Novels shortlisted for the Mann Booker prize should be a sound basis for choosing what to read. I was also drawn to Andrew Mitchell’s “The Land in Winter” by my admiration for the originality and quality of his earlier work, “Pure”, despite its macabre theme on the real-life removal of the 18c Parisian cemetery “Les Innocents”, which had become insanitary.

The relationship between two couples with little in common except that both wives are pregnant for the first time, and they have recently moved to a rural community near Bristol, where they find themselves isolated and trapped in the harsh winter of 1962-63, seemed a promising theme. This is particularly since I live in this area, and can recall that time period. Yet despite the largely positive reviews which this book has received, I was left dissatified.

I have nothing against slow-paced novels, but frequently felt bored by the short, verging on “Basic English” sentences spelling out in great detail the mundane details of the characters’ lives. particularly the women’s. Doctor Eric Parry deals with his patients, while his underoccupied upper middle class wife Irene dutifully does her domestic chores. Across the fields live the improbable pair of Cambridge drop-out, neighbour Bill Parry playing at being a farmer, as his former showgirl Rita fritters away the days, managing to conceal the times when the troubling voices came to haunt her. Perhaps this approach was intentional to heighten the claustrophobic, even surreal sense of being snowed in as supplies of fuel dwindle.

The indications of possible future crises are not always developed. Apart from aiming to hook the reader, I still cannot quite understand why Mitchell starts with a scene in a local asylum, where a young man on the point of being discharged is found dead, and it soon becomes apparent that Eric may be held culpable for giving him too large a supply of potentially lethal medication to take with him. Yet Eric does not seem to worry much about this, and nothing comes of the situation. Eric’s unwise affair with a glamorous married woman, half-hearted but somehow to hard to finish, seems likely to cause more trouble.

Two-thirds of the way through, the novel changes gear to the extent of seeming like a different book, with some dramatic events as all four of the main characters independently leave their snowy prison for a while: the style alters and we begin to learn more fragments of past events which have formed them. Although Mitchell succeeds in arousing sympathy at some point for these flawed characters, I rarely felt engaged with them.

It is as if the author prefers to focus on particular incidents or insights to convey the impact of the weather, or the culture of the period (including a total lack of concern about drink driving or smoking heavily when pregnant), which he has clearly researched quite thoroughly, without caring much about plot. Similarly, apparently keen to follow his agent’s advice to “keep it weird”, he tends to lapse into distracting surreal images e.g.

• speaking of Bill in the cowshed or “shippon”: “He checked the water. The tap (it sat there like a small god) was stiff but turned and the water flowed”.

• or of Eric: “In here, in the basement, the outer world might be doing anything. It might be on fire, the four horsemen cantering around College Green, slicing off the head of policeman”.

The novel’s ending is the most surreal episode, leaving the reader with an ambiguity in which some may enjoy the freedom to speculate as to what happens next, but to many will appear too abrupt.