The Winter Vault

Set in 1964 in Egypt and Toronto, Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels’s historical novel The Winter Vault (2009) tells the story of Avery and Jean who fall in love against a backdrop of two of the largest engineering displacements of the twentieth century: the building of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River and the construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Construction on the Aswan High Dam caused flooding resulting in the displacement of 120,000 Nubians in the region, while 6,500 people in Ontario's "Lost Villages" watched as their communities were submerged as part of the Saint Lawrence Seaway project.

At the beginning of the novel, Egyptian engineer Avery and his Canadian wife, Jean, are newly married. They live in a houseboat on the Nile River in the shadow of the massive Abu Simbel rock temples, which were carved out of a mountain during the thirteenth century B.C. under Pharaoh Ramesses II. Avery is an engineer working on the hugely costly and architecturally-daunting project to relocate the rock temples in their entirety to protect them from rising floodwaters due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Despite the huge costs—both in terms of money, labor, and the displacement of ethnic Nubians—Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser is determined to build the dam so the country can harness hydroelectric power and better control flooding in the future. The project is also tied into Nasser's ideas of Arab nationalism in contrast to the Egyptian monarchy he helped overthrow, along with other monarchies that still exist in the Middle East region.

Avery is one of many engineers tasked with leading the temple relocation project. His team and other teams cut the temple into blocks weighing no less than twenty tons, dismantle the blocks, and relocate them to an area two hundred meters away and sixty-five meters higher in elevation. Avery calls himself a "machine-worshipper," frequently waxing poetic about the ability of machines to assemble and destroy in equal measure. Jean, meanwhile, is a botanist. In a flashback, Jean and Avery meet one another on the banks of the St. Lawrence River where Jean lost her home during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. She works to preserve the Canadian wildflowers in the region, aware that her interference may be just as threatening to their survival.



Having witnessed the chaos created along the St. Lawrence River, Jean is deeply dubious of the Aswan Dam Project. She tells Avery, “The dam would make a gash so deep and long that the land would never recover. The water would pool, a blood blister of a lake. The wound would become infected – bilharzia, malaria – and in the new towns, modern loneliness and decay of every sort. Sooner than anyone would expect, the fish would begin dying of thirst.”

Before long, Jean and Avery are expecting a child, a baby girl. Tragically, the girl is stillborn, and the weight of the loss is too much for Jean and Avery to bear. Jean moves back to Canada, settling in an apartment in Toronto. Avery abandons his work on the temple relocation project and re-enrolls in architecture school. He comes to see the reconstruction as "a further desecration, as false as redemption without repentance."

The focus of the second half of the novel stays on Jean. In Toronto, she meets and falls in love with a Polish Jew named Lucjan. An artist and a revolutionary, Lucjan is haunted by the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II, recalling his own community's reclamation project to try to rebuild the Old City of Warsaw. Jean and Lucjan lie together in bed, reflecting on those who lost their lives and their homes in wars and federally-funded engineering projects, all of them done in the name of progress. They discuss the winter vaults, which lend their name to the book's title and are designed to house the dead when the weather is too cold and the ground too hard to dig a grave. The grief Jean feels for these dead is in some ways misplaced mourning for her child, whose loss she has yet to fully grasp. She spends much of the second half of the book listening to Lucjan's stories and hanging out with his bohemian friends, giving little thought to Avery or their stillborn child.



In the end, Avery and Jean are reunited, though it is left unclear whether they will ever fully reconcile and live happily together again.

According to The Guardian, The Winter Vault is told with "humane intelligence and lush language."