The two had originally met during the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Avery, an engineer, worked on this project, and Jean, a botanist, busily collected native plants to relocate them in a different setting because once the river diversions and locks opened upon its completion their native location will be drowned and destroyed.

The dam and the seaway constructions provide Michaels with parallels of the human experience of loss: the Nubians (60,000) who had to leave the fertile Nile valley and leave behind their date palm trees developed over thousands of years; the 6,500 residents of six villages and three hamlets along the St. Lawrence River, whose homes and farms vanished under the rising waters. The Nubians received new villages, but away from the river. They were unable to take anything with them except their personal belongings, leaving behind a lifestyle of millennia. Many of the St. Lawrence River residents had their houses moved (530 in all) at government cost and their villages and hamlets were replaced by two towns, Ingleside and Long Sault. These towns still lie within the sight of the St. Lawrence, though they obviously could not replace the centuries of memories for those who had to leave as the water rose.

In the second part of the book, titled The Stone In the Middle, Michaels adds to these scenes of loss Warsaw, rebuilt stone by stone as a faux city after its destruction during WWII. The sorrow that the émigré artist, Lucjan, and his friends express seems to imply that Warsaw is the only such faux city in Europe. Of course that is not the case. There are numerous places, considered historic attractions, that have been rebuilt in their original image after being destroyed during that war. The fact that they are now fake is not usually advertised, but is of concern to those who care about history, about the lives lived in these places. Today's generations, far removed from wars of the past, most likely won't bother to ask what is historic and what is fake history unless someone like Michaels brings it to their attention.

The novel's course is set with a one-page prologue that starts: "Perhaps we painted on our skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone." A little further on Michaels states, "We made our paints from bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets its origins." Then she offers us this: "Grief is desire in its purest distillation. With the first grave—the first time a name was sown in the earth—the invention of memory. No word forgets its origins."

Right away it is clear that Michaels treats her novel not so much as a story but as a philosophical statement of certitudes. That the author couches these certitudes in poetic fragments does not necessarily make them wholly acceptable to the reader, which one regrets.

It soon becomes clear that Avery fears he will be consumed with shame for having helped to move the temple. "Only his wife understood: that somehow holiness was escaping under their drills, was being pumped away in the continuous draining of groundwater, would soon be crushed under the huge cement domes; that by the time Abu Simbel was finally re-erected, it would no longer be a temple." This thought goes through his mind as he prepares to paint the scene before him on his wife's back with a brush dipped into Nile water. It is an act he repeated every evening while they lived on a boat on the river. "At dusk, the light was a fine powder, a gold dust settling on the surface of the Nile." And a little later on we read, "He thought that only love teaches a man his death, that it is in the solitude of love that we learn to drown."

Soon we are introduced to the nightly conversations these two hold, recalling the past, which allows us to learn about how they met. But even this meeting is overshadowed by loss. Strongest, though, are conversations about the loss of Jean's mother at an early age and then more recently that of her father. These reveal Jean's preoccupation with death and the past. At the same time Avery mourns the death of his father only shortly before both were supposed to have been working together on the St. Lawrence Seaway project. They express their thoughts in fleeting snippets, devoid of normal speech as we know it. After a while, it all becomes too precious as these two reveal themselves as too self-contained and wholly unrelated not only to the present moment of their lives, but also to each other.

Just how unrelated they are becomes apparent when a tragedy befalls them and Jean, instead of turning for solace to her husband, removes herself from him. With that, Avery falls out of the novel for a while. Instead, the Polish artist, Lucjan, enters to have a strange affair with Jean. They met while she secretly planted wild flower gardens in Toronto's ravines, edges of parking lots and lanes at night and while he went about secretly painting images from the caves at Lascaux on neglected fences. This anonymous act had gained him the nickname 'Caveman' among local residents.

Jean gets drawn into the community of former Warsaw residents surrounding Lucjan, whose conversations, whether in their homes or at a picnic never seems to leave the subject of Warsaw and its rebuilding, and their lives lived there before leaving for Canada. Though living in Toronto, we get no sense that they are ever touched by this city or by Canada as a whole. Lucjan, a child of the Warsaw Ghetto who managed to survive, also mourns the lost Warsaw, but at a deeper sense, he mourns the loss of a mother suddenly vanished from the Ghetto, and even of a stepfather, whom he meets again, but with whom he cannot reconnect.

There is a fourth person whose presence is heavily felt. She is Marina, Avery's mother. She, too, mourns. In her case not only the loss of a husband, but more acutely, her family whom she had left behind in Holland when she moved to England just before the start of WWII. They, too, vanished in the maelstrom of that war that became the Holocaust. One senses some guilt on her part for having survived, an emotion not uncommon in survivors of any tragedy.

One can understand her pain, and her dislike of Germans. But, because I suffer from sticklerishness (thank you, James Delingpole), I find that some of her statements about them border on victimization of a post-war generation. It brings to mind the terrible truth that victims frequently become victimizers. Speaking to Jean we hear her say, "This will interest you, said Marina. I read in the newspaper that there's a movement in Germany to expel the rhododendron and the forsythia, to rip them out of every public and private garden, because they are not indigenous and are therefore a threat to 'pure German soil.' . . . Do you think the rhododendron-haters will give up potatoes in their stew? A German birth certificate will be forged for them, you can be certain." Did Michaels wish to show us that sorrow can create intolerance, or does she share her character's opinion?

If the latter, perhaps Michaels is not a gardener. If she were, she might be aware that naturalists in Britain are doing their best to wean Britons off their beloved rhododendron along with a host of other foreign plants, which have become so invasive in wood lots and in ponds they push out native plants and deprive local fauna as well a flora of their habitat and food. Being an avid gardener I now find myself in the position of ridding my garden of all the beds of periwinkle and goutweed in the shady parts of the lot. I do so at the request of my conservation authority because these plants are so invasive that they are among several foreign plants that threaten the environment of the Niagara Escarpment. This has nothing to do with intolerance or superior Canadian nationalism, but very much with common sense and with the ecological follies of our ancestors who introduced foreign species into our world, regardless of country or continent.

The final conclusion about The Winter Vault is that while the author brings us some poetic gems, none of her characters are likeable, and none are wholly of flesh and blood as they drift across the pages suffused with loss, with unshed tears and with an indescribable longing for something that cannot be replaced or undone. And, while at the end, there is a kind of resolution, as a reader one does not really care anymore, though one wishes one can. Sadly, it arrives too late and at too high a cost of battling unlikable characters, and far too precious, precise and forced lines.