Reading room
An achingly beautiful tale of love from an author who is at her height, writes Juliet Rieden.
Tin Man by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press. There’s a tender, sensual and often painful romanticism at the heart of Tin Man that envelops you in its cloak of words and pulls you deep into its world. You can devour this book in one sitting if you have a day to spare and that is certainly the most delicious and rewarding way to read it.
UK author Sarah Winman has already proved what a daring and intuitive storyteller she is with her first two novels When God Was A Rabbit and A Year Of Marvellous Ways, but Tin Man shifts gear to another level. It’s a beautifully crafted tale about love, loss, friendship and what might have been.
In the prologue, set in 1950, Dora Judd, pregnant with her son, wins the Community Centre Christmas raffle and despite being urged by her raucous husband, Len, to choose the whisky, opts for a rather fine reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers instead. “It was her first ever act of defiance. Like cutting off an ear. And she made it in public,” writes Winman. For Dora, the painting represented the life she had always wanted – “Freedom. Possibility. Beauty”. And it is this she wants for her unborn son.
The novel falls into two halves, each told from the viewpoint of our two protagonists – childhood friends Ellis and Michael. Ellis, Dora’s son, is 46 when we first meet him, widowed and racked with grief. He works in the paint shop of the local car plant where his father worked before him and where his skilled panel beating is unique and precious. Yet Ellis, we learn, was forced into the job and never got to pursue his gift for painting as his mother had wanted him to.
Dora adored her son and nurtured his creativity and his special friendship with his best friend, Michael. When she died too young, a part of Ellis’ life died with her. As his story opens, desperately lonely Ellis has had a nasty fall from his bicycle. He’s off work and hallucinating on painkillers, which takes us back to the day he met Michael, their carefree childhood and the naive love that developed. When he later married Annie, she fell hard for Michael, too – the trio becoming inseparable until Michael inexplicably moves away.
The second half of the novel sees this love story from Michael’s perspective as Winman joins the dots that throw light on his past. It is powerful and understated with some scenes that will break your heart, as Michael moves away from Ellis and Annie, and the scourge of AIDS becomes a backdrop to his life.
Running through both narratives are other sorts of love – maternal and paternal – and society’s take on love. The result is gentle and powerful at once. A tour de force.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sarah Winman
Born and raised in north-east London, Sarah describes her childhood as “imaginative, energetic, secure, adventurous”. She trained as an actress and worked in theatre, film and TV. “I’d kept a journal since my mid-20s and wrote screenplays. I switched to fiction in my 40s, quite simply because I wasn’t working much.” When God Was A Rabbit was her first published work and became an instant best-seller.
“It gave me ... the freedom to write another book.”