Michael Winter
Just under halfway through Into the Blizzard, a late-bloomer of a book about the thousands of men who enlisted in the Newfoundland Regiment during World War One and the hundreds of them who perished in one day at the Battle of the Somme, Michael Winter delivers a blunt series of statements about his overarching concerns. Into the Blizzard, he tells us, is a book about "how war and the past creep into everyday life." It attempts to investigate what "we recall and how does it move us, or not?"
Winter's self-referential turn ultimately triggers Into the Blizzard's shift from plodding exercise to often-riveting treatise on war. But the question itself doesn't come as a surprise. It's one that Winter has implied repeatedly in the book's first 100 pages. It's also one that, by this halfway point, he has been unable to even feign an answer to.
Into the Blizzard follows Winter on a trip through England and France that retraces the path the Newfoundland Regiment (known, since 1917, as the Royal Newfoundland Regiment) took before reaching Beaumont-Hamel in the Somme, where 753 members faced combat and only 68 survived. It is composed of both Winter's personal reflections about his journey and an elliptical retelling of the Newfoundlanders' experiences before, during, and after the war.
To start, Winter tries to blend these two layers seamlessly, much like he blended real life into his novels This All Happened and The Death of Donna Whalen. But his attempts to relate to the experiences of the Newfoundland Regiment, to be moved by them, all come off stiff or ill conceived.
At one point, Winter likens his own impulse to backpack through Turkey after university to the decision of enlisting in the infantry. Just three pages into the book, he brazenly compares exiting a subway station in Toronto to how "men climbed out of trenches and crossed no man's land."
There's no lack of sincerity in Winter's approach, but the way he stretches and contorts his experiences in an attempt to fabricate some connection to the Regiment is far from convincing. It borders on insensitive.
So when Winter comes out and outright declares the chief questions and intentions of his book, he isn't offering a helping hand to the reader. He's expressing his frustration. He's responding to everything he hasn't found so far on his quest.
The moment transforms the book. After starting in the mold of W.G. Sebald, using a personal travelogue to illustrate history's influence on our daily lives, Winter's approach shifts to resemble some of Geoff Dyer or Janet Malcolm's work. It becomes a book about the failed attempts to write the work he aspired to.
The trope may seem hackneyed – like a worn out post-modern sweater that Winter throws on for comfort in a difficult time – but it ultimately best suits Winter's concerns. That's because Winter's sudden skepticism isn't simply directed toward his own talent or even the validity of his project. It emerges alongside and intertwines with a larger concern about the nature of our relationship to the First World War as it fades further into history.
It's only when Winter accepts his early failure that he begins asking more probing questions about why "the First World War now contains only a faint wisp of trauma in our memories" and is becoming "an event without direct effect on us." It's only then that he begins to engage critically with the ways Canada and other countries choose to commemorate war. Only then that the book develops a truly compelling voice and point of view.
The more Winter delves into these concerns, the more his frustration grows to anger. It doesn't hurt that Winter is at his most gripping as a writer when he's mad, declaring that "here, beyond this line in the sand, I defy the stately historical manner of honouring war. I defend my son against a missed encounter with the real, which is what trauma is. Let the real poke through in these words I have written, and not through the process of repeating words that become detached from experience."
Exasperation also pushes Winter to his most incisive arguments. Increasingly he casts his ire toward the false notions of courage and heroism propagated about the Newfoundland Regiment, ones which obscure that "courage requires a choice" whereas these "men fell into death." He disparages the politicians and military leaders, then and today, who "throw individuals in to war and kill them for some idea."
Winter, to be clear, never espouses a wholly traditional view of the war or the Regiment. Early on, he insists on overturning any characterization of the Newfoundlanders as stern soldiers. "If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment," he writes, "you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare."
But as Winter's journey continues, his skepticism grows and so does his emphasis on counter-narratives. He starts deliberately stressing the mistreatment of the Newfoundland soldiers; the senselessness of their sacrifice, not their bravery and commitment. Increasingly he turns his focus to Tommy Ricketts, a soldier who was given the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for bravery bestowed by the British military, and was celebrated upon his return to Newfoundland, but who, following the war, never properly reconstituted his life.
These sorts of criticisms have been expressed before in history books and in novels like The Wars. As Alec Scott noted recently in The Walrus, overtly positive views of the war may have prevailed for a brief period after the conflict ended, but the darker realities of military service eventually emerged in the writing of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, to whom Winter alludes repeatedly. Today it's well-documented and seemingly well-known that the trenches were hellholes, that barbaric death tolls were callously accepted by military officials, and that the reasons for the war were hazy to the point that they're still being debated.
Yet Winter's grievances do not feel re-hashed. That's because Into the Blizzard is not historical fiction. Nor is it even history, really. Its concerns are more contemporary, preoccupied less with what happened during the war than how nationalistic myths about heroism and sacrifice can prevail in spite of the facts. Winter's arguments may be familiar, but they're made fresh and compelling by a troubling notion he introduces: that time might be diminishing our understanding of the war, not increasing it, leaving it simplistically reified, not furnished with nuance.
The further the First World War recedes into the past, the more that the land on which it was fought loses all trace of what took place there. As Winter writes, fields "sown with dead" are now "full of crops," leaving us only with monuments and preserved battlefields that constitute our national attempts at collective remembrance. It's through these sites and events – not personal history, not history books, but these memorials made for wide public consumption – that Winter primarily attempts to connect to the war.
And as he visits them, he finds largely fabricated memories. Ones that lose sight of the tragic, immoral mistakes that led to so much death. Ones that get pushed on us by stock phrases repeated in tiresome ceremonies like ones Winter witnesses in Thiepval and Beaumont-Hamel. By our insistence, Winter writes, on talking about the costs of success at the Somme instead of recognizing the truth that "the Somme was a colossal failure." If Winter begins his journey hoping to directly access the war and the Newfoundland Regiment's experience of it, he soon realizes that all that's left to inspect are "cellophane-wrapped flowers."
It's in protest of this inadequate choice between natural erasure and patriotic veneration that Winter declares the need for "a new way to talk of war that might break the fruit of the battle narrative." Into the Blizzard doesn't quite accomplish that goal. It's more of a warm-up for the project. Nevertheless, after watching Winter begin Into the Blizzard overwhelmed by the responsibility of finding a connection to the Newfoundland Regiment, it's energizing to see him rise up in the second half of the book to offer several vigorous attempts at such an essential task.
Toronto-based writer Tomas Hachard has written for The Guardian, NPR, The Atlantic, Slate, and the LA Review of Books.