The Winter Soldier

July 23, 2018
In Mason’s moving historical novel (after The Piano Tuner), Lucius Krzelewski is a 22-year-old, upper-class medical student in 1914 Vienna who, after Austria enters World War I, volunteers for duty. Despite his lack of practical experience, he is sent to a field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains, where he is expected to perform emergency surgeries. Fortunately, he is guided by Sister Margarete, a nurse with a mysterious background who teaches him the surgical skills he lacks. They go on to become lovers. One day, they are given a new patient, a shell-shocked soldier who can only communicate by drawing pictures. Lucius becomes obsessed with finding a cure for this patient, who is dubbed the winter soldier. Then, Margarete disappears and Lucius gets lost looking for her. He is transferred to another medical unit, then is returned home to Vienna. But despite an arranged marriage, Lucius can’t go on with his life until he finds out what happened to Margarete and the winter soldier. Mason’s old-fashioned novel delivers a sweeping yet intimate account of WWI, and in Lucius, the author has created an outstanding protagonist. Reminiscent of Thomas Keneally’s Season in Purgatory, this novel is a fine addition to fictional testaments of doctors and nurses during wartime.

Laurence Dobiesz's steady, unaffected narration brings precision, dexterity, and conviction to a story built on meticulous detailing. As narrator, he is clearly at home in several European languages and is capable of suggesting a character or a state of mind with a shift in volume or tone. Set in the Carpathians, in a makeshift hospital on the Austro-Russian front in WWI, Mason's epic romance is impressively informed on the geopolitics and the medical and military practices of the time. Here, a steady--and steadying--voice is welcome. The surgeries are grim, and one's heart breaks at the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. You might ask: Haven't Hemingway and Pasternak and Barker already filled this particular shelf of fiction? Even so, the writing is superb, and Dobiesz's subtle and simpatico reading holds you hour by hour, and in suspense until its final minutes. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine