Roger Brunyate's Reviews > The Big Snow

Warmth in the Snow

On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don’t think that is its main point. At 137 pages it is a novella really, half the length of the whole book, and its mystery is insufficient to justify that proportion on its own. But put together with the other four stories, all of which are set in Northern Ireland during the severe blizzard of 1963, it completes a quietly marvelous collection of character studies, all featuring people who are socially awkward or wrong-footed by the extreme conditions, and treating them with love and understanding. Forget the title; this is a warm book. And an especially meaningful one for me, who grew up in that part of the world, and would have been about the same age as the two youngest protagonists.

The opening story, The Light of the World, is the shortest, and hauntingly beautiful. I don’t want to say too much about it (or any of the stories) as Park is so skillful at controlling information. But it concerns a man leafing through a volume of Ansel Adams photographs while talking to his wife, who is also a photographer. She is lying in bed, and he is standing at the window, watching the falling snow, and everything is connected by beauty, pain, and that pure, pure light.



The Wedding Dress is almost as short, and equally mesmerizing. A woman scans the papers for a used bridal dress to buy for her own upcoming wedding, before she too goes out into the snow. White on white, its secret is a terrible one, and oh so sad.

At 35 pages, Against the Cold is more substantial. Mr. Peel, the headmaster of a Belfast school, works with one of his teachers, Miss Lewis, to see the pupils safely home before snow closes them down. Conscious of his noblesse oblige, he escorts her to her door. She invites him in for a cup of tea before he starts his own long trek home, but the snow falls harder and harder. Peel is the only one of the five protagonists we do not like immediately. He is authoritarian and patronizing; he fantasizes about one of the other teachers, and looks down on Miss Lewis; he is a prude, who disapproves of her having a reproduction of a couple kissing on her living-room wall (he has probably never heard of Dante Gabriel Rossetti). But they have a long day ahead of them, and things can change.…



My favorite story was the second longest at 65 pages, Snow Trails. Peter, its principal character, is the son of the local undertaker, in his first year studying French at university, and longing to get away from the small country town. He is attracted to the young wife of a Belfast businessman, who has recently bought property on the outskirts. She is at least a decade older than him, but that doesn’t lessen the intensity of his crush. When they meet, he is reading Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier [ The Lost Estate ], and is thrilled that she has read it too. Indeed, the whole story might almost be a retelling of Alain-Fournier's impossible-to-recapture romantic dream, but it is no less effective in its own terms.

And it is a similarly young protagonist, not the mystery, that is the focus of The Big Snow. Like the young Morse in Endeavour, probationary detective constable Swift is better educated and smarter than most of the people around him. But he is also green behind the ears and touchingly insecure. He is paired with an old-school sergeant named Gracey, who has no time for niceties but gets results by concentrating on the most likely culprit and squeezing a confession out of him. Only this time, Swift reckons he is wrong; most readers too will probably see the way the wind is blowing well before the halfway mark. But the real interest is in the relationship between the cub and the old grizzly, which takes some surprising turns, and in the character of Swift himself. He identifies strongly with the young murder victim, who is probably the first woman he has seen unclothed, and treats the case as a personal chivalric crusade. Once again, Park gets what it is to be young, sensitive, and bright. So it is a pity that, in developing a type he had captured so perfectly in the shorter story, he moves a little too close to melodrama in the longer one. Were this the whole book, my rating would be no more than four stars. But given the strength of the others, I can certainly go to five.

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This is the fourth David Park book I have read. I begin to think he has a special affinity for short to medium length fiction. The very fine The Poet's Wives consists of three novellas, focusing on the wives of William Blake, Osip Mandelstam, and a fictional contemporary Irish poet. His The Light of Amsterdam and The Truth Commissioner are full novels, but each consists of several distinct strands that eventually interweave; I was a little lukewarm about the Amsterdam book, but the other is one of the most constructive responses to the Troubles in Northern Ireland that I have read. Long or short, I recommend anything he writes.