In Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale, a thief in love with a doomed heiress looks for a way to turn back time and ushers in a new millennium in the process.
The book begins somewhere in Brooklyn when a beautiful white horse escapes its stable and goes trotting toward Manhattan, which is glittering and glorious under a blanket of new-fallen snow. He turns toward the Battery, but is prevented from going further by a locked gate. Then he sees Peter Lake, who is trapped by the same gate
The young thief is being pursued by members of a ferocious street gang under the command of their leader, Pearly Soames, who has been chasing Peter for years.
Peter seems doomed until the white horse picks him up, jumps the fence and gallops away so fleetly that those who see the horse later swear that it flew.
This is the kind of novel that’s most often described as a “tour de force,” only here, the material really deserves the title. It is part epic history of New York (where the early chapters overlap Gangs of New York with tales of Dead Rabbits and Short Tails and other gangs), part love story and partly a story of redemption and the power of love.
The story is filled with tons of detail that make us feel like we’re sharing Peter’s life (or lives) in whatever time it’s taking place. (There’s a description of what roast oysters taste like that makes our mouth water, and when Peter puts the sack of hot shells against his stomach to warm himself, it gives us a quick, vivid picture of just how cold it is in the winter in which this story takes place.
In fact, the story is crowded with all sorts of things—characters, plot, descriptions of small things that turn poetic when gilded by Helprin’s prose. He is word-struck, in love with this city and its possibilities. (And the possibility of what the city can become and the enormity of what Peter sets out to accomplish takes the story out of magical realism and into the realm of philosophy.)
This book is about ideas and his characters spend time contemplating the nature of life, the nature of God and the possibility of cosmic justice. Because the plot goes back and forth in time, and involves a number of complicated storylines and entwined histories, it does not lend itself to a simple three-act structure. Nor is there a clear throughline, the sort of hook that sells a movie to its audience.
The closer we get to the Millennium in the story, the more allegorical the tale becomes. We can admire the writing, but it’s hard to get drawn in as the generations unfold. Also, the characters in the first part of the novel are much richer and more dimensional than those in the last chapters.
Helprin has created a magical version of New York as a backdrop for his story—starry nights and the false constellations of Grand Central Station’s ceiling. There is a dark ribbon of realism running through the magic, particularly in the early chapters where bad things happen to good people, but that realism only serves to enhance the wonder of what is happening to Peter and to the city he loves.
Magical realism is difficult to put on screen; the genre tends toward the delicate, but Akiva Goldsman has crafted a lovely adaptation of the novel and the movie’s cast is topnotch, so the cinematic version may fare better than most movies in the genre. And for readers, the novel is a lovely book that can be savored at leisure.
