The best books to read on a cold winter’s night
Look out of the window this winter and you’re faced with either bucketing rain or unseasonable sunshine. I suspect that the only way to enjoy a proper snow-dusted bone-chilling winter experience this January will be to close the curtains on the outside world and stick your nose into a few books.
Whereas sultry summers are the best backdrop for love stories, winter is the ideal setting for adventure. For many of us, it is impossible to hear somebody lamenting a lack of snow without recalling Will, the young hero of Susan Cooper’s fantasy classic The Dark Is Rising: his birthday falls on the Winter Solstice, and “the gift he most wished for … was something nobody could give him: it was snow, beautiful, deep, blanketing snow, and it never came.”
On the eve of his 11th birthday Will finally gets his wish when his cosy attic bedroom is invaded by the outside world: “there came a wrenching crash, with the howling of the wind suddenly much louder and closer, and a great blast of cold.” The snowstorm that breaks through his skylight is a reminder that snow can be dangerous as well as beautiful, and a harbinger of the ways in which the comfy certainties of Will’s childhood are about to be replaced by the chilly reality of the evil forces he must learn to fight.
I’d be lying if I said that as a child I’d never hopped into a wardrobe and hoped to feel under my feet the tell-tale crunch of snow that heralded Lucy Pevensie’s first entry into Narnia in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as she leaves drab wartime England behind and catches her first glimpse of the faun Mr Tumnus, carrying his tail over his arm to keep it out of the snow. The snow and ice give Narnia an ethereal beauty, but are ultimately malign, as the White Witch has made the season permanent – “always winter and never Christmas”.
Another children’s classic that captures the ambiguous nature of winter is Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. The story starts with Mole and Rat spending the summer “messing about in boats”, but the arrival of winter, with the pair getting lost in a blizzard in the Wild Wood, heralds the loss of innocence and the intrusion of darker elements into the story. And yet the evocation of the Wild Wood in winter is unforgettably quirky and joyful: “Here and there great branches had been torn away by the sheer weight of the snow, and robins perched and hopped on them in their perky conceited way, just as if they had done it themselves.”
Winter can be even more insistently metaphorical in works for adults. In “The Dead”, the great concluding story in Joyce’s Dubliners, the Twelfth Night snowfall blanketing the whole of Ireland (“we haven’t had snow like it for 30 years”) brings home to Gabriel Conroy the interconnectedness of all human beings and their identical fates: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Sometimes wintry weather is more than decoration, and plays a part in directing the events of a novel. The chilly New England winter setting of Edith Wharton’s 1911 novella Ethan Frome not only reflects the misery of its protagonist – a pair of would-be lovers who can never be together – it also offers them a means of escaping their plight by embarking on a kamikaze sledge ride: “Right into the big elm … So ‘t we’d never have to leave each other any more.” It’s a measure of the treachery of winter, however, that this seasonal suicide pact doesn’t quite come off as hoped.
One of the best evocations of winter I know is in Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm (made into an underrated film by Ang Lee in 1997). As lies and secrets are exposed in two families in suburban Connecticut, against the backdrop of a fierce ice storm over Thanksgiving weekend, nobody notices teenager Mike disappearing to revel in the storm’s defamiliarising effects.
“Everywhere New Canaan was sheathed in this ice, in this coating that seemed to render the stuff of his everyday life beautiful again … He recognized trees in a way he never had, recognized the vast, arterial movement of roads in his neighbourhood, recognized the gallant and stalwart quality of telephone poles.” But the lesson that winter is never more dangerous than when it’s most beautiful comes a couple of pages later, when the storm brings down a telephone wire and Mike is fatally electrocuted.
One sub-genre in which winter has proved indispensable is the classic whodunnit, with many a list of murder suspects helpfully limited by the fact that heavy snowfall has cut Mayhem Manor off from the rest of the world (two favourites are Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman and Cyril Hare’s An English Murder). And it was of course the master of the “impossible” crime novel John Dickson Carr who first came up (in his 1935 mystery The White Priory Murders, written as Carter Dickson) with the now familiar trope of the corpse surrounded by snow but with no killer’s footprints in evidence.
These books deal with the discombobulating effect of the arrival of winter in normally equable climes, but if you’re really seeking something that gnaws at your bones, try a book with a setting in which ice and snow are commonplace. Much of the emotional impact of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina derives from the turbulence of the weather reflecting the heroine’s tempestuous feelings, and she delights in the bad weather just as she delights in the dangerous feelings Vronsky evokes in her as they embark on their affair (“At that moment the wind, as if it had mastered all obstacles, scattered the snow from the carriage roofs, and set a loose sheet of iron clattering … The awfulness of the storm appeared still more beautiful to her now. He had said just what her soul desired but her reason dreaded.”)
In Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the terrible winter that was the backdrop to the October Revolution of 1917 seems to reflect and even inspire the political turmoil of the period: “There was something in common between the disturbances in the moral and in the physical world.” And of course the film would hardly be as memorable if Omar Sharif and Julie Christie went around in T-shirts instead of furs and ushanka hats.
Perhaps the ideal books to read by a roaring fire in winter are those that tell of perilous journeys through miles of unforgiving snow. Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of Scott’s disastrous expedition to the South Pole, The Worst Journey in the World, is the finest non-fiction example. But I also recommend such classic adventure stories as Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights, about a CIA agent’s search for a sinister Russian laboratory in deepest Siberia, and Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet, in which Tintin falls down a crevasse and Captain Haddock has his whisky pinched by the Abominable Snowman.
Finally, winter is the ideal season for slapstick: after all, people are up and about and engaged in perilous activities rather than half-comatose on a sun lounger. The description of the hapless Mr Winkle trying to impress the lovely Arabella Allen with his ice skating skills in The Pickwick Papers has been making people laugh for nearly 200 years; and Mr Pickwick’s sudden descent through the cracking ice, though it threatens to turn the comedy into a tragedy, proves to be even funnier. Like so many of these great winter reads, it has the paradoxical ability to warm the cockles of your heart.
The best winter books
The Pickwick Papers (1837)
Skating, sliding and gallons of smoking bishop: Dickens gives us winter at its most benign.
Anna Karenina (1878)
Although the winter wolf hunt in War and Peace is unforgettable, this is Tolstoy’s snowiest, stormiest novel.
Orlando (1928)
Virginia Woolf’s evocation of the “Frost Fair” held on the frozen Thames during the Great Frost of 1608 stands among her best writing.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Boris Pasternak’s epic, spanning three decades of Russian history, rarely features a scene in which you wouldn’t want to be wearing your biggest coat.
The Dark Is Rising (1973)
Now going viral on TikTok 50 years after it was published, Susan Cooper’s YA adventure story sends its hero on a journey through a frozen landscape.
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992)
The epitome of Nordic Noir, Peter H?eg’s mystery thriller sees a Greenlander’s intimate knowledge of snow aid her in probing a suspicious death.
Snow Falling on Cedars (1994)
A snowstorm grips an island off Washington state while a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in David Guterson’s unconventional murder mystery.
Northern Lights (1995)
Philip Pullman’s alternative-world fantasy epic features his own distinctive version of the Arctic and literature’s most memorable polar bear fight.
Snow (2002)
In Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novel, cultural and religious tensions come to a head in a remote Turkish city cut off by a heavy snowfall.
Winter (2017)
The second volume in Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet” focuses on a large family gathering in Cornwall and has deliberate echoes of Shaksepeare’s wintry late Romances.
