Winterland by Alan Glynn is an exciting and robust engagement with modern Ireland and is one of the more thought provoking books to come out in 2010 so far. There is a lot to chew on in Winterland and I suspect that I’ll be thinking about some of these things for awhile now. It’s also a compelling crime novel that deserves to be read by all.
I read Winterland some months back and I came to the book with a certain set of expectations in place. And I’ll be the first to admit somewhat unfairly. Chief among them was that I was expecting Gina to be the primary POV character and that her quest/investigation/arc would introduce us to the other characters. I think I was also expecting a bit more of a thriller. It became clear early on that I wasn’t reading a thriller and because it’s not fair to judge a book by standards that may not exist for it I threw the thriller thing out the window.
While I am willing to admit being wrong when it comes to the thriller assumption I think that I’m on to something with the POV observation.
For me, ultimately, Winterland had too many POV characters. There is a golf tournament term that applies here: shotgun start. A shotgun start is a type of tournament where all groups of players tee off simultaneously from different holes. I felt like the first part of the book — maybe up until the warehouse scene — was like a shotgun start. So many characters were introduced that it was hard to get a handle on who was who and then who was supposed to pull me through the story. The second half of the book felt more coalesced and focused.
The upside of all of these characters is that the socio-economic cross section of Ireland was very well represented. The characters met include businessmen (both Irish and American), politicians, entrepreneurs, real estate developers, criminals.
The warehouse house scene mentioned above is the centerpiece of the book and one of the pivotal and most important scenes. Gina has a Come to Jesus moment where she realizes that she wants results in a way that she can’t provide. She decides to bring in crime boss Terry Stack. This is a decision that will have its ramifications felt for the rest of the book because once she initiates the action she won’t have any control over it. My only criticism is that it feels like she rushes to the decision and never deliberates over it and therefore has no appreciation of the action that she unleashed. I do wish that Gina would have deliberated more about the decision to call Terry Stack
I want to talk about that phone call for a second. Do you remember the movie Sleepers? The character King Benny had a line about this is where he takes over because he plays on the muddy end of the field. (I searched IMDB but couldn’t find the exact quote.) This moment, when Gina hands the investigation over to Terry Stack, was Terry Stack’s King Benny moment. Or should have been anyway. Sometimes you come across something in a book, it could be a moment, or a scene or a character, and you know that it has a full and interesting story behind it. But it winds up being left unexplored. This moment, when Gina calls Terry Stack and he shows up, that goes unexplored, is probably one of my favorites in the whole book. I like it when a character that is supposedly or ostensibly “good” has to rely on those who they normally wouldn’t. A lot of subtleties play out in these moments. Not only in Sleepers but think of others like when Denzel Washington’s character turns to Ice-T’s character for help in Ricochet. That one decision alone that the protag makes carries a lot of weight with it and has a lot of ramifications. Oddly enough though the “bad” guy never makes the protag eat a shit sandwich for finally turning to them for help. I think that there is a great crime novel to be had in these moments if someone were to promote it from moment status to full story status.
But I digress.
Back to the warehouse. One of the really interesting things, stylistically, that happen at the warehouse scene is that it all happens off the page. The prologue is actually taken from the warehouse scene and so the cutaway refers back to that earlier reading moment then back to the main section of the book. I’m generally a big fan of cool structural things in a novel and this one was cool. In fact I can only think of one book that did something similar and that was The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers. While, from a personal standpoint, I would have loved to see the action in the warehouse overall I think that the move to keep the action in the warehouse off the page was a brave and largely successful one.
This leads me to the character Mark. For me Mark was the weak link. Regardless of his involvement with the earlier car crash and Larry Bolger he was a secondary character at best and didn’t warrant as much POV time as he got.
Winterland has four main tent pole POV character: Gina, Larry Bolger, Paddy Norton and Mark. But the four main tent pole characters SHOULD have been: Gina, Larry Bolger, Paddy Norton and Terry Stack because they all are representative of different socio-economic facets of modern Ireland. Gina is a citizen (and representative of Ireland’s tech industry), Larry is a politician, Paddy is a businessman and Terry is organized crime. Since thematically the book deals with the intersection of these facets of modern Ireland Terry becomes the missed opportunity.
Additionally his POV could have offered up an interesting investigation in its own right to counterpart and run concurrently with Gina’s. To riff off of the blurb from Ken Bruen — think about the dual investigations in Mystic River and the tensions and consequences that arose from them. Then his entrance to the warehouse scene would have been a convergence of investigations and the shedding of Gina’s morality by a little bit at a time would have been accentuated also.
I have one final observation to throw out there. Maybe the Irish contingent of my dozen and a half readers can weigh in. I found the authorial morality interesting. The Irish politicians and the American businessmen all got away but it was the Irish businessmen by and large who paid the heaviest consequences — in fact paid with their lives. Is this a tacit condemnation by Glyn? Was it intended? Does the blame for the boom and bust of Ireland’s economy lie at their feet? I don’t know the answer but above all else Winterland has me thinking.
Your very detailed analysis of “Winterland” is enjoyable and gives a very balanced reading of the book.
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