'Winter Under Water' - a review by Adam Carlton

Amazon - and what an alluring cover image!

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Review: Winter Under Water by James Hopkin

Here is the Amazon description of this interestingly-flawed novel.

"When Joseph meets Marta, who has come to the UK to research the forgotten histories of remarkable women from across Europe, he is captivated, and Marta feels the same; when she returns to her previous life, their relationship continues through letters and phone calls. Then Joseph decides to visit Marta in her native Poland.

"Interlinking Joseph’s often strange experiences with Marta’s letters to him, Winter Under Water is a book about who we are and who we choose to love; exploring issues of isolation and identity, of home and belonging, it is also, ultimately, a book that suggests you only truly know a person or a place when you can sit in silence and not feel compelled to break it - in any language."

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That's not my take, however.

James Hopkin’s debut novel Winter Under Water (2007) presents itself as a love story in Kraków in the early 1990s, but its real subject is Poland at the hinge of history. Joseph, a rootless Englishman, and Marta, a Polish academic, are less characters than ciphers. Their romance is the surface play of deeper forces: the collision of Western liberal cosmopolitanism with Eastern European post-Communist disillusion.

Joseph stands in for that familiar tribe of educated but precarious Western youth - the bohemian “precariat” - arts degrees in hand but no prospects. They cling to those universalist, atomised liberal values they absorbed in their universities, and they attach these values to the supra-national promise of “Europe”. To them, Europe is not a continent but a dream: a utopian ideology; a secular faith to fill the void of religion and class.

Marta emerges from a parallel class in Poland: young, educated, equally disenchanted with her own society, but tempered by history. Having lived under Communism, she has seen “progressive” ideology deployed as a weapon of oppression. Polish dissidents even in their idealism were trained in cynicism - hard-headed realism about human weakness and the corruption of systems. Marta, though alienated from her own culture perceives the shallowness of Joseph's fashionable worldview.

Their supposed love affair - briefly intense followed by a slow sputtering - is that as metaphor. It dramatizes the brief encounter of Western utopian liberalism with Eastern post-ideological scepticism. And, like their relationship, it is doomed. Both currents are swiftly swept aside by the onrush of the new bourgeois order: the Kantor currency-exchange booths, the gold-toothed hustlers, the flood of Western kitsch and consumerism. Romance fades as ideals dissolve into commerce and boho tourism.

Hopkin captures this moment with startling prose. Critics rightly praised his metaphors, which illuminate the novel like sudden flashes of winter light: paranoia sitting on a man “like a pigeon on a crust”, or roads that glimmer “like tin trays carrying water”. These images linger long after the plot - such as it is - is forgotten. His great gift is atmosphere, and in this book the atmosphere is history itself - the feel of a city poised between collapse and colonisation.

But the weakness remains: most saliently with Joseph and Marta themselves - they are exasperating: Joseph, narcissistic and self-indulgent; Marta, lost in contradictions.

Winter Under Water succeeds, then, as a prose-poem of transition rather than as a novel of character. It is a portrait of Poland’s fleeting liminality, when the old ideologies had collapsed but the new consumerist dispensation had not yet locked in.

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