Ellis Judd is a 46-year-old man working at the Cowley car plant in Oxford bashing dents out of panels. His world is suffused with crushing loneliness. The people he loved the most — his mother, his wife, Annie, and his best friend, Michael — have vanished. Especially poignant are memories of a glorious summer in the south of France, where he and Michael briefly glimpsed an intoxicatingly different lifestyle. As Tin Man progresses we learn what has happened to Ellis’s loved ones.
Sarah Winman’s previous novels, When God Was a Rabbit and A Year of Marvellous Ways, were shot through with a magic realism that sometimes bordered on whimsy. Not Tin Man, which instead calls on the consolatory power of art to alleviate the gloom into which her characters are plunged. Specifically, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, “painted by one of the loneliest men on earth. But painted in a frenzy of optimism and gratitude and hope.”
This short novel is divided into Ellis’s story, then Michael’s, which is in the form of a discovered diary and is noticeably more lyrical. Winman’s narrative is fluid throughout, slipping back and forth in time as characters are carried off by memories. As with her previous book, she eschews quotation marks. The effect is of being adrift and nudged by unseen currents. This is sometimes confusing for the reader — and apparently also for Winman, who claims that Ellis, Annie and Michael were listening to Erasure in 1978.
This is a tale of thwarted love, and the consequences for Ellis and Michael are stark; their lives are twin portraits of emotional isolation (Annie, for all her importance, never comes into focus). Winman mines themes she has explored before — childhood bonds and traumas, and gay love, which she evokes with tender sympathy — and again searches for poetry amid the suffering she inflicts on her protagonists. But rather than having the ring of profound truth, Tin Man ends up sounding somewhat hollow, its button-pushing devices too clearly on show.
Tin Man by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press, 195pp, £12.99
