In the prologue to Sarah Winman’s third novel, a woman defies her husband at the local community centre when, upon winning a raffle, she chooses as her prize not the whisky her husband desires but a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: “It was her first ever act of defiance. Like cutting off an ear. And she’d made it in public.”
The transformative power of art and the untapped potential in quotidian lives are themes that pervade Tin Man. In a novel of two halves, the first narrator is 46-year-old Ellis, who works nights in the paint shop of an Oxford car plant, smoothing out dents so that no imperfection will ever be detected. Ellis had wanted to be an artist but after his mother’s death, when he was a teenager, his father forbade it. Now, a middle-aged widower, his loneliness is palpable: “This had always been the worst time when the quiet emptiness could leave him gasping for breath. She was there, his wife, a peripheral shadow moving across a doorway, or in the reflection of a window, and he had to stop looking for her.”
This is a novel infused with memories, not least Ellis’s for his childhood friendship – and teenage love affair – with best friend, Michael. Later, when Ellis meets his future wife, Annie, the three form a tight friendship that ends abruptly when Michael leaves for London after his grandmother’s death.
The second half of the novel switches to Michael’s perspective, filling in the story of his life in London and his memories of his relationship with Ellis, including a trip to the south of France where, for nine days, they were lovers: “We undressed separately, unbearably shy. I don’t know what to do, he said. Me neither, I said. I lay down and opened my legs. I pulled him on top of me and told him he had to go slow.”
Winman’s writing about sexual identity and the 1980s Aids epidemic are both nuanced and compassionate, while her descriptions of Michael and Ellis’s brief love affair are replete both with youthful desire and the exquisite pain of regret: “I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit… I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible.”
Tin Man is a story about alternative lives that might have been lived had circumstances been different – socio-economically, culturally or familially. In her two previous novels – the bestselling When God Was a Rabbit and A Year of Marvellous Ways – Winman has revealed herself to be a writer of great empathy and a sensitive chronicler of the impact of grief. Here, she surpasses both those novels with beautifully restrained prose about love, loneliness and loss: these are characters who grieve not only for people but for the desires they’ve relinquished, whether sexual, artistic or emotional.
The writing is powerful and yet understated, whether in Winman’s observations about relationships or her evocations of landscapes. With her skilful command of language and deep emotional insight, Winman has produced in the exquisitely crafted Tin Man her best novel to date.
• Tin Man by Sarah Winman is published by Headline (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
