Product Description
From the #1 national bestselling author of Away, The Stone Carvers, and A Map of Glass, Sanctuary Line is the eagerly anticipated new novel by Jane Urquhart.

Set in the present day on a farm at the shores of Lake Erie, Jane Urquhart's stunning new novel weaves elements from the nineteenth-century past, in Ireland and Ontario, into a gradually unfolding contemporary story of events in the lives of the members of one family that come to alter their futures irrevocably. There are ancestral lighthouse-keepers, seasonal Mexican workers; the migratory patterns and survival techniques of the Monarch butterfly; the tragedy of a young woman's death during a tour of duty in Afghanistan; three very different but equally powerful love stories. Jane Urquhart brings to vivid life the things of the past that make us who we are, and reveals the sometimes difficult path to understanding and forgiveness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Look out the window..."
"Look out the window. The cultivated landscape of this farm has decayed so completely now, it is difficult to believe that the fields and orchards ever existed outside my own memories, my own imagination... ". With these opening lines Liz Crane, forty-year old entomologist and the central voice in Jane Urquhart's new, engrossing and most personal novel invites us into her world and into her mind. Having recently returned to the old Butler homestead, Liz feels she needs to reconnect with all that is familiar from the past. She lets her memories return to the fun-filled summers of her childhood, spent amongst her cousins and the rest of the extended family. They bring to mind the annual migration of the Monarch butterflies that she now and studies at the nearby Sanctuary Research Centre.Important questions have lingered on about the whereabouts of some loved ones. Will her going through the remnants of memorabilia kept in the farmhouse shed some light on these?

Much of the story takes place in the nineteen eighties at the Butler family farm on the northern - Canadian - shore of Lake Erie, a landscape that is depicted with detailed and loving attention. Liz, the city girl, is the enthusiastic "summer cousin" immersed in play and exploration, especially with her cousin Mandy. Mandy and her father Stanley, the head of the Butler clan, are often on Liz's mind now in her ruminations about the past. Mandy, the poetry lover turned military officer, was killed on duty in Afghanistan not long ago, and Stan, the life-loving "innovative" farmer, disappeared without a trace one day, twenty years earlier. Reminiscences also take her back to Teo, the Mexican boy, whom she got to know over several summers at the farm. His mother was one of the Mexicans working there each season. They had become close friends, until... "There is no one, no one left. I live in a landscape where absence confronts me daily," she reflects, and later on: "Hardly ever has memory been good for people..."

Multi-generational family sagas, reaching back in time to Irish immigration to North America, are one of Urquhart's familiar themes. In SANCTUARY LINE the primary storyteller is uncle Stan, who captures Liz's attention with his absorbing tales of the family's forbearers, the "Great-greats". His recounting of the past history of the Butlers is revealed in small, apparently disconnected, summer installments. Liz's mind, recalling his stories, is also not linear, wandering in and out of memory snippets. Central to the family characteristics, beginning in Ireland, is "bifurcation": between farmers and lighthouse keepers, and in North America between those settlers on the southern shore and those on the northern side of Lake Erie. Family dramas and politics are alluded to over and over again. Still, Liz keeps wondering how much of Stan's rich lore was based on fact and how much a construction of his creative mind, deliberately invented for the benefit of the children.

Having read most of Urquhart's previous novels and enjoyed her insightful realization of engaging characters and her often lyrical and vivid evocation of the beautiful and diverse landscapes in Southern Ontario, SANCTUARY LINE feels quite familiar in that respect. Yet, for this novel, the author has taken a new, and for me, more intimate approach to story telling. Creating, for the first time, an authentic first person female voice, she allows the reader to feel like an intimate companion to Liz's inner voice. She even appears to invite us to "look out the window" with her into her young girl's persona and life. With the hindsight and distance of a mature person, yet filled with deep emotion and unresolved questions, she brings the past to life for her and our benefit.

By allowing Liz's memories to wander effortlessly - and seemingly randomly - between present and past, yet also subtly linking the two spheres by dropping clues and small hints to future situations, Urquhart, in fact, spins a beautifully crafted delicate, yet sturdy, and increasingly tightly structured story web. It captures scattered shards of Liz's memory, splinters from Stan's imaginative and sometimes wild family stories, and builds on strong connecting threads of love and friendship, loss and happiness. It is up to the reader to carefully assemble the numerous and recurring references to individuals and relationships that will be revisited again and again, revealing a bit more each time until they are eventually explained.

Monarchs appear regularly every summer on the Butler farm and the symbolism of their migratory conduct is evident to Liz, who monitors their behaviour.She understands their genetically imprinted sense of orientation and interconnectedness through several generations that makes them return to their summer breeding grounds. In her ruminations she returns to their image, recalls their presence in the "butterfly tree", admires their strengths as a swarm but also recognizes their fragility when migration patterns are in jeopardy or one butterfly is straying from the predetermined path. The parallels to her understanding of her family and human behaviour in general are evident and very aptly described. Sometimes the connections to the story web seem somewhat arbitrary and tenuous and are in danger of getting lost in the midst of everything else. [Friederike Knabe]

Of Monarchs and Memory
This is a novel about memory, nostalgic, partial, sometimes painful, but always intriguing. At any time, a person's mind potentially holds the sum total of all her experience, though she may not be able to access all of it. She may have forgotten details, until reminded by revisiting a place or picking up a keepsake. There may be memories too hurtful to recall, until the recounting of simpler things clears a pathway to them. There may be things that she cannot understand until the light of maturity suddenly reveals their meaning. Unlike a tale told chronologically, a novel based on memory contains its entire story in outline from the first pages on -- although it remains unclear in detail, emotion, and significance until we have lived long enough in the narrator's mind to explore her past from within. And Jane Urquhart, in the gradual unspooling of memory that is the essence of her latest novel, allows us to inhabit the mind of Liz Crane, her protagonist and narrator, as though it were our own.

Liz is an entomologist, working at a sanctuary situated on a promontory of the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. She studies the Monarch butterfly, which migrates annually from Canada to Mexico and back again, the task being spread between several generations, dying so that others may live. Urquhart makes this a metaphor for the theme of human migration over successive generations that threads through this book. As a child, Liz would spend her summers at her uncle's orchard farm, worked each year by families flown in from Mexico, whose children she would get to know. Her own family, the Butlers, emigrated from Ireland a century before, settling on both the American and Canadian sides of the lake; the novel is full of their stories of risk-taking and loss. Her uncle himself was given to unexplained disappearances, and one year he simply walked out of their lives for good. More recently, her cousin Mandy, a senior officer in the Canadian army, spent several years in Afghanistan, dying there shortly before the book opens. There are other deaths also that will emerge as the memories come into focus, but there is also life, love, and friendship, and golden echoes of those endless summer evenings of childhood in the country.

The three novels by Jane Urquhart that precede this -- AWAY (1993), THE STONE CARVERS (2001), and A MAP OF GLASS (2005) -- have all been panoramic stories told chronologically. SANCTUARY LINE is different in being intimate, personal, and reflective, the same events coming back again and again, growing in meaning with each telling. Urquhart has always been a poet, even in her prose, and this book has the structure of poetry itself -- a quality that is found also in CHANGING HEAVEN (1990), though its atmosphere is altogether wilder than the relative quietness here. Poetry, which was Mandy's passion, actually plays a large part in it, with well-placed quotations from Robert Louis Stevenson (whose greatness I cannot see) and Emily Dickinson (whom Urquhart makes me appreciate as never before). This is distinctly an older person's vision. Its prevailing poetic moods are pastoral and elegy: Urquhart's love of the country and her lament for its disappearance. In this, she echoes themes from her earlier novels, especially A MAP OF GLASS. All her books draw strength from their local roots.

