Tin Man

Written by Sarah Winman, Tin Man (2017) primarily follows Ellis, now in his forties, as he navigates the grief of losing Annie, his wife, and Michael, his childhood friend and former lover. The three were once a tight-knit group, but without them, Ellis struggles to find any sense of joy or direction in his life, and he embarks on a quest to rediscover his deepest self. 

Also the author of Still Life, Sarah Winman penned Tin Man as a piece of literary fiction that acts partly as a bildungsroman and partly as a broader social critique of a world in which gay men are forced to hide their love for one another. Critically acclaimed for its nuanced portrayals, the novel was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Novel Award. Set in both England and the south of France, its intricate narrative of interwoven memories stretches from the 1950s to the 1990s, linking past moments with present regrets to explore The Societal Constraints on Authentic Expression, The Search for Identity and Belonging, and The Silent Burden of Regret.

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide feature descriptions of child abuse, illness, death, sexual content, substance use, and anti-gay bias.

Plot Summary

A few weeks before Christmas in 1950, Dora Judd and her husband Leonard go to the Community Center. There, while avoiding her husband, Dora buys a raffle ticket. When she wins, she chooses a replica of a painting of sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh, ignoring Leonard’s instructions to pick a bottle of whiskey instead. She once saw the Van Gogh painting in a museum when she was young and fell in love with it. Despite Leonard’s anger over her choice, Dora hangs the painting in the house that night, feeling a new sense of freedom at the sight of it. When Leonard comes in to take it down, she threatens to kill him if he ever touches it and declares that she is moving into the spare bedroom.

In 1996, Ellis Judd, the adult son of Dora and Leonard, wakes up at five o’clock in the afternoon for his night shift at the Cowley Car Plant. On his bedside table is a picture of him and his wife Annie, along with their friend Michael. Ellis is now alone, as both Michael and Annie died years ago in a car accident. Later, while Ellis is working, one of his young coworkers, Billy, asks if he has someone special. When Ellis tells him that his wife is dead, he is surprised by Billy’s compassionate reaction.

Ellis remembers the night he first met Annie in 1976, when he delivered a Christmas tree to her house. The two took an immediate liking to each other, and Ellis brought Annie back to the store owned by Michael’s grandmother, Mabel, where Michael was waiting for him. The three of them spent the night drinking and laughing. 

The narrative returns to the present. During his next shift, Ellis is moody and leaves early. As he rides his bike around town to clear his mind, he is hit by a car, though he is not seriously injured, and the incident causes him to feel an inexplicable release of the emotional pressure that has been weighing him down.

With his arm in a cast, Ellis goes out to Annie’s garden, which has become overgrown since her death. He then goes for a walk, and as he passes by what was once Mabel’s shop, he remembers the night he met Michael. 

On that night, Mabel asked a young Ellis to join her for Michael’s arrival, since the two boys were the same age. Michael had essentially been orphaned, as his mother had abandoned him and his father had died. Upon Michael’s arrival, he instantly took a liking to Ellis, and the two grew close. Ellis was astonished by the number of books Michael had brought, and Michael was eager for Ellis to use his skills as an artist to draw a portrait of him.

Ellis also remembers when Michael first met Dora. They got along immediately and discussed the Van Gogh replica and Van Gogh’s life. Dora encouraged Michael and Ellis to express themselves, saying that boys have the ability to make beautiful things.

When Ellis was 14, he noticed that his mother seemed ill. As her condition worsened, his father took night shifts to avoid her, and Ellis became her primary caretaker. Before she was admitted to the hospital, she made Ellis promise to stay in school and continue drawing. Ellis promised. After two months, she was admitted to the hospital, and Ellis went to live with Mabel and Michael; he never saw Dora again. On the day of the funeral, a woman named Carol, whom Ellis realized was his father’s mistress, told him to be strong for Leonard’s sake. Ellis left the funeral, and Michael found him by the river and comforted him; the two shared their first kiss. When Ellis noticed his father watching them, he was relieved to realize that his father had not seen them kiss, but he then realized that his close proximity to Michael easily betrayed the nature of their relationship.

That night, when Ellis returned home, Leonard demanded that he stay at home and not go to live at Mabel’s. He demanded that Ellis quit school, give up drawing, and work at the Cowley Car Plant. He then forced Ellis to practice boxing. Afterwards, Ellis called Mabel, who came to pick him up and encouraged him to be patient. That night, Ellis and Michael shared a bed and explored each other’s bodies. Three months later, Ellis moved back home to find Carol living there and his mother’s painting gone.

In the present, Ellis gets six weeks off from work because of an arm injury sustained when the car hit him. He spends that time fixing up Annie’s garden. When he isn’t working on that, he takes walks and remembers his time growing up with Michael, and he also reminisces about Annie. He regrets not being more open with Annie, and he misses Michael dearly. 

Ellis recalls that when Mabel died, Michael disappeared for six years. Annie always urged Ellis to go find Michael, but he refused. During the time of Michael’s long absence, Ellis felt as though life were bland without his lover and friend. His marriage suffered, and he and Annie only managed to rekindle it with a trip to Venice. On the trip, they discussed how much they missed Michael, and three weeks later, Michael returned.

