt acquired during a Christian education.

A Place Called Winter is at its best when describing the furtive intimacy between men at a time when homosexuality was considered a monstrous perversion, and also when depicting the stark grandeur of the Canadian prairie. I was less taken with the chapters set in the therapeutic community. Characters were less clearly drawn and the life of the community only sketchily evoked. It felt almost like another novel in embryo.

Nonetheless, this is a vivid and compelling depiction of an individual who finds himself at odds with the world in which he has grown up and an important testimony to the lives of characters whose stories conventional society has often preferred to ignore.