Europa
Review by Walter Cummins
This, Miller’s tenth novel, was a finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize and received two major British awards for historical fiction. The story is historical because it is set during the actual frigid winter of 1962-63 in England’s Somerset county—roads impassable, train lines blocked, the ground frozen with ice and snow, people enduring constant chill, just surviving each day a misery.
The wretchedness of the weather penetrates body and mind of Miller’s characters, in particular two young couples—Eric Parry, a local doctor, and his London-bred wife, Irene, and Bill Simmons, an Oxford dropout turned would-be farmer, and his once showgirl wife, Rita. Despite class differences, the wives, in neighboring homes, bond, in good part because they are both pregnant. As the story develops, this is clearly the winter of their discontent, as it is for the people around them.
The novel begins with a suicide, that of a young man, Stephen Storey, who overdoses in a nearby mental hospital, an act made possible by Eric’s misdiagnosis, thinking the patient was capable of managing a supply of sedatives. While references to the act enter throughout, it does not affect the action, but it does linger as a shadow darkening all that happens next. The body was discovered by Martin Lee, Rita’s father, who had been traumatized when he had to take photographs at Belsen concentration camp at the end of the war. He too is mentioned but never appears in the novel again.
Miller is skillful at penetrating the thoughts of this community of characters, revealing an essential confusion about who they are, what they want, and how to grasp the nature of the lives they should be living.
One example can be found when Rita says to her friend Gloria after telling her being a farmer’s wife is just a game: “I don’t know anything […] not any more. It isn’t supposed to go like that.” Another is Eric imagining leaving Irene and becoming a physician in the Antarctic: “It would give him the company of serious men, sober, intent. A community! Was that what he had been looking for?”
A singular demonstration of this collective muddle takes place at a Boxing Day party thrown by Eric and Irene. The event gathers most of the novel’s characters, major and minor, at least those living close enough to manage the brief frigid journey to their house. Once all are assembled, Miller is very effective at keeping track of them as they wander from room to room, choose food, open bottles of liquor, pick music, and drift from conversation to conversation. The author keeps better track of their whereabouts than they do themselves. Despite their show of pleasure, they are really disoriented. At one moment, after cleaning her drunken sister’s vomit, Irene encounters a woman standing at the washbasin, who apologizes and says, “I got lost.” That woman, Alison, has been having an affair with Eric, her husband and teenage son somewhere among the downstairs guests.
One telling moment occurs when Rita discovers Eric’s recording of St. John Passion and sets it on the turntable in place of the party music: ” She had theories about Jesus Christ; she was curious. She put it on, just to have a taste of it, but then the sounds, like something prowling, something crossing a dark space unstoppably towards them, made it impossible to move. When the voices came—and they came unfairly, leaping from the dusty speaker, stunning her—so did Dr. Parry. He reached past her and lifted the needle.” That’s because, as Eric tells her, it isn’t party music. What he does put on instead is “God bless the child who has his own …”
Once the guests all leave, it’s clear that the evening has been a sad affair. The section ends with Bill and Ruth standing in the field that separates their home from Eric and Irene’s, enveloped by darkness: “Then she [Ruth] gripped his arm, leaned into him, and with heads bowed they pushed on, no longer quite certain of their direction, the torch playing over shifting veils that seemed sometimes to rush at them, then parted to let them through.”
Another work of art, this one a painting rather than music—The Arenolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck—as a print on the bedroom wall is referred to at a number of points in the novel. Irene is uncertain she likes the man portrayed, calling him strange-looking , noting that the bride seems to be looking away. She isn’t sure if this wedding gift from a medical school friend of Eric’s was meant as a joke: “His [the groom’s] other hand was raised in a gesture of blessing, or as if to silence her, silence everyone, while the brain behind that long white face puzzled something out. The bride was dressed in green. She was pregnant, or that was what it looked like, her free hand on the green swell of her dress. Hard to say where she was looking. Not at him, her husband.”
The first two parts of the novel develop the building tensions among the characters, especially the two focal couples, but in the third and final part, “Live Your Life,” the culmination of the confusions explodes into action. The four lose control of the lives they have been contemplating so futilely. They fail to shape events. Events drive them into chaos, in good part because of the terrible winter. The packed ice stops trains, causes a car crash. A revealed secret destroys another car. Some of what happens results in spattered blood, especially a painful miscarriage in the midst of a blizzard. That gathers the couples in a field as they seek help in a medical helicopter rising above the “meaningless and lovely, dark flowing of the snow.”
