How This Symbol Works: Blue in The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

As the title suggests, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is a bleak and unforgiving novel.

The story follows two couples as they come variously unravelled in England’s record-breaking winter of 1963. From the first page, Miller begins knitting his tapestry of complex symbolism, and the most interesting element quickly becomes the colour blue, first encoded when Eric recalls buying his Citroën from a car dealer who described the paint job as “bleu nuage,” or “cloud blue.” Writers curious about image patterns and symbol development can learn a lot by tracking how blue crops up throughout this novel’s few hundred pages.

First, it helps to know that Eric is the village doctor, and because of his poor upbringing, he’s got some class preoccupations that his caring wife, Irene, was inoculated against during her own, more privileged childhood. They live in a nice cottage down the lane from Bill and Ira’s drafty, rundown farmhouse, a site where the former is devoted to making a success of himself far beyond the orbit of his rich father’s brash corruption, and this is an agenda he’s imposed on his pregnant wife, who has serious mental health problems and spends her days contemplating her life before marriage.

The book begins with a thick and soupy fog cast over the village and progresses to an oppressive winter whiteout, with only a few glimpses of sunlight in between. It’s an emotionally and psychologically complicated story that rotates points of view as it slowly weaves its narrative through the experiences of these two couples, drawing increasingly elaborate lines of contradiction and convergence.

When we first meet Eric, he’s driving his car through the village, out on his rounds, and we immediately like him as we watch him care for his patients. That’s why we’re so surprised when we see him treat his devoted wife with blistering contempt as he pursues an affair with a woman he met as her doctor. Eric, we’ll come to learn, is an endlessly selfish piece of garbage, and this contradiction is presaged by the description of his car’s colour—because since when are clouds blue? That, in fact, is the property of skies.

Lingering over this contradiction is a trip. Because we’ve got clouds on the mind, our first instinct is to connect blue with beautiful open skies that speak of freedom, visibility, and deep, invigorating lungfuls of fresh, rejuvenating air. Meanwhile, we think of clouds as lumbering grey things that blot out the clarity of our skies. Then we remember all that clingy wet fog hanging over the setting, and we think, well, what’s a cloud if not an isolated patch of fog? And in a world without blue skies, a world in which society is still trying to move on from the psychological wounds of the Second World War, do fancy cars painted in colours named after impossible clouds not represent a form of self-delusion? Are they not a means of obscuring our healthy freedom, conspiring with the fog by dressing in the appealing aesthetics of its opposite?

Maybe this is why we only see Eric drive the car when he visits his patients, performing a public persona he abandons in private, or when he visits his mistress, a woman he obsesses over primarily to escape the resentments he unfairly harbours toward his wife. We don’t see him use it for much else, least of all to take Irene for a drive. And by the time the book ends and Eric has been exposed for the person he really is, his Citroën has been rather roughly revealed as well.

The colour’s journey through the book starts with that initial description of the car, and from there, the author often uses it to tie the idea of complicated self-delusion to other characters. For example, Irene’s sister enjoys an exciting, liberated life in the United States, and she mails Irene accounts of these experiences in blue envelopes transported by plane. We see them early in the novel, and later, when Irene has no choice but to resign herself to the fullness of her situation, she copes in part by letting her sister’s stories, so bright and compelling, cloud over the bleak reality of life with Eric.

There’s also the book’s mantric repetition that “the future is purple,” a phrase that Bill’s brother, filthy rich from the rotten spoils of their dad’s slumlord empire, pronounces more than once as an explanation for why his own fancy car happens to be purple. Purple is what you get when you mix blue with red, and by this point, the author has already connected red to mental illness in the novel’s prologue, which features an old man waking up in an asylum, a man who looks at the fog through red-trimmed curtains while wearing a red wool cardigan his daughter gave him last Christmas, and when we learn that he had a bit of a penchant for setting fires, we understand red as more problematic still. This man takes on greater significance as the novel develops, but for now it’s enough to know that Bill’s alcoholic brother believes, consciously or otherwise, that a successful future is a mix of mental illness and effective self-delusion. Heavy stuff.

Colours, weather, cars, cattle—this novel is rich with symbolism, but without a doubt, blue does a lot of the heavy lifting, so much so that it’s a prominent part of the cover design. Unpacking the meaning isn’t too tough if you focus on it from the outset, and a close study will reveal strategies you can use to make similar image patterns in work of your own.