Maciek's Reviews > Winter's Tale

Winter's Tale held the promise of being a book that I would have loved: a fantastical novel set in a New York City of the Belle Epoque but in some alternate universe with perpetual winters, with a large cast of characters and a love story at its core. I really looked forward to reading it, and was actually excited at the prospect of immersing myself into the world that Mark Helprin created, and losing hours for the story that he told, reading deep into the night. This year the novel was finally adapted into a movie - I decided that I could wait no longer and dove right in. I am sad to say that I was wrong - and that ith each passing page initial enthusiasm that I had for the book waned, and as I was nearing the end it disappeared altogether.

Winter's Tale is a mess - it's a long book (almost 800 pages in its most recent edition), and throughout all that length I could never find a real story that it wanted to tell. Ostensibly it's the story of Peter Lake, an orphan and professional thief of mysterious past and his whimsical and serious adventures in a magical New York City. But Peter is not a character, but a caricature - His charm is endless and he can always get out of seemingly inescapable trouble at the last second; almost exactly like the Road Runner. Peter Lake's (as Mark Helprin insist on always refering to him by both names) nemesis and former boss, Pearly Soames, isn't much better - he's the literary equivalent of Bluto from Popeye: oversized, dumb and determined to murder Lake as vengeance for slipping from his grasp. Pearly is also the leader of a gang of burglars to which Peter belonged for a time, called the Short Tails - named after a real gang which terrorized New York's Lower East Side during the Gilded Age, but in the novel serving merely as props to display fear of Pearly and his enormous physical power.

Perhaps the largest offense of the novel is the love story, which makes absolutely no sense. Early in the novel Peter Lake breaks into an luxurious apartment, where for no reason a girl falls in love with him at first sight (I'd call it the Lake Syndrome). Beverly Penn is her name, and she is perfect - hopelessly beautiful, a visionary who can read the universe and write down complex equations which explain its mechanisms. People are changed for the better when they are around her, and even evil villains stop being evil; and she's also - you guessed it - a virgin! Still shrink-wrapped, ready for a Prince Charming. She's also dying. But from tuberculosis - nothing which would spoil her beauty and perfection too much. Isn't it just dandy that a charming, handsome, young and total stranger just happens to break into her house so that both can experience True Love - immediately?

Beverly eventually dies off-screen, and the book loses what little focus it had. Characters come and go without much impact on whatever events are going on, random people fall in love with random people, and we're never sure what the novel is actually supposed to be about. There is also an actual flying horse named Athansor, who serves no real purpose other than getting Peter Lake out of completely impossible situations. To make it worse, Mark Helprin is one of those authors who love hearing their own voices, and relentlessly drags every little description to make it as evocative and poetic as he possibly can, being less and less aware of this self-indulgence as the novel progresses. This is a book which desperately needed an editor, but somehow never got one. Or worse - this is an actual edited book, and somewhere in the universe still exists the original manuscript of Winter's Tale, three times as long.

This is a book which is clearly aware of the fact that it's at least partly a fantasy, but wanted to be more than that. By having cartoonish characters with outlandish names participate in impossible adventures, affairs and conflicts, it wanted to transmit some grand Greater Truths in a eloquent and poetic style; but in its attempts at doing so it becomes nothing more than a parody of itself, and a bad one at that since its written in utter seriousness. Consider the following passages:

How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.

Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is – and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others.

Is it just me, or is Mark Helprin constantly trying to sound profound rather than to make actual sense? The book is full of such idiosyncratic truisms, trying to blind the reader with its succession of endless images of snow and winter and lure him into believing that they're experiencing a truly lyrical moment. But the ploy becomes obvious here, as Helprin begins to engage in tautologies and things which sound good but simply make no actual sense:

All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

This is the kind of baroque writing which at a glance might look powerful and memorable, but at a closer inspection turns out to be nothing more than a sham, a fake, a construction verbs and nouns with some adjectives thrown into it for no reason other than to attract with empty glitter. Kind of like people building stylish turrets, gates and columns into their McMansions - they think they make them look fabulous but in reality it's just dumb.

There's never any real sense of arriving somewhere and learning something important and unique. The book never shakes off its internal confusion and decides what it wants to be and where it wants to go, and ultimately fails to leave any mark. An Amazon reviewer summed it best by stating that "the characters are not and never will be us, and the tale illuminates nothing of essence" - and I'd rather eat a barrel of snow than read it again. What a missed opportunity.