Tin Man by Sara Winman

 79th of 2021 was Tin Man by Sara Winman.

The story jumps around through time from the 1960s to the 1990s, and shifts narration between Ellis and Michael. This is an immensely memorable story about friendship, love, and longing, and the blurred lines between those things. The book starts with a picture of Sunflowers, the same painting Van Gogh painted in the French countryside. Dora, pregnant with Ellis wins this copy and against her husband's wishes hangs it in her house. She will look at its sunny face, day after day, whenever things become unbearable. 

This is a story of two boys, Ellis and Michael, brought together by loss and need - loss of loved ones and the need to feel connected. A beautiful friendship grows between them. It’s not just these two that capture your heart, however. The relationships that Ellis and Michael forge with others further ignite their spirits and will take hold of you as well. Ellis’s mother, Dora, suddenly realizes the narrowness of her life when she gazes at that sunflower painting for the first time. With it now hanging on her wall, it becomes a daily reminder of all the wonderful possibilities in life. Mabel, Michael’s grandmother, offers love when it’s needed the most. Her door is an open one and she encourages a friendship between the two boys. And then Annie walks into their lives. Ellis and Michael now become Ellis, Annie, and Michael. The dynamic shifts and a unique and poignant bond is formed between the three.

We hear from Ellis, and then we hear Michaels story. At one point Michael writes in his journal,

"I'm broken by my need for others. By the erotic dance of memory that pounces when lonliness falls."

Sounds like words from a poem, and there is much more of those type of lines. This is a story that is both beautiful and sad. That painting, Van Gogh and the sunflowers will have meaning, threaded throughout this story. 

“... it was my humanness that led me to seek, that’s all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere.”

Ellis is a quiet boy growing up outside London. His mother has always felt a little stifled in their town, so she wanted Ellis to follow his dreams, to keep drawing, and to stay in school, paths that aren't necessarily encouraged in the 1960s. He meets Michael, the grandson of a local shopkeeper, and they become fast friends, Michael's more ebullient nature as a complement to Ellis' thoughtfulness.

As the two grow into manhood, they are nearly inseparable. Their friendship transforms, deepens, but both cannot give what the other wants. Then one day Ellis meets Annie and the two are instantly smitten with one another. Yet this isn't the type of story in which one friend gets discarded when the other gets married—Michael becomes a part of Ellis and Annie, an inseparable companion to each in a different way. They are whole when the three are together, mischievous, exuberant, bold.

But after a time, Michael needs to live his own life, and he leaves Ellis and Annie behind. This challenges the couple, as they find themselves becoming what they always swore they wouldn't be—ordinary. And as Michael sees places in the world he always wanted to, and experiences deep emotion, he feels a hole where his friends once were.

"In those days of my twenties and early thirties, I remember how friendships came and went. I was too critical — a disagreement over a film or politics gave me permission to retreat. Nobody matched Ellis and Annie, and so I convinced myself I needed nobody but them. I was a sailboat at heed to the breeze, circling buoys before heading out to the uncomplicated silence of a calm bay."

When Michael returns, the circle is once again completed. Yet he returns with secrets, secrets that could threaten the delicate balance of their lives. But their love for one another, and the joy they get from their friendship, is as if no time has passed.

Another small sample excepts:

“It was the first of many memories he had, of how Michael sought Dora’s attention in those early days, how he clung to her every word as if they were handholds up a cliff face. He said he had to sit in front on account of car sickness, and he spent the entire journey complementing Dora on her driving and her style, steering the conversation back to the ‘sunflowers’ and the south, back to color and light. He had been able to change gears for her. Ellis firmly believed he would have”.

"'There's something about first love, isn't there?' she said. 'It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows,' she said."

And Ellis remembered thinking he would never meet anyone like him again, and in that acknowledgement, he knew, was love.

What a beautiful, bittersweet story about first love.

Art is an important theme, but it doesn't overtake the human and very emotional aspects of the story. From deep discussions with Ellis' mother about Van Gogh and the sunflower painting she keeps hung in their house, to Ellis' passion for drawing that is crushed by his father's insistence that he work in a car factory, art plays a huge role in the story.