I should not like this book, but I do. Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child has an unpromising start. Mabel, a nervy wreck of a woman, decides that her loveless life is not worth living. She strides out into the Alaskan wastes seeking a quiet death.
It is a cliché worn thin by bad television drama, and it gets worse. Mabel fails to die, of course, and she returns to the log cabin which she shares — ‘live together’ would connote more intimacy than exists between them — with her withered husband, Jack. They then co-exist in silence for the next 50 pages. It was a slog for them; and it was a slog for me.
The year is 1920, or thereabouts, and Jack and Mabel have recently moved to Alaska in search of solace after the still-birth of a child. They were enticed north by government grants and the prospect of comfort and contentment. That promise has been extinguished by gruelling work and crushing loneliness. Money is tight; food is scarce; and hope is hopeless. The winter looks set to claim them, one way or another.
Salvation comes in the form of the snow child, a supernatural girl-cum-sprite. It’s a fairy tale that will be familiar to most readers. The child leads Mabel and John through the wilderness, and seems to command the weather, protecting them from the worst of the winter. The child, though, will claim her pound of flesh in the end.
The magical element in Ivey’s story is unremarkable, even hackneyed. But her feel for place is memorable. Ivey is Alaskan, and she knows the cruel landscape. Despite the seemingly limitless space, claustrophobia is the overriding sense for those who live there, as if nature was trying to obliterate them and their tiny civilisation. Forests threaten to reclaim the few strips of ploughed land; ice creeps up through the floorboards of the homestead at night; the wind bites through glass windows; and the mountains lour over everything. It is miraculous that anyone survived, which makes the magical story coherent if uninspiring.
The retold tale of the snow child will probably ensure that this book is a smash hit, which is just as well because Ivey’s account of those first pioneers deserves an audience as big as an Alaskan sky.
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