What is creativity? What is art?

Anyone who creates art must at times ponder why we are driven to do it. Even to read, as someone once pointed out, is an act of staring at a page and hallucinating. The line between artistic endeavor and insanity is very fine, perhaps finer than we would like to admit. Which may be why the unreliable narrator concept fascinates me so.

Do fictional characters exist? Of course not, they’re fictional! Yet, if I asked you about Sherlock Holmes, you probably know what I’m talking about. He “exists” as a shared understanding in our minds, drawn from the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and a thousand spinoffs. He exists as a concept even if not in actual corporeal form, and we can make reference to him, and even, if we so choose, make decisions based on words Doyle gave him to say.

Sherlock Holmes the character is thus, in a way, more real to us than Jerome Caminada, an actual police detective of the era. In Victorian England, Caminada existed, and Holmes was fiction. Nowadays, however, neither of them exist in the physical form, but Holmes’s “presence” is still felt.

Now, this is the part where you’re probably like, “I thought this was a book review?” Or possibly even “sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

Well, you see, even talking about this book requires you to be in a certain frame of mind. This sense of discombobulation you feel is necessary to relate to the story of Ilona Miller, the protagonist of Winter Journeys.

The story is told in interwoven form, alternating between Ilona’s time as a college in student in 1987, and her later life, 20 years later, as she struggles with being laid off from her job, leading her to reflect on her past, and that critical winter of ’87-’88, when her life took a dramatic, unhappy turn, as she became obsessed with Franz Schubert’s composition Winterreise, until her fascination with it came to override everything else in her life, including her own mental stability.

Ilona is one of the most tragic characters I’ve ever read about. Her fixation on the German romantic epic, combined with her obvious empathy and thoughtfulness, gradually override everything else in her life, destroying her relationships with those who care for her the most.

And, as we soon realize, she has never really recovered from this sad episode, even 20 years later. She has tried, no doubt, but in the end it is questionable whether in her heart she ever truly wanted to recover, or if what she wanted all along was to disappear into the wintry world of Schubert’s music. She reminds me of Eleanor Lance, the tragic heroine of The Haunting.

Which brings me to another important point: unlike Driscoll’s other novels, this is one is purely literary, with no supernatural elements.

Or is it?

All right, some of you might be getting tired of this constant second-guessing and ambiguity act that I am running. If so, you are probably in the wrong place, but nevertheless, let me try and explain what I mean: there are no ghosts, monsters, demons, Lovecraftian entities, or other demonstrably non-natural phenomena in this story. That much may be taken as certain.

However, due to the hallucinatory and unreliable-narrator aspects of the story, there is certainly a feeling of the unreal about much of it. Probably the best way to categorize Winter Journeys is as fantastique. Bizarre and inexplicable things happen. Why do they happen? Well, if we knew that, they wouldn’t be inexplicable, now would they?

This is one of those books you’ve got to experience. And the best way to experience it is the way I did: reading it on a frigid January night when it’s too cold to go anywhere, after a few shots of rum, and while having recently been reading about Baudrillard. And of course, listening to Winterreise is an absolute must.

Of course, in my hemisphere anyway, Sumer is icumen in, or at least, we’re moving out of the dead of winter. But rum and Baudrillard are still available; and even if neither is your depressant of choice, my point is that this is the kind of book you want to lose yourself in. Only not too much. Curiously, after finishing the book, I was left more than anything with a feeling of warning against connecting too closely with any work of fiction, lest the abyss should gaze back…