“Thrown off course by a sudden shift of the wind, a butterfly will never reach its intended destination. It will die in flight, without mating, and the exquisite possibilities it carries in its cells and in the thrall of its migration will simply never come to pass.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 4, 2010)

Consider memory. 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. This is a novel about memory, nostalgic, partial, sometimes painful, but always intriguing.

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 the
message from her earlier novels, especially A Map of Glass. All her books draw strength from their local roots.

It seems that 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.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	MacAdam/Cage Publishers (October 4, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jane Urquhart
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Changing Heaven

Bibliography:

• The Whirlpool (1986)
• Storm Glass: Stories (1987)
• Changing Heaven (1990)
• Away (1993)
• The Underpainter (1997)
• The Stone Carvers (2001)
• A Map of Glass (2005)
• Sanctuary Line (October 2010)

“The hills beyond the window darken. Approaching night and receding snow. There is no need for Ann to speak, no need, in fact, for her to listen except in the way that one listens to music, allowing it to wash over the ear and the heart. The references to weather catch her attention, like a dragline hook in underwater weeds, pulling and then letting go. She has not need now for the complexities of content, the snares of meaning. Only his man’s voice, the music of it; the pure sound of the words, empty of narrative. The repetitious references to weather tugging and letting go, tugging and letting go . . .”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 4, 2010)

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 A Map of Glass 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.

“After four or five days, Ann is obsessed by the wind. It both pleases and perplexes her. It scatters the mail that the postman leaves at the door, dispersing her one link to her past, her real life. […] It rattles at the coal cellar door at night like a vigilante group demanding entrance. It blows into her dreams. When she walks over the moors, the wind causes a knife of pain, straight through her neck just below ear level. It makes all the bracken and bilberry and heather swell and undulate, as if some unknown substance beneath the earth’s surface had just reached boiling point.”

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 living out a similar 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.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	David R. Godine Publisher; 1ST edition (February 1993)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jane Urquhart
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sanctuary Line

Bibliography:

• The Whirlpool (1986)
• Storm Glass: Stories (1987)
• Changing Heaven (1990)
• Away (1993)
• The Underpainter (1997)
• The Stone Carvers (2001)
• A Map of Glass (2005)
• Sanctuary Line (October 2010)