Guy Vanderhaeghe's western novel August into Winter involves murder and retribution in a small Prairie town
In the historical fiction novel August into Winter, Guy Vanderhaeghe imagines the world of a small Prairie town in the 1930s and 1940s, and it dazzles in its detail and humanity. With the long shadow of war shaping the characters' lives, August into Winter is an epic story of good versus evil — and how humans respond to crises they could never have imagined.
Vanderhaeghe started publishing books in 1982, winning the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction with his debut short story collection, Man Descending. He would go on to win two more Governor General's Literary Awards: in 1996 for The Englishman's Boy and in 2015 for the short story collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories.
August into Winter was a finalist for the 2021 Atwood Gibson Prize for fiction.
The Saskatoon-based Vanderhaeghe spoke to The Next Chapter's Shelagh Roger about writing August into Winter.
I haven't met a character like Ernie, your antagonist, for quite some time. He is a narcissist. He's childish. He's a psychopath. He is incredibly vain. Where in your imagination did you find someone like Ernie?
My conception of him was evil incarnate. I was struck, years and years ago when I was a young man in my 20s, by Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. The subtitle of that was A Report on the Banality of Evil.
As the character grew over the course of time, I increasingly got obsessed with the president of the United States. This wasn't conscious on my part, but I think I began to inject parts of Trump's personality into the personality of Ernie Sickert. I was so obsessed with him, and so immersed in news of what was going on below the border, that he must have crept into Ernie Sickert.
Why were you so obsessed with Donald Trump?
I was very terrified about the threat to democracy. I was terrified by the rise of the alt-right, not only in the United States, but elements of it in my own country and all over the world. Even before the election of Trump in the United States, I had a feeling that our world was veering in a bad direction. I do see parallels between what is happening now and what occurred in the 1930s. So it was, on my part, unavoidable. It was something that I kept thinking about all the time.
Ernie's a very interesting character to me because, while he may be evil incarnate, he's smart. He plays a mean saxophone, and he has this unbelievable talent which he puts to his own purposes. He sees needs in people and he uses that with great cruelty. Why did you want to give him this perverse gift?
That's why psychopaths succeed. They have no empathy. They can often read people and the worst of our politicians have those qualities too. They essentially don't care about the people that they're representing, or at least they leave that impression. Yet they often know what the people they represent want to hear, and they're willing to give it to them. So that was part of it.
Even the most monstrous human beings have within them something that I think we can find in ourselves.
The other part is that even the most monstrous human beings have within them something that we can find in ourselves. There's the old line about the villain always being the hero of his or her own story. That's the way Ernie Sickert sees himself — he is put upon, he's persecuted, he can do no wrong and, in fact, he has a right to avenge himself on the world that mistreats him or misunderstands him or doesn't give him the consideration that he feels he ought to have. His need for that consideration is insatiable.
LISTEN | Guy Vanderhaeghe discusses August into Winter:
A lot of the story takes place on the literal cusp of the Second World War. Each chapter begins with a news dispatch from the Winnipeg Evening Tribune about the gathering storm — and then entry into the war itself. What does war as a subject give you as a writer?
One of the things that war allows us to see is human beings at their worst, but also their best. War is a horrible, indescribable experience. But it's interesting how much people are willing to sacrifice for others in a wartime situation. Parents and civilians who are under threat would do almost anything for their children or the people that they love.
War is a horrible, indescribable experience. But it's interesting how much people are willing to sacrifice for others in a wartime situation.
Of course, I've never been in combat. I was one of a lucky generation that never fell to. But I grew up around men who had fought in the Second World War. As a young boy, I could almost feel their visceral attachment to the soldiers that had gone through that.
There are two brothers in the story, Jack and Oliver Dill, and they are literally brothers in arms. They fought together in the First World War. What does war do to them?
What it did to them is what it does almost inevitably to anybody who sees action. It damaged them. In dealing with their damage, they take entirely different courses. Jack is of a religious mystical bent. His intention was to become an Anglican minister, and he begins inventing his own religion. It's a religion in which he imagines a final reconciliation between heaven and Earth, where the two spheres are bound together in a perfect harmony.
His brother, Oliver, is much more of a hard-headed realist, but he has carried the violence home to him in a way that Jack hasn't. When he first arrives back in Canada, he drinks too much. He fights. He walks around with a cold anger inside him. He's been damaged by two things: the war and the death of his wife. He's trying to re-humanize himself, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.
Oliver Dill's late wife Judith is a character that he's drawn to because of her vivacity. She seems to have this enormous capacity for joie de vivre. But he comes to understand that she's had to work very hard at it. It's something that she's cultivated. She's also desperate for respectability and he tries his best to give it to her. What does respectability look like in a small Prairie town like Connaught?
I think it's fitting in with the people who matter. Her father was a ne'er-do-well, and she felt that very strongly. Anybody who grew up in a small town knows that there are respectable families and families that aren't respectable, at least in the eyes of the respectable people. What she wants to do is she wants to graduate to respectability. Part of respectability is fitting in, but it's also a certain material status, and her husband, Oliver Dill, gives her that respectability. He allows her to step into a pair of shoes that she had never worn before.
The female protagonist is a woman named Vidalia, and she's a schoolteacher who gets caught up in the action. She's a feminist before the word even existed. She's super independent. She really speaks her mind. She wants a life on her terms. How much of a challenge was that for a woman in this time period?
It was a huge challenge. In many ways, Vidalia is modelled on my own mother. She joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps during the Second World War and rose in the ranks to a position in which she was training men, vets who were disabled, teaching them skills that would allow them to be employed after the war.
She liked the opportunity. To say "be in command" would be too strong. But she liked the fact that she could be treated as an equal and, often just because of rank, she might be superior to men. But when she came back from the war, like virtually all women, she was expected to go back to what she had been doing before. I don't think that ever sat well with her.
I remember one time when I was 10 or 11 years old, I was actually shocked when she said, "You know, the happiest years of my life were the years in the army." I couldn't understand that then, but, in retrospect, I can now. Now Vidalia is very different in many ways from my mother, but I think her psychology and her personality owe something to my mother.
Winnipeg has quite a starring role in the novel. What got you thinking about Winnipeg at this time?
I grew up in the eastern part of Saskatchewan, and for a lot of people, Winnipeg was the big city. Farmers shipped cattle there. People went there to buy large items, like automobiles, things like that. I think that in many ways, Winnipeg may have been a more cosmopolitan city in the late 1930s than, say, a place like Toronto.
I've got a big crush on Winnipeg and I loved how you represented it in the novel. I wanted to talk to you too about how you give us the Prairie landscape — the weather and the plants and the animals. When you write a story like this, how do you see the elements of the western genre?
I have to say something about the posse element, that was actually based on fact to a certain extent. In 1939, a member of one of the prominent families in my hometown murdered the only policeman in town. What happened was that a group of First World War veterans formed up to go in and track him down. Now I took that and altered it for the novel. But, in my mind, landscape is character. Landscape in the novel — whether because the novel begins with a horrendous summer and ends with another almost cataclysmic winter storm — was framing the action for the novel. The weather reflected what was going on in the world, and it also reflected the interior lives of the characters. The entire novel was three levels of struggle that moved toward a kind of reconciliation at the end.
The entire novel was three levels of struggle that moved toward a kind of reconciliation at the end.
There was the physical struggle with landscape, the political struggle involved with the Second World War, the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, and it was the struggle that the characters undergo on a personal level to achieve some kind of balance.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
