San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
In from the cold
What is it about winter in literature? Why are we mesmerized by it? How many contemporary titles feature that word; how many classics stand out for their winter settings? Perhaps a backdrop of bleak weather and whiteout landscape creates a scraped-clean canvas against which stories must pop with near-surreal starkness — the way images seen against snow feel branded into memory. Sense data shifts in winter; focus distills; interiority gains power. An idea of winter frees our dreams in a sealed-off world.
So it is that novelist (also Bay Area physician and professor of psychiatry) Daniel Mason has harnessed the harsh clarity of winter to frame his urgent, cinematically beautiful third novel, “The Winter Soldier,” which, like its predecessors (“The Piano Tuner,” “A Far Country”), fully qualifies as epic.
“The Winter Soldier” follows the fortunes of PolishAustrian medical student Lucius (for “light”) Krzelewski, 22 years old in 1915: a nervous, idealistic young man born into a Viennese family of status and influence, “restless, resentful of hierarchy, impatient for his training to come to an end.” In the midst of his medical education (including a sly, witty cameo by “Madame Professor” Marie Curie), World War I is declared. And because the military is desperate for doctors, the stilluntried Lucius is conscripted to a facility in a remote, tiny village called Lemnowice, in the Carpathian Mountains.
Lucius — achingly uncertain, an irresistible protagonist — envisions an orderly field hospital. What he arrives to (in pitiless winter) is a makeshift setup in a battered old church, run by a single, hypervigilant nun. The place is typhus-riddled, freezing and only crudely supplied.
I’ll go very gently now on plot summary, but not on admiration. Not only does Mason make every crumb of pertinent history, culture and geography so real throughout this saga that a reader feels instantly teleported into all of it: “The Winter Soldier” also delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era’s medical knowledge and practices. “Grieperkandl, the great anatomist ... believed that most modern medical innovation (such as hand washing) was emasculating.” From the moment of his bewildered arrival, Lucius can only respond to a torrent of triage: delousing, amputating, fishing bullets from wounds. He is guided at each step of his shotgun apprenticeship by the (hint: putative) nun, the enigmatic young Margarete,
who runs her ragged operation with acerbity, resourcefulness and compassion:
“Smelling like that? ... [This soldier will] be dead by morning ... We keep him warm. If he wakes up we tell him he’s home; if he calls you his father, you call him son. Perhaps it is different in Vienna, but this is how we do it here.”
(Fortunately, Margarete believes in handwashing and disinfecting.) As war surges around the shabby outpost, conditions toughen (cold, starvation, sadistic military officers forcing the gravely sick and injured back into the fighting ranks). And as Lucius grows more skilled under Margarete’s crack tutelage, their mutual attraction intensifies.
When a horribly damaged soldier is suddenly dumped into their midst, a decision Lucius makes about his fate will test everyone severely, affecting much to come. Mason seems, through this critical hinge in the story, to be asking us to consider with him a particular yet emblematic dilemma of ethics, science and ego. Against a tableau of human cruelty, kindness and ingenuity, art’s part, too, is contemplated — smuggled into the story in the form of materials stuffed inside the eponymous soldier’s clothing. Soon, a series of mishaps sweeps Lucius and Margarete apart; like the bounty of other scenes marbling these pages, they are hair-raising. In one, a frenzied Lucius races on foot to find Margarete, only to get caught in battle:
“He leapt and hit the ground, tucking his head inside his hands. Horses thundered past him, kicking up clods of dirt. He stumbled up, still trying to ward off the flying hooves. Gunfire churned up the ground around him. He ran ... crossed the clearing ... up a slope to where a man possessed of some authority was shouting field commands, reaching him just as a bullet struck the officer’s neck and knocked him to the earth. ‘Down!’ someone, somewhere, shouted. Stunned, staring, Lucius hit the ground. A few feet away, the officer clawed at his throat, gasping as blood spurted between his fingers.”
“The Winter Soldier’s” settings (Vienna, countryside, peasant and military flight) are peopled by a terrific ensemble; meticulously drawn, all acted upon in their turns by the frantic compression of options during wartime. A romance seeded inside such straits can’t not take on desperate stakes — as will Lucius’ later, monumental search for Margarete. One is reminded of a dozen greats: “Dr. Zhivago,” “The English Patient,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
The novel’s pacing clips along tightly; its closure, when at last it comes, proves deeply, memorably moving. On occasion, Mason’s descriptions — interior and external, wondrous and horrific — can feel oversupplied, if never other than graceful and acute. Here, Lucius studies a young mother’s worn photo of herself and her missing husband, whom she now desperately seeks in the wake of battle:
“Something striking about the photo: her face a little flushed, her eyes a little darker, more wild. Her hair was braided . ... The skin of her neck glistened, and the weight of a breast pushed at the cotton pleats of her blouse. She had been dancing, he realized.”
And in a late, crucial scene: “Over his shoulder, were he to look: a scoop of moon. The air gilded with the pollen from a line of pines beyond the buildings. A fringed white curtain fluttering in an open window. A pair of sparrows, garrulous, as if urging their terrestrial counterparts to speak.”
Writers are, first and last, noticers. Mason has created a magnificent world, urging us to savor every grain of it — right down to the memory of “the way that snow collected in the seams” of a worn rucksack. Such passionate noticing is among reading’s finest rewards. It’s to Mason’s abiding credit that he adheres to the letter of Henry James’ beloved dictum — to be “someone on whom nothing is lost.”