In the present, Ellis goes to his father’s house for Leonard’s birthday and tells Leonard and Carol that he quit his job. Carol is happy for him, but Leonard is disappointed. Before Ellis leaves, he asks for his mother’s painting, and Leonard tells him that it is in the attic. When Ellis retrieves it, he also finds a box titled, “Michael.” Carol explains that they kept the box for him after Annie and Michael’s deaths to avoid adding any stress to Ellis’s life.

Spring arrives and the garden blooms. Ellis continues to go on walks, and on one occasion, he sees his coworker Billy kissing another man. He also swims where he and Michael used to swim, recalling that Michael would make Dora pretend she was saving him from drowning as he recited lines from “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman. 

He also remembers the night that Annie and Michael died. They were in a car accident while on the way to a presentation about the poet Walt Whitman. When the police brought Ellis to the hospital, he was surprised to see that Annie only had a bruise on her temple. When they told him that Michael’s body was in the morgue because Michael had AIDS, Ellis was incredulous, saying that Michael would have told him if he had contracted the disease. 

One night, Ellis finally opens Michael’s box and finds a journal from the years that Michael was away. As he begins to read it, the narrative shifts into Michael’s voice.

In November of 1989, Michael begins writing to deal with the stress of the decline of his partner, G, who has AIDS. Michael encountered G one day at the National Gallery and began following him because G reminded him of Ellis. When G stopped in front of a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers, Michael approached him. The two spent the day together and soon struck up a relationship. Though the relationship fizzled, they remained close friends, and when G called Michael and admitted to having AIDS, Michael promised that he would always be there for G.

Michael writes in his journal that these days, he is struggling to care for G. He is eventually forced to move him to a ward at Barts. There, G meets Chris, a young man who is also ailing. Chris asks G to help him write a letter to his parents, and as the two spend time together, they grow closer. Chris asks Michael questions about his life and love but grows angry when Michael tells him that that love is overrated. Chris asks him not to diminish something that he always dreamed of having but now never will. Eventually, Michael tells Chris about Ellis and the nine magical days that they once spent in France together.

The narrative shifts back in time to Michael and Ellis’s experience in France together. During the summer that they are both 19, Michael and Ellis take a trip to the south of France. There, they feel as though they can truly be together, and they spend their days lounging and drinking. They skinny-dip at night and even have sex for the first time. When this happens, Michael knows that Ellis will likely withdraw, but he keeps Ellis from crumbling under the pressure of shame and Leonard’s judgement. With four days remaining in their trip, they begin to plan a future together in which they will stay in France. On the last day, Michael is hopeful that their plans will come to pass, but he is soon crushed when Ellis packs their bags and does not reply to Michael’s profession of love. They return to Oxford but do not see each other for a while. A numbness grows in Michael’s heart, and when they finally reunite, he knows that he will never be with Ellis. 

After Michael tells Chris this story, Chris assures him that if he had been there instead of Ellis, he would not have packed the bags and left.

Chris soon goes home to his parents, and G dies at the beginning of December. Michael spends the holiday season alone and recalls the Christmas in 1976, when Ellis first met Annie, years after Michael and Ellis had taken their romantic trip to France. During that time frame, Ellis had taken to hiding the truth of their relationship whenever he told the story, changing the details and calling it a bachelors’ trip. When Michael first met Annie, he knew that she would be the one for Ellis. 

In Michael’s present, when spring arrives, Michael goes to the National Gallery and stands in front of the Van Gogh painting. A man pushes him out of the way, and Michael exclaims in frustration that he has a right to be there. Astonished at his own outburst, he apologizes and leaves.

Michael hikes around the south of France, stopping briefly in a monastery before renting a room in a mas (a farmhouse with rooms). He goes swimming to release his tension and anger, and he remembers when he and Annie went to pick out her wedding dress. On that trip, she admitted to Michael that she knew about his and Ellis’s youth together, and she reassured him that she was fine with it. Michael also relives his mother’s departure, and his father’s judgment when Michael tried on her clothes. That moment ruined their relationship. Around this time, Michael also found a picture of his mother with a woman, and as he grew older, he realized that his mother left her family to be with this woman.

When Michael realizes that he does not want to leave the mas, he convinces the owner to give him a job cleaning rooms. He initially feels anxiety as he searches his body and waits for signs of an AIDS infection to appear, but this mindset slowly passes. He lives in a shed behind the mas, at the edge of a sunflower field. He takes in the sight every day and goes to Arles to see where Van Gogh painted. At the end of the summer, he decides that he wants to see Annie and Ellis again, so he returns to Oxford. He rents a room but waits before finding his friends. He walks around and goes through the memories of his youth. When he feels brave enough, he goes to Annie’s bookshop and surprises her. They walk back to her house, and she lets him go ahead to meet Ellis alone. When Ellis sees Michael, he tells Michael that he missed him, and Michael’s heart breaks.

The narrative returns to Ellis’s present, after the deaths of Annie and Michael. Now that Ellis is not working at the Cowley Car Plant, he goes to the south of France and the mas that Michael stayed in. He rents the same shed and looks out at the sunflowers, thinking of Michael’s loneliness and his own. Now, however, he finally feels as though he can move forward.

Ellis’s photo featuring himself, Annie, and Michael was taken on a summer day when a wood salesman dropped off some floorboards. They were in the backyard, and Annie asked the man to take their photo. When he did, the man saw how happy the three were together, and he noticed that that it was Michael, in the middle, who kept them together. As the man left, he heard Annie ask Ellis if he wanted to come with her and Michael to hear a presentation about Walt Whitman. Ellis said no.