Winter’s Tale

The prologue lets the reader «fall» through the clouds down onto the city: from above, New York looks like a small, living insect in the eye of a white hurricane. We descend into another time, into a painting made of winter colours. These few lines are the key to the novel. Helprin is not writing a realist city novel; he tells the city itself as a myth. Beyond the Bayonne marshes there is a living «cloud wall» that swallows everything, the bridges shine «like strings of pearls», and horses move as if they always hear music.

The first chapter may be the most beautiful scene in the book. Before dawn a white horse escapes from a Brooklyn milkman's stable, crosses the empty Williamsburg Bridge and tries to reach the golden light over the Battery, but finds an iron gate at the end of every street. Just then a man appears, running through the snow, with Pearly Soames's Short Tails gang behind him. He slips on the ice, hits his head, then sees the horse peering from behind a shed and begs: «Horse! Please!» The horse leaps towards him, and Peter Lake swings onto its back.

The next chapter turns the chase into a citywide carnival. Peter Lake snatches a policeman's hat in Madison Square, escapes a traffic jam through a theatre, the horse jumps over the orchestra pit onto the stage of the Spanish dancer Caradelba, and the thief presents the hat to her as «a token of the city's love». Trying to flee to the marshes, he finds the North Ferry burning on the icy river, buys roasted chestnuts in the crowd and has to run from the gang once again. Helprin keeps his humour even at the tensest moments.

Behind this chase lie three years. Peter Lake is a house burglar, and working anywhere but Manhattan would mean «surrendering to the ordinary». He weighs moving to Boston again and again but finds nothing there worth stealing. The gang, meanwhile, wakes him on rickety stairs before dawn and robs him of meals, women and burglaries. His only refuge is the Bayonne marsh. The Baymen who live there are so fearsome that thirty police chiefs and detectives who tried to bring them under the law vanished into the clouds, and a deputy governor was cut in two in his bed.

The chapter devoted to Pearly Soames is the book's strangest portrait. A psychopath with a scar left by his own father's knife, who hates babies and disabled people, has one weakness: colour. He freezes for hours in front of house painters, then has paintings stolen from famous galleries. When they arrive he is furious: they are all brown and black, «mud». The next night he has them put back, with a note pinned to the frames.

The fifth chapter opens onto a completely different world. Isaac Penn, an old newspaper publisher who grew up watching for whales, has called an eye doctor in the evening for his daughter Beverly. The doctor waits nervously while Mozart is played in the next room. Finally a young woman with golden hair appears in the doorway, short of breath with fever. Beverly calmly reminds them that the doctor's horse is freezing outside, while she herself imagines the day the Earth falls out of its orbit into an eternal winter. One senses that both the love story and the tragedy will start here.

• Long, almost poetic sentences that describe the city as a living being
• Magical realism that presents the fantastic (the cloud wall, a horse ready to fly) as ordinary detail
• An ironic voice that brings humour even to the darkest characters
• A structure that weaves several storylines back and forth in time