Andrew Smith's Reviews > Snow Country

I normally know how I feel about a novel quite early on and that view seldom changes as I progress through the story – but this one was different. Set in Austria in the first half of the 19th Century, we follow quite a cast of characters as they live through the build-up to The Great War and events thereafter (the war itself getting only a bit part role in this particular tale). The characters we’re introduced to include:

Lena – born to an alcoholic mother who enjoys the experience of pregnancy but rather avoids what comes after.

Anton – a roaming journalist who witnesses the building of the Suez Canal before experiencing the horror of war.

Rudolf – an earnest young lawyer whose political views prove to be at odds with his country’s ruling party.

Martha – who runs a sanatorium which was co-founded by her father (this having being detailed in the author’s earlier book Human Traces)

There are others too, perhaps too many for my taste, whose lives are to intersect. Love is found and love is lost – and sometimes love is found again – as historical events unfold around them. I felt the narrative was jerky and I struggled to get into its flow. I was interested in what was happening around the characters but not gripped by lives of people who kept flitting in and out of the frame. Amongst the cast, Lena appealed to me most: she’d led such a tough life, struggling to find anything at all to latch on to – could it be that there would at least be a happy ending for her?

There was a point mid-book where I actually contemplated giving up on this one, it wasn’t my thing (in truth, historical fiction rarely is) but the quality of the writing alone kept me going. And I’m glad I stuck with it because as the tale entered it’s final third I suddenly found myself interested in the plight of a number of the players, the same people who had failed to arouse my interest to this point. Things started to come together, the links clicking into place. Now I was wondering – and more importantly caring - how it was all going to play out.

I’m not going to give away anything that would spoil the book for future readers, but I will say that the ending is both suspenseful and satisfying. So how do I rate this book? Well, for me the first half merits three stars at best but the back end is more four star territory. So it’s flip a coin time, but I’m going to go with how I felt at the book’s conclusion: so it’s a slightly generous 4 stars from me.

My thanks to Random House UK, Cornerstone and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.