starryeved 's review for:

Tin Man by Sarah Winman

4.0

---

And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

Many stories nowadays can make you rage. They can make you weep. They can make you laugh. They can make you feel all sorts of things, and that is just the power of the written word.

A rare few, however, can make you feel peaceful as your heart cracks, and those are truly, madly, irrevocably beautiful.

Tin Man is that, and all in between. It is an almost love story about Michael and Ellis as they meet and grow up together in 1960s Oxford, between the yellows of making art and the dappled sunlight of cycling and swimming. What an aesthetic. Years later, however, Michael is married and Ellis is nowhere to be found.

Thing is, we all know what happens. We all know about the aching tenderness of what could have been, of loss and grief seeping in softly like dust illuminated by the afternoon sun. There are no surprises in this book, but it will still wrap around your soul and leave you longing.

Here it is not the story itself that Winman brings to life, but the vividness of their time together. The evocative imagery of the French countryside, the stark contrasts between their rose-colored youths in a time that did not accept them and the reality of the now that permeates everything with grey and sharp edges. The ache of feeling, the fragments of humanity.

As she puts it so gracefully, the simple belief that men and boys are capable of beautiful things.

I could quote this all day. If I could bottle up Winman's words and this atmosphere, I would let my heart fall all over again. Tin Man is short and delicate and untouchable, indestructibly and madly lovely in its tenderness and its what ifs.

It is the physical representation of an old photograph from days long gone, of deep summer talks about Van Gogh and loneliness that permeates you to your core, of missing and yearning for an impossible someone as one yearns for a part of their soul, of the grief of separation, of the montage in movies when two people more meant for each other than anyone in the world live their separate lives and only find out about everything through letters and memorabilia, long after.

It will remind you that humanity is worth something. That being soft in a jaded worth is priceless. That first loves, bittersweet as they may be, are everlasting in their own senseless ways. Hazy and dazing, but stunning.

Life was not as colorful without him. Life was not life without him.