In Labrador, life is something painstakingly worked from the land in seasonal cycles. In this way, it is not mystery that propels Winter's novel, but a question as to the nature of survival.
Early on, readers are made aware of the life into which Wayne is born and his parents, Treadway and Jacinta, are forced.
Written in the omniscient third, Annabel's secrets are such only to the characters. Indeed, much of Winter's prose reads as timelessly as the hard necessities of survival in Labrador. Annabel makes no promises of assurances and leads readers well away-and rightfully so-from science. Middlesex is a novel of precision in which questions are to be answered. Eugenides's novel takes on international concerns and creates a historiography of the Greek immigrant experience in America, while maintaining sure devotion to a scientific accounting of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency-the recessive condition accountable for the majority of intersex individuals. These are two significantly different novels.
Untold to him, Wayne's intersex nature is secreted by his parents and a friend of his mother, though the ghost of the daughter he might have been remains loosely concealed.Ĭomparisons to Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002) are bound to occur, misplaced as they may be. The decision is made: raise the child as a boy, Wayne. It is into this culture of hard-boiled masculinity and contained femininity that a child both male and female is born. Begun during a decade that so altered contemporary ideas, the novel's characters are at once preserved and sheltered from the gender and racial enlightenment of the 1960s by Labrador's near impenetrable forest of tradition and inaccessibility. Her debut novel, Annabel, finds itself deep in the largely untamed wilderness of twentieth-century Labrador. It comes as no surprise that as a Giller Prize finalist-one of the Canada's foremost literary awards-Winter's literary expertise sneaks up on readers in the best of ways, so natural and direct is her prose. The novel's setting is no mere stage onto which characters rush, but the integral facet of the characters' lives that produce their desires, fears, and conflicts. To what extent is a novel a product of its setting? And to the same end, how much does place owe to its novelistic depiction? As is so often the case in successful Canadian literature, Kathleen Winter's Annabel is a novel as much about place as it is about the characters who reside in it.
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