But she very much needs those roots. When Mandy goes to Afghanistan, she is in an utterly different environment that Urquhart does not entirely manage to connect to her own; she is absent from this world, but never convincingly present in that one. This matters most in the final section, when Urquhart attempts to close the circle and does not quite succeed. Which is a pity since this epilogue is intended to balance the opening book-end, showing Mandy's hearse being driven along Canadian highways as policemen, firemen, and members of the public gather on overpasses. It is a hero's return, a poignant image of loss and homecoming, the themes of this entire book. But the most hopeful symbol is that of the Monarchs, flying to and fro between Mexico and Canada, and converting the trees on which they land into tongues of living flame.
... Read more

Product Description
From the author of the best-selling, award-winning The Stone Carvers and The Underpainter comes a new novel that explores love, loss, and the transitory nature of place. After Jerome, a young artist on a remote island retreat, discovers Andrew Woodman s dead body frozen in the ice, he meets the elderly man s former lover, Sylvia, who is curious about the circumstances surrounding Andrew s death. Together, Jerome and Sylvia uncover both the secrets of their own pasts and the breathtaking story of Andrew s ancestors. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Fire and Ice
In a haunting, topographically rich novel that transports the reader to a disappearing region of a rural, Canadian peninsula, two narrative time periods tell a story. The novel, textured with the natural world of impermanence and change, progresses with an almost hyperreal cohesion, drawing out its themes under drifts of snow, sheets of ice, bare-branched trees, windswept sand, and glassy lakes. The map of this region moves from macrocosm to microcosm, from the mutations of the landscape to the private storms of it inhabitants, from early nineteenth century to recent times. The story flickers beneath the earth and through the air.

Sylvia is a middle-aged woman with an unspecified "condition" that sounds a lot like Asperger's.She has one friend, who is blind, and a husband, Malcolm, who is blind to her secret life.She stays shuttered in her house,images of tables and bibelots running through her head ceaselessly, the light from the windows casting shadows and reflections that play on the artifacts and with her consciousness.She is an autodidact of esoteric knowledge, of the entire history of this isolated, disappearing, glacial town, and she makes luxuriantly detailed, three-dimensional maps of the area.One day, she gets her driver's license and starts combing the peninsula.She meets a historical geographer, Andrew Woodman, and has a long, secret passionate affair that becomes the focus of her existence. Time passes, (their affair is interrupted by a seven year separation) and she knows that Alzheimer's is eroding his mind and his life, until one day he just disappears.A year later, she reads in a newspaper that he had died (a year ago), was in fact found floating in an ice floe and discovered by a three-dimensional wilderness artist named Jerome McNaughton.

Jerome is a young man suffering from an unresolved past--an alcoholic, abusive father and withering, spineless mother--who now has difficulty committing fully to the woman he loves (Mira), of sharing all his private sorrow and rage.When Sylvia contacts him to meet and discuss Andrew, he reticently agrees.The series of meetings between Sylvia and Jerome and Mira focus on Andrew's ancestral journals--the history of the Woodmans going back to Andrew's great-great grandfather and the timber industry.What the journals reveal about Andrew and his family forms a cynosure between Jerome and Sylvia.And, in turn, their tenuous, brief bond becomes a niche where history, love, and home are revealed and a palpable epiphany takes place.

The novel's most transcendent attribute is the poetic fusion of the landscape with the themes of loss, identity, and home.The story of Andrew is told in reflection. His profession as a historical geographer cleaves with the history and geography of the region (much of it contained in the journals) and progresses to his relationship with Sylvia. Time vacillates between static and dynamic as events almost pour out of time, while the present feels stagnant until the journals' history can influence the ones left behind. There is never an immediacy that the reader feels between Andrew and Sylvia, because Andrew is already a piece of history when the novel opens.I believe the author intended that, and she effectively placed Andrew as a polestar for the healing of others.

The nineteenth century sections were, for me, the most vivid and electrifying.It was through that lens that I was able to visualize the landscape evolving by unchecked capitalism--from forest to deforestation, from rich soil to topsoil for barley, and, eventually, to sand. The tycoon daddys were reminiscent of the American robber barons J.P Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, steely tycoons who were often tyrannical. The female characters are particularly well fleshed out here.Annabelle, Andrew's great-great aunt, and Marie, his great- grandmother, added pathos to the grandeur of the industrialists.The parallels between characters from both centuries were finely drawn and the fusion of all Andrew's ancestors into his psyche gave the story its most authentic depth of character.

I did have a hard time believing that someone as cloistered as Sylvia for thirty-odd years, who is afflicted with a pronounced social disorder, could go out and have this passionate affair of tremendous life-altering proportions and yet be unnoticed by her husband.I cannot believe that Sylvia has the capacity to live a double life unobstructed.However, she is effective because of the momentum she creates around her and how she is contrasted to the changing environment, as well as paralleled to the history of this region--the hyperreal context I referred to at the beginning of my review.

The story also suffers from a clumsy construction at times.Some of the events are told in a hurried narration and some revelations are telegraphed rather than experienced. There is also a character named Ghost, an archetype who enters late and feels forced into a centerpiece arrangement.

Fortunately, the grace of this story resides in the timeless humanity that is poetically and symbolically rendered. I recommend this unique novel for its astonishing beauty, breathtaking prose, and moving themes.The flaws of this novel dissolve into the scintillating landscape.

"... there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it...
... even if it is just a trace - all but invisible - it is there for those willing to look hard enough."Like her protagonists, Jane Urquhart delights in following those traces in a landscape.Southern Ontario, an important backdrop in her previous, exquisite novel, The Stone Carvers, is explored here primarily as an essential part of a family history. Going back some hundred years, "Timber Island" is the intricate setting for this profound and brilliantly developed multi-faceted novel that explores a lot more, of course, than the interdependence between human beings and their land.

The central figure providing the glue, so to say, for the story's different threads is Sylvia, middle-aged and apparently suffering from a "condition" that, while not defined, suggests some form of autism. Since childhood she has been more comfortable with objects rather than people, preferring to touch their permanent and solid surfaces. The unpredictability and change that human beings represent made her withdraw, until... Nevertheless, she has married her doctor who had moved into the family home, taking over her father's surgery and the gentle and considerate treatment of the "patient". Under his guidance, Sylvia slowly learns to move cautiously beyond her familiar territory into the wider neighbourhood, concentrating on establishing clear landmarks for herself. During one of these outings, she meets Andrew, a landscape and historical geographer, a man "who walked into the past", who has been researching his family history. A secret friendship ensues that lasts on and off for many years, until he disappears from her life.

The novel opens with Andrew, suffering from Alzheimer's, attempting to return to the island where his forbears had created their timber business. This is one of the most delicate and evocatively beautiful passages in the book. "...The palms of his gloved hands are open to the sky as if he were silently requesting that the world come back to him, that the broken connections of heart and mind be mended, that language and the knowledge of a cherished place re-enter his consciousness..."While there are many other sections of moving lyricism and rich imagery, making reading Urquhart's prose such a delight, this first passage draws the reader right into the mysterious connections between Andrew, Sylvia and a young, "conceptual artist", Jerome. Jerome had found Andrew's body, frozen in ice during a visit to the now abandoned island. In his art he attempts to capture civilization debris, remnants of earlier human habitation. To some extent Jerome symbolizes Urquhart's own exploration of Robert Smithson's aesthetics. The novel's title is derived from Smithson's sculpture "Map of Broken Glass"; Smithson's contention that "the artist seeks.... the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate" can be interpreted as one of the novel's underlying motives.

Sylvia, having learned of Andrew's death, seeks out Jerome, who she feels is holding "the end of Andrew's story... in a way, the last thing he told me". For the same reason, Sylvia feels compelled to share her life story, reluctantly at first, with this young stranger and finds an increasingly attentive listener. Jerome has his own demons to battle and, maybe, they can both help each other at some point.

Embedded in the present-day narrative, Andrew's journals form the middle section of the novel. They stand on their own and delve into the fascinating saga of his great-great grandfather, one of the early timber barons in Southern Ontario, and three generations of his offspring. Urquhart brings out Andrew's distinct voice: his description of the family's changing fortunes and long-term destiny is completely captivating. Their reign over the island leaves the land dramatically altered with consequences far beyond the landscape: symbolic for the impact of destroying its natural beauty and for the family's greed is the image of their fancy hotel, now almost totally submerged in sand. As a counterbalance to those driven solely by profit, there are those with more redeeming features, such as family values and, in particular, artistic talent and expression.

Art and artists always play an important role in Urquhart's novels. Sylvia is an artist of sorts: she creates tactile maps for her blind friend Julia. Maps are important to her as they establish some form of solidity and permanency. Her own maps reflect her very personal sense of landscapes, shapes and markers that she shares with her friend. Julia asked her once, how she could be sure that what she sees is what other people see. Maybe a more profound question than intended, it turns out as we, the readers, are encouraged to follow the fluid lines between her imagination and reality. Sylvia's version of her life's story, of her relationship with Andrew, with her husband, may not match the one the reader is being led to believe. Or is it?And, as Jerome muses: "maybe landscape -- place -- makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past".This is a novel to absorb slowly, to ponder and to be carried away into different mental and real landscapes, rich in symbolism and breathtakingly beautiful at times.[Friederike Knabe]

Walking Toward the Past
[5 stars plus] This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: "The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved." He is walking, as one of the other characters later remarks, toward his past. The book that follows will be the slow uncovering of that past, not only as it applies to Andrew and his forebears, but by extension to the whole of Canada, its natural resources, and the way of life that squandered then vanished with them.

All this will be the subject of the central section of this three-part novel, an elegantly-told family saga beginning with an English immigrant, Joseph Woodman, who founds a timber and ship-building empire on an island just where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. But the main focus is on Joseph's son, Branwell, Andrew's great-grandfather. Trained in Paris as an artist, he spends the rest of his life on an uneasy balance between art and commerce, two opposing viewpoints that emerge as one of the philosophical axes of the book. Branwell's sister Annabelle in a way has it easier, because as a woman she is not expected to enter the business and so can devote herself to painting -- but all she paints are her father's ships and their destruction by water, fire, or time.

Were the novel confined to this historical story, it would still be a very good one. What makes it remarkable are the framing sections set in the present. Andrew, it turns out, was a landscape geographer, a kind of archaeologist who reconstructs earlier lives from the traces people leave in their surrounding world. Jerome McNaughton, who finds Andrew's frozen body, is an artist engaged in similar pursuits, making careful excavations, taking photographs, and building imaginative reconstructions. Both, in their different ways, make maps. So does Urquhart's primary character, Sylvia, who makes tactile maps for a blind friend, Julia, so that she may explore her landscape by feel. It is Sylvia's closeness to Andrew that brings her to Jerome's studio and begins the process of linking past to present -- a linkage that Urquhart reinforces by a web of subtle cross-references that are intricate without ever being obtrusive.

Julia is blind; Andrew developed Alzheimer's; Annabelle was lame; Sylvia appears to suffer from a form of autism; even the young and apparently healthy Jerome will turn out to have been spiritually crippled by the legacy of an alcoholic father. The most amazing of Urquhart's many feats of alchemy is that she manages to turn these apparent disabilities into gifts. The reader turns the pages with wonder, enthralled by the writer's inexhaustible ability to see familiar things in a new way. Central to it all is Sylvia, whose social limitations and fear of change will nonetheless turn her into the virtual author of a story of love and family whose very subject is change.

A MAP OF GLASS is even greater than Urquhart's excellent previous novel, THE STONE CARVERS. Both share a three-part structure; both go back into Canadian history; and both are centered around a work of visual art. The underlying inspiration here is a 1969 piece by Robert Smithson entitled "A Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)," an 18-by-15 foot pile of broken window panes that suggests the debris of lost civilizations, but which nonetheless catches the light in unexpected ways and glistens with a mystery of its own. Urquhart's MAP is also a lament for the past, but its quiet glow of consolation is nothing short of a miracle.

By the end I really liked it
I had mixed feelings about this book, but by the end I really liked it.It was a very interesting exploration of memory, loss, impermanence, and the fragmentary nature of life.It was a very atmospheric book, evocative and descriptive, not a driven by twists and turns of plot or dialogue, but it is thought provoking, and multi-layered.I am surprised by how long it has stayed with me, and how many times I find myself thinking about it and recommending it to others...

A CANADIAN MASTERPIECE
Jane Urquhart's new novel, A Map of Glass, is a richly rextured and complex work of genius. Magnificent descriptive passages illuminate and delight.
This novel is deeply insightful,exceptionally thought provoking and remarkably moving.
Intelligent readers eveywhere, will be delighted by this rare literary jewel. ... Read more

Product Description
In 1867 a good-natured Bavarian priest, is sent by God and mad King Ludwig to the wilds of North America. Soon the backwoods are transformed into a parish and the settlers into a congregation, and Joseph Becker, a woodcarver, meets his future wife. Several decades later, Joseph Becker teaches his astounding carving skills to his grandchildren. One of them, Klara, shows exceptional talent and has a surfeit of what the local nuns call "a fondness for men's work." Untamed, she falls in love with an Irish boy, Eamon O'Sullivan, only to have him leave to fight in the Great War . . .Amazon.com Review
In her fifth novel, award-winning writer Jane Urquhart interweaves the sweeping power of big historical events with small but very moving personal stories. Klara Becker is the granddaughter of a woodcarver in German-settled southern Ontario. She has a love affair with a brooding, silent Irish lad who then goes off to fight, and die, in World War I. Meanwhile her older brother Tilman has literally snapped the ties that would have chained him to the family home, and vanished.

Of course, as in all great romantic epics, the two are destined to meet again. Tilman loses his leg in the war and experiences joyful belonging with an exuberant Italian immigrant family in industrial Hamilton, Ontario, before finally venturing home. Klara remains a spinster in her small town, sewing and working on and off for years on the figure of an abbess carved from wood. The novel culminates in the building of a huge stone monument to Canada's war dead in Vimy, France. Klara and Tilman are both compelled to visit the site of this insanely ambitious artistic obsession of real-life Canadian sculptor Walter Allward; both find that they have a personal struggle to overcome the past and learn to express love. Urquhart grasps her characters from outside and inside as precious few authors manage to do. She is, in her own way, a sculptor who carves a radiant and enduring tale from the elegant material of raw language. --Nigel Hunt ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

From Macondo in Upper Canada to the Trenches of France
In the gloomy 1930s we look back over a span of a hundred years to the start of a pioneer village in Ontario. The village can now, due to the depression, be considered a failure. It was not always so. In 1866, a Bavarian priest was instructed by God and by `mad' King Ludwig, his two bosses, to move to Canada to attend to the spiritual needs of a flock of Bavarians who had started a village in the woods. The region was called Upper Canada at the time, and the village acquired the name Shonevale, which I believe to be a garbled variation on the German for Beautiful Valley. The previous name had been Carrick, as Irish settlers had been there first. We learn the story of the priest and how he built his church in Canada. The Becker family are the main heroes of the epic.


By the 1930s only the nuns of a local convent and a particular `spinster', Klara Becker, still know about the history. Rumor among the nuns has it that only her affection for 'manly work' had kept the spinster from becoming one of them. Manly work in her case means primarily carving: wood is her element. She is also an accomplished tailor. And she runs a farm with livestock. The story is assembled in bits and pieces back and forth with Klara being the centre of attention in the first part, called Needle and Chisel. By the time she is a young woman in love with a pretty Irish boy she has seen tragic things in her family. The Great War demolishes her romance, as it did for so many. The people of Shonevale mostly resist enlistment. Those of Bavarian or Alsatian origin had come here to escape European wars, not to be dragged into one. Those of Irish origin wouldn't dream of fighting for the English. Klara's lover was different, he wanted to fly an airplane.

For the whole first part and nearly half of the book, nobody carves stone, by the way. We have only woodcarvers. Part 2 is called The Road (but has no likeness with MacCarthy) and follows Klara's brother Tilman, who had run away from home at age 12. His name honors the great carver Tilman Riemenschneider. This part is short and conventional. We stay with Tilman until WW1 breaks out. He has settled with the family of an Italian fellow tramp and has become a wood carver. Still, the only stone carving is done by others, not the Beckers.
Part 3, The Monument, reunites the siblings at home in the early 30s. Tilman has lost a leg in the war. He has also learned stone carving in the meantime. In France a huge Canadian war memorial is being built, carved from stone. The siblings decide to join the project. The story becomes something like a non-fiction tale about the monument, which really exists in France.
By half way I had lost some of my enthusiasm for the book. Its original freshness has given way to a conventional novel, if still well written and emotionally appealing. The breadth of narration and the sense of humor are charming. The legend is cute and the family drama is dramatic. I sense a taste of Macondo in Ontarian woods. Urquart's technique is partly based in Marquezian narrative tricks and characters. Her courage doesn't carry all the way though.
I have some concerns, like this one: the lover boy is not an entirely plausible character. He is not one, but two men, first an oafish yokel, then a normal charming seducer. The jump is needed for the plot, but not made quite understandable. That is a flaw, in my view.

There are also some minor misdemeanors. Generally the accuracy level of using German words is not great in this book. The Ludwig Missions Verein becomes a Verig.
The book also has its share of anachronisms: e.g. the priest is said to have enjoyed his choice of European wines after his meals, while working in his parish in Innzell, back home in Bavaria. Innzell is a pretty place (at least last time I checked) and probably was so already in 1866, but is it realistic to say that the local priest had access to a selection of European wines?
Is fiction free with facts? I don't think so. Placing a specific man at a specific place in a specific year generates the obligation to be accurate about circumstances.
But these are minor problems. All in all, the book is well worth reading. The author is an established contemporary author in Canada, a regular prize winner. I wouldn't know about her without the amazon friends system, which shows that it is good for something.

Obsession and redemption
Klara Becker had decided to live like a spinster. Although still young, she doesn't expect any more from life: tending the animals on her inherited farm, sewing clothes for the villagers to earn a little extra money, and burying the memories of love and loss, until... She is unquestionably Jane Urquhart's heroine in this wonderfully rich and absorbing novel about deep emotions, drive and determination. Set in the nineteen thirties, against the continuing aftermath of the most devastating historical event of the early twentieth century, World War I, the author by concentrating on intimate portraits of her protagonists brings to life the personal challenges ordinary people faced during these difficult times.

The novel is structured into three distinct sections, focusing in turn on Klara, her brother Tilman and the construction of the Canadian War Memorial in Vimy, northern France. Klara's character comes to life primarily through her own observations and inner reflections. The depth of her emotional being that stands in sharp contrast to her external "spinster" persona, is exquisitely evoked in Urquhart's lyrical language. The following quote gives a taste of it:"When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind?..."

In this section, the narrative moves easily between the thirties and the late eighteen eighties when Klara's grandfather, master woodcarver Joseph Becker, immigrated from Bavaria to southwestern Ontario in search for a new life. He settled in the village of Shonegal where he found work with Father Gstir's ambitious church project for his small Catholic German congregation. Shoneval remained the centre of Klara's world; wood carving the craft to be passed on through the generations. Tilman, Klara's older brother,less interested in wood carving than in following the migrating birds, leaves home at a young age. Klara, on the other hand, quietly imitated her grandfather until she was ready to embark on her own carving project. Urquhart draws on the close interaction between her heroine and her work in progress - the statue of an abbess - to reveal the different emotional stages Klara experienced. Joseph could describe the changes he saw in the abbess's face, yet only guessing the source for his granddaughter's inner upheavals.

The third section of the novel draws the different threads of the story together and moves it to a different, yet intensely compelling level. The author provides an almost intimate account of the Canadian Vimy Memorial and the last stages of the work in progress, personalizing the direct involvement of its architect, Canadian Walter Allward and of the many skilled carvers implementing his dream.Her description of the enormous Monument, built on the actual battle field, and erected in memory of the many thousands of Canadian soldiers who perished in this decisive battle, leaves no doubt as to its impact on anybody seeing it. Urquhart's lyrical language evokes the eerie atmosphere that surrounds the carvers working high up on fragile platforms on either of the white limestone pylons that form the centre of the monument. The passages describing the intricate work of stone carvers whether swinging on ropes high up or working on engraving the thousands of names of the missing are some of the most memorable of the novel. The author imagines the stone carvers' daily existence: carving from dawn to dusk; living and breathing the atmosphere of the land, still saturated with the evidence of the war. For some, like for Klara and Tilman, the work is a release from the past, a new beginning that is grounded in forgiveness, closure and redemption. Not surprisingly, Urquhart, asked about what the novel was about, responded: "it is about the redemptive nature of art".Yes, indeed.

By bringing the different threads of the novel together around the Vimy memorial, Urquhart also achieves an admirable harmonization between the intimately imagined lives of her characters and the broader historical reality.Shonegal, for example, is based on the town of Formosa, the actual Father Gstir built the enormous church up on the hill as described in the novel. The imposing Vimy Monument continues to be well known to Canadians of all generations; Walter Allward, almost forgotten since as the architect of the Monument, has been given a well-deserved tribute in Urquhart's novel. [Friederike Knabe]

In Wood and Stone
For almost the first half of this book by Canadian author Jane Urquhart, I was thinking that it was one of the most entrancing novels I had read in a long time. Now having finished it, I still consider it a very good one, though it could not quite sustain the miraculous balance of its opening. This tells how Father Archangel Gstir, a 19th-century Bavarian priest, comes to a small German logging settlement in the forests of Ontario and establishes a church, adorned by the wood carvings of another immigrant, Joseph Becker. Moving ahead to the inter-war years, we see the small village, Shoneval, decayed a bit but with the church still standing, a convent by its side, and Becker's granddaughter Klara an eccentric spinster in her late thirties living on a farm at the edge of town. The short chapters jump around in time (though always with perfect clarity) throughout this 75-year span, piecing together Klara's story: how she learned wood-carving from her grandfather and tailoring from her grandmother, how her brother Tilman ran away from home, and how she fell in love, only to see her lover also leave home at the outbreak of war. The characters are rich, the emotions are strong, and the shifts in time give the story enormous scope, yet it remains rooted in that one small part of the Canadian landscape. So much power in such containment -- it is a remarkable achievement.

But the other two parts of the novel take us away from Shoneval. The second follows Tilman, Klara's runaway brother. Sensitive but claustrophobic, he wanders all over Canada as a hobo before falling in with a family of stone masons and learning something of that trade. The shift from wood to stone is a significant one, I think: a live material to a dead one, small scale to large, immediate to eternal. The third part is set in Picardy, where the great Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge is being built to the design of the sculptor Walter Allward. There, amid the work of executing the sculptures and engraving the names of the fallen, the various strands from earlier in the novel are pulled together, enabling the characters to reach their own kind of completion.

Several times, I was reminded of David Malouf's FLY AWAY PETER, another marvelous novel that starts in a small corner of the British Empire (in his case Australia) and moves to Europe; in both books, a loving sense of place is an essential prelude to the wasteland of the battlefields. But THE STONE CARVERS is unusual in skipping the war scenes completely and returning to France over a decade later. The elegiac feeling that this creates is unique, but it comes with a loss of immediacy. It may very well be, however, that the novel works differently for Canadian readers, who would be able to follow Tilman's wanderings with more understanding, and for whom the Vimy memorial is a national icon. The perfect photograph on the cover of the Penguin edition captures the mood of the book beautifully, but I strongly advise readers to Google images of Vimy to get a fuller sense of the visionary scale of this remarkable monument, which almost begs to have a novel written about it.

The Book + Visit to Vimy = profound
It's been 5 years since I read the book and longer ago that I had wanted to visit the Vimy memorial. So I read the book in the summer of 2001 and travelled to France in Oct 2001.

I found the combination of book + visit very moving and recommend both to any Canadian with an interest on what Canadians have done in the name of the country elsewhere in the world (though in WWI, in the name of the "empire" would be closer to the truth). I recall the story as being a good read and the fictional story told of the carver's assistants added additional interest and meaning to what I actually saw upon arrival at Vimy (went directly there off the flight). The story can fit in, in a manner, as a surrogate for the actual sculpture's own story, which is not told in great depth.

The monument is an amazingly powerful place to me. The book sets up the visit very nicely.

Did I Miss Something??
After hearing about how great Jane Urquhart's writing is, I have to say I was really disappointed with The Stone Carvers. Primarily, I was irritated by the overall lack of depth in this book; The story, although somewhat interesting because it is historical, has little structure. Urquhart uses the old "parachute under the pilot's seat" device a bit too much, and so nothing is believable. Things just happen, and there is no reasoning behind circumstances or events. Likewise, the characters are flat, predictable, and rather stereotypical--not real people.
I found myself becoming aware of Urquhart's writing while reading The Stone Carvers, usually because I was amazed at how simple and un-insightful it was. Perhaps I missed something, or expected too much. Either way, I wish I hadn't bought this book!
Tere ... Read more

Product Description
In this entrancing novel about the power of fate and memory, Esther O'Malley Robertson looks back over her lifetime and reflects on her Irish lineage. "Vividly drawn and richly textured . . . an enchanting and highly imaginative work that lights up the dark, haunted corners of the human psyche without diminishing their mystery."--New York Newsday. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

Celto-Canadian Magic Realism
I'm sure there are lots of readers who will love this novel, and I resolutely recommend it to them, but they'll have to self-identify. There's a little of every genre in it: a novel of "generations", a immigration tale of hardships, a 'poetic' romance with a demon lover, a fervent protest against progress at the cost of cultural identity, a historical rebuke of English brutality in Ireland, and an overarching despair that the triumphs and catastrophes of the pioneers generations will be obliterated along with the ecology of their lives. It's a "potboiler", in short, or what some people call a "sweeping romance". I can aver in good conscience that, as such, it's crafty in its language; that's the rationale of my four-star rating, an attempt to be fair and helpful to readers with different tastes from mine ...

... but I didn't enjoy it much at all. I had to struggle to keep reading. It's too rhapsodic for me. As a gothic romance, it falls way short of the Bronte Sisters. As an immigration saga, it doesn't come close to Willa Cather's "O Pioneers", or Ole Rolvaag's "Giants in the Earth", or the greatest of all frontier novels, the immigrant tetralogy by Vilhelm Moberg. And as a portrayal of real human joys and sorrows out on the empty expanses of Ontario, it doesn't have the potency of even one short story by Alice Munro, Canada's finest fiction writer ever. Actually, the cover picture gives a clearer impression of this novel than anything I can say about it, so I'll bid it adieu.

Twisting a sentence into a song...
"The women of this family leaned towards extremes [...] They were plagued by revenants. There was always water involved, exaggerated youth or exaggerated age. Afterwards there was absence..."

Esther O'Malley Robertson, now in her eighties, and by her own admission "the last and most subdued" of these extreme women tells the family's story one last time "to herself and the Great Lake, there being no one to listen." The story, she muses, "will take her wherever it wants to go in the next twelve hours, and that is all that matters." And what a story it is! Like her protagonist, Jane Urquhart "paints a landscape in her mind", so rich in colours and shades, and so full of life - real and imagined, large as the ocean, minuscule as a tide pool - and so intimate in the depiction of its human inhabitants with their deep connection to the land and the waters that sustain them.

Spanning some one hundred and forty years, Urquhart creates a intricate multigenerational portrait of a family, starting out on the island of Rathlin, at the most northern coast of Ireland and leaving with Esther at Loughbreeze Beach on the shores of Lake Ontario.Mary, Esther's great-grandmother, stands tall at the beginning of the story, but, overwhelmed by what she experiences one early morning on the beach, changes into somebody that the locals refer to as being "away" - living in an otherworldly reality. She eventually returns to "normal life" thanks to the dedicated gentle care of Brian, her new husband.Urquhart's subtle and sensitive description of the young couple's evolving relationship, set against the increasingly precarious circumstances of the farming communities around them, pulls the reader right into their reality and creates an intimate empathy that only grows as the story unfolds. The contrast between the poverty stricken tenant farmers and their English landlords is stark, yet, even when portraying the latter, the author is perceptive to their limited efforts to help those dependent on them for their survival.

Urquhart touches on major historical events over the novel's time span. With heart wrenching intensity she describes the impact of the Irish potato famine, the subsequent wave of Irish immigration to then "Upper Canada", and the challenges faced by the early settlers and would-be farmers in the harsh landscape of the Canadian Shield.The struggle of the Irish immigrants goes beyond their claiming and cultivating the land and the political realities compete with the domestic; Urquhart interweaves the two component with great skill and balance. Yet, her central force are always the individuals, vividly portrayed, and their attachment, and often fascination, with the landscape they find themselves in. For Mary this deep connection is with the sea; her need for touching it will eventually dictate the rest of her life. For her children, Liam and Eileen, and all those who follow in this family tapestry, Urquhart's poetic and beautifully flowing language captures the diverse characters' deep emotions, at time haunting and heart wrenching and at others sensuous and exuberant. Some of the men are wanderers and capture the attention and love of their women in fleeting visits, others, especially Brian and his son Liam, are earthbound and provide the solid support to those who are torn between the land and the water - the 'here' and the 'away'. Esther, being the last in the line, knows that "Over the years the women of the family who have ventured out into the world have carried pictures of Loughbreeze Beach with them in their minds; its coloured stones shining through water, the places where fine pebbles give way to sand, certain paths the moon makes across the lake's surface on autumn midnights..."

The characterization of one person that he can twist " a sentence into a song" could not be a better description for the author's talents. Whether evoking the diverse emotions of individuals, the inner or outside landscapes they are connected to, the changing seasons with their atmospheric transformations, Urquhart's rich prose carries the reader into a mystical world that is both very real and richly imagined.[Friederike Knabe]

Between Two Worlds
Most of this magical novel hovers in the space between two worlds, tied in fact to one but inhabiting the other in spirit. Literally, it spans two continents; the book begins in 1842 on Rathlin Island, off the most Northerly point of Ireland; it ends 140 years later in Canada, on the shores of Lake Ontario. As the Washington Post described it, the book is an "Irish ballad sung on foreign soil, its words and music all the sweeter for being heard so far away from home." Its song has a special resonance for me, here in North America reading of my birthplace in Northern Ireland; the setting of the first part of the book is where my parents used to take me for holidays as a child. Urquhart knows the cliffs, the moorland, even the smell of a turf fire; her poetic fantasies are anchored in detail.

AWAY spans the centuries also, five generations of mothers and daughters: Norah, Mary, Eileen, Deirdre, Esther. It opens with Esther as an old woman, lamenting the surrender of her family house to encroaching industry (a theme that Urquhart would revisit in A MAP OF GLASS), labeling pieces of furniture and keepsakes with hints of their stories, and recalling the story that her grandmother Eileen had told her as an old woman herself, the tale of her own mother as a girl in Ireland, the potato famine, and their new life in a forest clearing in Ontario. Mainly the book is about Mary and Eileen, but the double time-warp of the opening is essential to the atmosphere, suspending the story in a web of hints and deliberate ambiguities; the first 21 pages could stand being read a second time. Esther's labels are significant: 'On an old copper boiler she had written the words "I wept for joy. The lake was calm and light engorged the kitchen." [...] Attached to the metal case of a gold pocket-watch that rests alone on the dining-room table is a luggage tag, and on this is written, "There was often one of us was away"....'

"Away" is the Irish term for being possessed by the spirits, and the spirit world is never far from Urquhart's tale. Near the opening of the book, Mary watches the flotsam from a shipwreck wash ashore: a prodigious number of cabbages, silver teapots bobbing in the brine, barrels of whiskey, and carried on them like a raft, a half-drowned young man. In trying to restore him to life, Mary becomes possessed, and although she will eventually marry, move to Canada, and bear children, she will never be free of that pull of the water. It is a spell she bequeaths to her descendants: "They were plagued by revenants. Men, landscapes, states of mind, went away and came back again. Over the years, over the decades. There was always water involved, exaggerated youth or exaggerated age. Afterwards there was absence. That is the way it was for the women of this family. It was part of their destiny."

I am amazed by Urquhart's ability to balance fantasy with fact. This could so easily have been a fey, whimsical subject, but it is rooted in harsh reality. Nothing could be more different from the barren Antrim headlands than the forest in Upper Canada. Urquhart is as detailed in describing the difficulties of pioneer life as she had been in depicting subsistence farming in Ulster, but her scene has undergone a sea-change. She recreates the magic out of other materials -- forests, streams, Indian neighbors -- even her language shifts from poetic Irish lilt to a more down-to-earth tongue. One of the most striking moments in the second part is when, after a first night in the forest filled with despair, "men with wild hair and unkempt beards began to emerge from between the trees" carrying axes and saws, neighbors come to fell a clearing and build a house. The moment is a miracle of savage grace, but its fierce magic is worked out in totally real terms. The poetry of this novel may rest in its metaphors, but they are metaphors that are lived.

Most of the characters are quite ordinary people whose lives nonetheless touch something universal. The final section, however, introduces an offstage personage who was very famous indeed. This is the Irish-Canadian politician Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an orator with a silver tongue who preached an end of sectarian strife in the confederation of the new Canada. This message is an appropriate conclusion to Urquhart's themes of deracination and reintegration, and for Canadian readers McGee's larger-than-life status would sustain the almost-mythic quality of the novel. But for those of us who are unfamiliar with him, the change from the universal to the particular makes an awkward gear change that rather weakens the conclusion of a book that seems too short as it is. All the same, this merely reduces a seven-star marvel to a still-extraordinary six stars. Read it!

Stay Away......From Chapters Two And Three
This novel is ultimately a disappointment because it starts off with such potential.Indeed, if Ms. Urquhart had simply made a novella out of the first chapter and entitled it A Fish On A Pool, it would be a first rate artistic achievement.Instead, she drones on in two subsequent chapters in a lyricism that eventually fails through repetition, a plot that grates through being, well, the same blasted plot repeated three times and a theme that becomes not a little over the top in itsliterary feminism.

This review is not the place to go into all of Ms. Urquhart's gifts and how she has wasted them after the first, astounding chapter.She has a lyrical gift that owes much to Yeats. -In fact, the words "changed utterly" occur twice in this book-which, if you are a lover of Irish poetry and, ergo, a lover of Yeats, cannot fail to strike a chord. Hint: Read his Easter 1916.There are also passages like these in the first chapter, "Dark morning birds lifted away from the earth she walked on, her words spinning in the sky then flying over the fields to the shore".The first chapter is thematically wild and entrancing and lyrically virtuosic.

But then......who knows?Maybe her publisher demanded a certain number of pages.In any event, she goes on in two flat, pat chapters about the same thing with less magic and more of an axe to grind.She flirts with feminist propaganda near the end.Only the woman can receive the enchanting gift of being "away" it would seem.And men turn out to be destroyers of themselves and/or the land around them, unless, of course, they happen to be American Indian and go by the none too subtle name of "Exodus".

Still, the book is worth it.Just stop after the first chapter while you're still enchanted and before disillusionment has set in, while you're still "away."

Intense/abnormal love stories
I enjoyed the historical aspect to this book, particularly the description of the potato famine in Ireland. I read up on it a little on the Internet while going through the book and it seems Urquhart describes it accurately. The story, although partially fictitious, of D'arcy Mcgee was also interesting. I thought the obsessive love Eileen had for Aidan was over-emphasized and was dwelled upon for too long. I got the point long before she wrapped up the story. Considering we had already encountered an obsessive love through Mary in the first half of the book, it seemed somewhat redundant to go into that much detail of this obsessive type of love again through Eileen. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Surface detail
This biography gives a succinct overview of Montgomery's strict upbringing, curious love life, incredible success and later disappointments without getting into the meat of the matter. Rather than providing detailed insight into Montgomery's character, it alludes to the most interesting aspects of her life that interested readers should pursue in either the biographies named as sources to this volume or in Montgomery's own diaries.

It's useful as general background, but aside from Urquhart's obvious regard for her subject, it doesn't add much more than a Wikipedia entry. (It's better written, though.)

Excellent
I love all things Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables!Which is why I was absolutely thrilled when I saw this book.

I am impressed by this series (Extraordinary Canadians) published by Penguin Books - taking a well known Canadian personality and having another well known personality write a book, based on their views of this person and their work.This is a very clever idea and I certainly think that, in this case, it produced a great book.

Author Jane Urquhart, who I have never read, but have certainly heard about, had the opportunity of reading about Lucy Maud Montgomery and writing about her impressions and views on the life and times of this wonderful Canadian author.

My first impression is that it is obvious that Urquhart respects and enjoys Maud's books.This comes through clearly in her writings and it is always interesting to me to read about one author's "take" on another author - especially since Maud was certainly a huge influence on many female authors.

Jane actually also explored Maud as a woman, mother and wife - which, to me, are areas that were solely missing in the past.While there are many, many books out there, analyzing every word written by LMM, precious few explore her as a human being and Urquhart did a wonderful job of this.

Of course, one of the main sources of reference are the many, many journals that LMM wrote throughout her life and were left to her son to publish upon her death.Jane quickly points out that LMM always knew that her journals would be published and therefore probably amended and tweeked her entries into the journals accordingly - which I always felt was a huge flaw in discovering the "real" LMM - I often wished that LMM would NOT have "altered" her journals at all - but considering how vain LMM appeared to be (and this has been documented quite a few times through various sources) I suppose we could not expect these journals to be 100% genuine - showing the good, the bad and the ugly.

However, having said that, I must say that Urquhart recounts her views of Maud's often tragic life with a grace and poignancy that I loved.I think that being a woman and an author gives her a unique understanding of the world in which LMM lived and this comes through in the way the author talks about the hardships and the decline of LMM in her later years.

This book, while not all that long, was a little gem and although I did not learn anything new about LMM, it was fascinating and touching to readsomeone else's view of this wonderfully gifted author and woman.
... Read more

Product Description
In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him--his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter--in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination--is Jane Urquhart's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.Amazon.com Review
Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter is a very modern novelpreoccupied with the power of the past. Austin Fraser, born in 1894,is a modernist who relentlessly paints over his canvases, much as hetries to eradicate people from his life. Though he insists that he hasforgone emotion and love, when he receives news of a women he onceknew, he can no longer stop memories from encroaching.

Urquhart's novel ranges from late-century Rochester, New York, toOntario to Paris to New York City. And not since Patrick White'sThe Vivisector have there been such disturbing scenes of thepainter in action: "I believed that I was drawing--literallydrawing--everything out of her, that his act of making art filled thespace around me so completely there would be no other impressionspossible beyond the ones I controlled." Amazingly, by exposingFraser's emptiness, Urquhart makes us pity him. Though she has saidthat she was "quite angry with Austin" while writing TheUnderpainter, the author's language incises his reluctant humanityand turns his life into a work of art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

beautiful and engaging
reading some of the other reviews was disturbing. so she doesn't follow typical novel plot structure - so what? it's always refreshing when someone steps out of the box most fiction writers have been hiding in. this is a beautifully written and engaging book. i looked forward to reading it every night - and i can't say that about many books.

beautiful prose, but story falls flat
Austin, an American painter, looks back at his life, and the people whose lives are intertwined with his memories.George, the serious and thoughtful china-painter, Sara, his quiet summertime model and lover, Augusta, who was a nurse during the war, who tells him her life story in one night while sitting in a china hall.

This contained some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, and I've taken note of a dozen of the loveliest passages from the book.But as a whole, as a novel, I could barely finish.I had absolutely no sympathy for the protagonist, and the plot was unapparent to me until the last fraction of the book.As beautiful as those passages were, they weren't enough to keep me entertained through the rest of this novel.Writing style deserves 5 stars, characterization 3 stars, and plot and storyline 0.

Suitable for those who don't know anything about art
Austin Fraser is a minimalist painter anda most unlikely hero.Urquart writes this book as his autobiography towards the end of his life.He has betrayed some very loyal friends during his lifetime.He appears to have no emotions, an unfeeling man surrounded by people, places and events that evoke passion.He drains his friends in the furtherance of his art giving nothing of himself in return.

The Underwhelmer
As a painter, books about artists naturally appeal to me. But even with such a head start, "The Underpainter" became one of those novels I only finish reading by skipping from section to section, trying to catch sight of those threads of the story which still held my interest. "The Underpainter" is a fictional first-person memoir told in the voice of Austin Fraser, an elderly abstract artist looking back on his life as the 1970s draw to a close. With unusual locales such as Rochester, New York, and a Canadian mining town; with the requisite celebrity cameos, in the form of Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent; and with the potential for romantic conflict, when the same girl catches the eye of both Austin and his summertime friend George, the ingredients for a good story were probably there.

In trying to figure out what went wrong, I'm inclined to cast the blame on the supporting characters. Austin in a different setting might still have come across as cold and uncaring, but his performance might have been more interesting on a different stage. His artistic education was credibly described, and his peculiar relationships with both his mother and his father were well explored. But George Kearns comes across as such an unambitious loser that he becomes unsympathetic, a trend that accentuates steadily right up to the book's conclusion. And we learn far, far more about George's lover Augusta Moffat than we really need to know - page after page describes her childhood before she ever crossed George and Austin's path, yet while her importance to the storyline is high, her actual protagonism is quite brief. On the other hand Sara, Austin's lover of fifteen years - fifteen summers, Austin would hasten to interject - never really comes alive. We never get even the slightest hint of why their relationship lasted so long. Was he just that good looking? Was she so plain no one else was interested in her?

Jane Urquhart writes well, and in her hands Austin sometimes speaks with resonance. Ultimately, though, in my opinion this book was let down by the direction its plot took, spending far too much time on a mediocre parochial supporting cast and not enough showing us Austin's performance in the art world he is supposed to have succeeded in.

Brilliantly exposes the selfishness of the artist's world
Don't mistake "The Underpainter" for an airy fairy novel with a soft underbelly for its languid pastel coloured prose belies a diamond hard centre. In this beautifully evocative 1997 winner of the Governor General Book Award, Jane Urquhart pierces the cerebral exterior of successful modernist artist Austin Fraser to reveal a cold callous soul, whose inability to give or receive love leads to unconscious acts of cruelty to those closest to him. Only upon reflection as an old man does he acknowledge his part in their fate but he has only memories to taunt not console him. Sara, his model and lover of many years, proves to be nothing more than a handy object holding a mirror to his own soul. She doesn't really exist for him, hence when they break up, he looks back upon a relationship spanning fifteen summers, not fifteen years. Not surprisingly, the fox in Sara's garden - a metaphor for Sara's inner self - doesn't exist in his mind simply because he has never seen it.When his mentor Rockwell critiques his paintings, it turns out to be an indictment of the painter himself. Austin is furious but finally unable to deny Rockwell's judgement. Vivian, heartless and vain, is Austin's spiritual twin in the novel. They are an anathema to George and Augusta, whose lives are deeply rooted in reality. George is also an artist, but unlike Austin, doesn't despise industry but works in his father's china shop and has survived the war. Augusta is a farm girl, warm, practical and disciplined, and the perfect partner for George until Vivian, with Austin's help, re-enters their lives one evening with devastating result. "The Underpainter" brilliantly exposes the selfishness of art for art's sake. It is a chilling reminder that art unless tempered by humanity ultimately conceals more than it reveals. Jane Urquhart is a tremendous novelist. "The Underpainter" is a gorgeously written and incandescent piece of work that leaves an indelible impression long after it's read. ... Read more

Product Description
Written in luminous prose, The Whirlpool is a haunting tale set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in the summer of 1889. This is the season of reckless river stunts, a time when the undertaker’s widow is busy with funerals, her days shadowed by her young son’s curious silence. Across the street in Kick’s Hotel, where Fleda and her husband, David McDougal, have temporary rooms, Fleda dreams of the place above the whirlpool where she first encountered the poet, a man who enters her life and, unwittingly, changes everything. As the summer progresses, the lives of these characters become entangled, and darker, more sinister currents gain momentum.

The Whirlpool, Jane Urquhart’s first novel, received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France and marked the brilliant debut of a major voice in Canadian fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An odd mix!
There is much to enjoy and equally much to wonder at in this work.It's worth a look if, as I am, you are a fan of Jane Urquhart's work.

lyrical and wise
This beautifully written book captures romantic obsession in alternating chapters told from the points of view of the three main characters:Maud, the undertaker's young widow; Fleda, the young wife of a military historian obsessed by his work, who is herself obsessed by the poetry of Robert Browning and who prefers the woods above the whirlpool of the title to a proper woman's domestic life in a house; and Patrick, the unsuccessful poet who becomes obsessed with Fleda.

Urquhart's luminous prose draws the reader in to experience the large and small frustrations and tragedies that swirl around the three in this novel set against the backdrop of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, in the summer of 1889.She has a wonderful eye for the telling detail and draws her characters with a meticulous hand, so that the reader almost comes to inhabit their world of pine forests carpeted with trilliums, mysteriously mute children, unspoken desire, and underlying everything, the river, with its falls and whirlpools and floating bodies.

This novel is not plot-driven, not one to be rushed through, though readers will keep turning pages to learn what happens to the characters; rather it is one to be savored, not only for the story but also, perhaps even more so, for the unfolding pleasures of the text itself, for the richness and perfection of Urquhart's language.It is the perfect book to read, as Fleda reads Browning, quietly in the shade of a tree.

I don't get it!
Everyone in this novel is obsessive-compulsive, and they are SO obsessive that they compulsed me to stay behind in the trees somewhere above the whirlpool. They are all dysfunctional, and this in itself does not make for a bad novel (necessarily), but in this case it does. Their obsessions do not seem believable. The coincidence of them all knowing each other only adds to the improbability of their existing at all. Here's the cast:
A man who ignores his beautiful wife because of his combined obsession with Canadian military history, and his fantasies about Laura Secord.
His wife... who lives in a tent in the woods near the whirlpool, and does nothing but read books (mostly the poetry of Browning). Her inner life revolves around her perceived connection with the swirling waters of the whirlpool which seem to call to her... to speak to her.
Then there's the poet-voyeur who accidently observes her in her wilderness setting because he too is obsessed with the whirlpool area. He becomes addicted to her (runs off with her shorn hair), befriends her husband to learn more about her, but cannot stand to be in her presence and avoids any verbal communication with her.
The superstitious undertaker-woman who loses her husband and parental in-laws to a mysterious plague all in one day, and is now forced to raise her speechless son on her own.
The speechless son who learns to repeat disconnected single words only after meeting the voyeur fellow. (?) Exactly.
The Old River Man who lives down by the whirlpool, and whose sole occupation is to use elaborate contraptions to fish drowned human bodies out of the water in exchange for booze from the undertaker woman.

The whirlpool is an area of water on the Canadian side, downriver of Niagara Falls, where this novel is set in the summer of 1889. All of these people interact with each other at one time or other, but the connection is weak in my opinion. There does not seem to be a unifying reason that any of them should even know each other. Like parentheses surrounding the novel, the first and last chapter are about Robert Browning... and I still don't get it!

I feel that this book suffers greatly because the actions of the protagonists seem too symbolic, unrealistic, and ethereal... everything seems to mean something else. To the point that nothing means anything.
Like a really long poem that you just "don't get!"
I got the book because I love some of Urquhart's other writings, and because I love Niagara Falls. But this book was a disappointing read. ... Read more

Product Description
The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod’s As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories depict men and women acting out their “own peculiar mortality” against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change.

His second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod’s international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.
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Jane Urquhart:Essays on Her WorksEdited by Laura FerriJane Urquhart has published three books of poetry, a collection of short stories and five best-selling novels. Her fiction has won many honours including Canada’s 1997 Governor General’s Award, and France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. She lives in Ontario, Canada. The essays in this book investigate Jane Urquhart’s interweaving of historical events, myth, folk tales, journeys and landscape with her acute perceptions of memory and self-transformation. The many critical voices in this collection invite readers to consider Jane Urquhart’s very special vision of the world, one made up ofmigrations, dreams, spiritual quests and prophecy. Along with an interview with Urquhart recorded by the editor, there are essays by David Staines, Allan Hepburn, T.F. Rigelhof, Mary Condé, Caterina Ricciardi, John Moss, Marlene Goldman and Anne Compton. ... Read more

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Two worlds are intertwined in this hauntingly beautiful story as it moves from Toronto to the English moors and to Venice, Italy. The time frame shifts between present and past, linking the lives of a young Brontë scholar (a woman in the throes of a troubled love affair), a turn-of-the-century female balloonist, and an elusive explorer with the ghost – or the memory – of Emily Brontë. Urquhart reveals something about the act of artistic creation, the ways in which stories enter our lives, and about the cyclical nature of love throughout time. This is a novel of darkness and light, of intense weather and inner calm. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Weather
A brilliant riff on Emily Brontë's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, this highly original novel is as bracing and wild as the weather itself, impossible to pin down, virtually plotless, yet sweeping all before it. Just as one speaks of a novel of ideas, this is a novel of emotions -- emotions in their purest form, taking possession like a natural force, and largely divorced from the normal ties of cause and effect. This is not a book for those who demand realism and logic rather than a novel organized by poetic association and contrast. But for those who approach it as the unique vision of a poet who just happens to be writing in prose -- wondrous prose -- it is something very special indeed.

I have now read all but two of Jane Urquhart's novels, and know nothing quite like this one from 1990, which barely seems to touch the ground. True, SANCTUARY LINE, her latest, has also the structure of poetry, revisiting scraps of memory, probing and elucidating, but its basic story is down to earth; indeed that is its essence. The other three that I have read -- AWAY (1993), THE STONE CARVERS (2001), and A MAP OF GLASS (2005) -- tell their stories in a more-or-less linear way, although all show Urquhart's characteristic delight in juxtaposing different periods, and AWAY and MAP especially have traces of the otherworldly elements that are so strong here. All of her later novels are set largely in her native Ontario; although Toronto makes an appearance here (as does Venice), the primary setting is the wild Yorkshire moorland near Haworth, where the Brontë sisters grew up. And even here, her concern is less the heather and crags so much as the clouds scudding over them, driven by a restless wind.

The novel brings together three women from different centuries. One is Emily Brontë herself, who appears as a rather personable ghost. The second is a turn-of-the-century balloonist, Arianna Ether, who performed for her manager and lover Jeremy Jacobs, the "Sindbad of the Skies." The third is a Canadian, Ann Frear, who has developed her childhood passion for WUTHERING HEIGHTS into an academic career in English. Shattered by an affair with a colleague named Arthur, an art historian who is also living out a passion for the darker works of Tintoretto, she takes a sabbatical in Yorkshire to write a book on Brontë's weather. But these are just the axes around which the elemental opposites of the novel revolve: passion and peace, wildness and domesticity, heath and hearth.

For most of the novel, the more dramatic elements predominate: the wild wind, the barren landscape, Tintoretto's dark visions lit by flashes of lightning, the unbroken whiteness of the arctic wastes. But, despite what I said about the relative absence of plot, we do begin to care a lot for Ann as a person, and feel for her as she finds a different kind of love from an unexpected source. We know she will never be free of her wild side, but now the question of balance becomes important. Nothing in this novel is as impressive as the way in which Urquhart moves towards that resolution at the end, and the evocative simplicity of her final sentence is heart-stopping.

Gorgeous writing needs a bit more grounding
Jane Urquhart's second novel combines parallel stories of love and obsession with literary references to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Tintoretto's paintings.

Ann and Arthur are the Bronte and Tintoretto scholars, their love affair as doomed as that of the naive factory girl-balloonist, Arianna Ether, and her tormented teacher who died 100 years before. Ann flees to the Bronte moors to recover from her affair and write about wind. Arianna, in the company of a darkly whimsical Emily Bronte, haunts the place.

An intriguing premise and Urquhart's ("The Whirlpool") writing is almost poetry. But it doesn't go anywhere. Although the story is about elemental passions, the passion is bled off into descriptions of the elements and fanciful allusions.

A haunting novel of temporal convergence...
THIS is the true sequel to Wuthering Heights. Not that Jane Urquhart intended it to be, but it so outstrips Return To Wuthering Heights by Anna L'Estrange that it cannot help but unwittingly assume that mantle.

Whereas L'Estrange's sequel is a fairly linear novel, which continues the saga through the lives of Heathcliffe and Catherine's descendants, Hareton and young Cathy, Urquhart gets inside Bronte's head and brings us the spirit of her creation, rather than the mere mechanics.

Urquhart's stunning grasp of Emily Bronte's psyche is echoed in Camille Paglia's own cracking assessment of Bronte and her work in the magnificent Sexual Personae. Here, in Paglia's analysis of Bronte's self-referential high romantic prose poem, she writes of how the Byronic Heathcliffe is both Bronte's own projected animus (put simplistically, her Jungian Inner Male component) and in the context of the story, Cathy's as well.

This metathesis, or literary transsexualization comes across in Urquhart's own brilliant re-weaving of the Brontean strands. Yet, such is the subtlety of Jane's unfoldment, that the female characters, including Emily Bronte (in spirit form, as is Arianna Ether) seem almost peripheral to the calculatedly one-dimensional, self-indulgent male characters. Such of course, is the history of patriarchy, in which women have traditionally been the Second Sex.

The only exception to the male group thus defined is the character Hartley, who, by comparison is an almost Shamanic figure - a man in balance, who has surrendered to the wisdom of the eternal Feminine.

I believe that Jane Urquhart has captured the elemental genius of Bronte's original work, with its relatively anarchic temporal shifting and box structure, in particular Bronte's deliberate use of the singular form of 'heaven' (in a related poem), rather than 'the heavens', which would be a more common choice when writing about the weather, the sky etc. The changing heaven is the changing Heaven, and the use of weather as a metaphor in Wuthering Heights, and therefore Changing Heaven, reminds you of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, which again represented a vortex, connecting the worlds at the opposite ends of the labyrinth. Yin and Yang, Life and Death, Masculine and Feminine etc.

Yet, as Dorothy discovered, when you have truly found yourself, Oz is Kansas. She never left, she merely transformed. Similarly, the temporal convergence that finally connects the female divine Trinity in Jane's epic work is a simliar point of transcendence, and resolution.

I was so impressed by Changing Heaven that I even mentioned it at a pivotal point in my own impending modern gothic novel 'One Star Awake', and in my first work of non-fiction, Sirius Moonlight - concerning the suppression of the Feminine in patriarchal culture - such is the influence that Urquhart's mistresspiece has had on me - likewise, with Camille Paglia.

Even the inspired act of latching onto the Bronte poem's phrase 'changing heaven' and relating it to the absolute core of Wuthering Heights, is a measure of Jane Urquhart's own genius.

I simply cannot recommend this wonderful book highly enough.

Intelligent
This book was brought to my attention by my editor who (like Urquhard, I think) hails from Canada. What a treat I had reading it. There were strong, feminist themes throughout the book that reminded me a little of Urquhard'scollegue, Margaret Atwood (argh! I told myself I wasn't going to make thiscomparison...), but the work in Changing Heaven is much gentler than what Iwould expect to see from Atwood (whom I also enjoy).

And then there areUrquhard's landscapes. Normally, I'm an inveterate skimmer of descriptiveprose, but not here. Her descriptions were just too good to miss.

Lastbut not least, Emily Bronte shows up toward the end of the book. Howmassively cool can a book get?

beautifully written
Jane Urquhart has created yet another masterpiece. this is the third Urquhart novel i've read, and this brillinat author never ceases to captivate my imagination with her beautiful, poetic prose.this is thestory of several seemingly unrelated characters who grow and develop beforethe reader, and as you get deeper into the story, their lives areinevitably intertwined in peculiar and fascinating ways. the maincharacters are a turn-of-the-century baloonist; the young Emily Bronte; awoman in the midst of a troubled love-affair; and the man that connects thepieces in this intriguing puzzle.the main themes in this exquisitelywritten novel are the loves and passions that bring the characters to acommon ground. they are all fascinating and eccentric, and reading abouttheir lives and losses has definitely added to my knowledge and perspectiveof human nature. a must read for those fascinated by human nature and itsaftermaths. ... Read more

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In 1867 Pater Archangel Gstir is sent by God to the Canadian wilds. Soon the backwoods are transformed into a parish and the settlers into a congregation, and Joseph Becker, a woodcarver, is brought together with his future wife. Decades later their grandchild Klara holds young Eamon O'Sullivan in thrall as he sits speechless in her kitchen, suffering her anger and stirring her desire. Yet just as he wins this war of love, his victory is lost to the Great War in Europe, and Klara is left alone. But when an architect plans an ambitious memorial to the Canadian dead in France, Klara must use her family skills - to carve, to create and to remember. ... Read more

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Twelve-year-old Pegeen lives in the sleepy town of Stratford. Money is tight since her father’s death, and she must help her mother run a boardinghouse. She even has to share a room with old Mrs. Leonard. Pegeen’s dreams of becoming an actress seem hopeless. Then an extraordinary thing happens – a Shakespearean festival is planned for Stratford. As the festival develops, so does Pegeen. She learns a great deal about Shakespeare, the boarders at home, and her circle of friends, including the mysterious pilgrim, Mr. Brimblecombe. ... Read more