Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault, Bloomsbury 2009, ISBN: 9780747598091. £16.99

One of the many bewitching qualities of Anne Michaels’ writing is her ability to engage with the utmost delicacy in philosophical questions that could easily seem trite in less able hands: What is that renders life meaningful, or conversely, meaningless? What is identity? What is love? How do we live with the past without being overwhelmed by it?

Michaels’ searching dissection of such questions lay at the heart of her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, which earned her much-deserved literary plaudits and a devoted readership. The story of a young boy, Jakob, rescued from Poland during World War Two by a Greek scientist, Athos Roussos, and the unfolding narrative of their interlocked lives, is an astonishing exploration of the frailty and the resilience of the human heart, rendered in the most exquisite prose. The combination of Michaels’ intellectual rigour and her acute ear for language - she is the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry: The Weight of Oranges (1986), Miner’s Pond (1991) and Skin Divers (1999) – combine in Fugitive Pieces to form a novel “electric with life”, as one critic put it.

Her new novel, The Winter Vault, seems at first a pale imitation of its powerful precursor. Avery Escher is a British engineer engaged as part of an international rescue team on the relocation of the Ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel above the water levels of Lake Nasser. With him is his wife, Jean, a Canadian, whom he met not long before whilst working on another major engineering project, the St Lawrence Seaway. Jean and Avery’s marriage is happy: a union of quiet, mutual gratitude: “They both felt the randomness of fortune, the unnerving shadow of what might never have happened.”

Set against the painstaking dismantling of the Abu Simbel temple is the construction of Jean and Avery’s intimacy, based on the steady and joyful accumulation of shared knowledge of one another. As dusk falls over the Nile, Avery paints watercolours of the English countryside of his childhood on Jean’s naked back. In the heat of the Egyptian night, they endlessly exchange stories about themselves, their childhoods, their parents’ lives.

As the great temple is painstakingly taken apart, however, Avery is consumed with doubts. How do you relocate a religious site? How do you calculate, still less preserve or enclose, sacred space? The rescue mission seems increasingly to Avery an act of profanity, a desecration. His misgivings gradually extend beyond the temple to the Nubian people, 120,000 of them, forcibly displaced by the massive lake that will flood their land and villages, built at the insistence of President Nasser against the strongest recommendations of his scientific advisors.

As in Fugitive Pieces, Michaels works obliquely, drawing us into the heart of her concerns with a net of slowly building detail about engineering, botany, geology. The physical world provides rich metaphors in Michaels’ exploration of the relationship between identity and place. We leave our trace on the land, on plants, on paper, and of course on each other. The delicate ecosystems ravaged by man-made lakes and diverted waterways are as worthy of attention as the emotional devastation caused by war or genocide. The physical world teaches us how to live, if we will only pause to consider its lessons. As one by one the deserted Nubian villages are flooded, Avery recalls the flooded towns of Ingleside and Long Sault, and records in his notebook: “Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you.”

For Avery, the chasm between what is possible and what is desirable increasingly cannot be ignored. Time, he slowly realises, and the fragile but vital meanings time contains, cannot easily be rearranged. Technical skill and scientific knowledge are not adequate to the real challenge. The past cannot simply be dismantled and reassembled to suit man’s convenience. Memories are not simply mental relics, but an aggregation of significant moments that we carry in every cell of our body, and which in turn give meaning to our present and future. “Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice,” Jean tells him, “you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.”

When Jean discovers she is pregnant, the analogy is complete: one temple is being emptied while another is filling. But Jean and Avery, in the infancy of their married love, are uneasily overshadowed by both the antiquity of Abu Simbel and the Nubians, whose daily lives and five thousand year old culture are about to be destroyed forever. When Jean’s pregnancy ends in stillbirth, it seems to Jean, at least, like some kind of punishment. Soon after, Avery’s work on Abu Simbel is complete. The couple return to Canada, their intimacy in ruins.

As The Winter Vault progresses, it becomes clear that this novel shares much of the thematic territory of Fugitive Pieces. It, too, is minutely concerned with the legacy of personal history, although in Jean and Avery, the subject is approached from the point of view of two characters who have not been traumatised by the large-scale horrors of the Nazi holocaust, not directly at any rate. Yet loss, as Michaels’ shows, can become a winter vault in which anyone can find themselves entombed.

At times, the weight of Jean and Avery's recollections threatens to sink the story and bore the reader. I tired of their memories rather sooner than they did and found myself wondering: does anyone really talk like this? Their insatiable appetite for the past, the dead and gone – a trait shared by all the characters in the novel – begins to have a transgressive feel to it after a while: remembering stops being bonding and instead comes uncomfortably close to a kind of emotional necrophilia.

Separated from Avery, Jean becomes involved with an artist, Lucjan, a man deeply damaged by his experiences as a Jewish child in occupied Poland. Memory – Jean slowly comes to understand – gives meaning to our lives but also threatens our capacity to live fully. Relationships, too, can become life-denying places where we simply wait for death. And so begins Jean and Avery’s slow journey back to one another, a journey that requires each of them to reckon with the past, and make their peace with it.

The Winter Vault is at heart an enquiry into the necessity and the danger of memory. If this novel has a single message to bestow, it is that personal tragedy, unlike stone or water, cannot be calibrated, any more than it can be avoided. Loss, whether of a child, or a parent, or a home, is always intensely meaningful, intensely subjective, whether it affects one person or a million. Suffused with melancholy, this is a novel about death and loss, but also about love and the unconquerable, redeeming human urge to connect.