Jane Urquhart

I would say this is Jane Urquhart at her best, but then I say that about every one of her books. This is also a book I re-read every couple of years when I want to center myself -- a book where my point of convergence places me firmly in time, and out of time. There is something that is sheer poetry about every word she writes. This one in particular, feels like reading a lovely, elegiac poem to Canada, and to Ireland.

Through Urquhart's poetic vision we are introduced to 4 generations of show more Irish, following them from pre-famine Ireland through emigration and eventual settlement on the shores of Lake Ontario. The story begins with a love affair and ends with heartbreak: a perfect circle of life painted with an artist's eye for vision. The story is rich with history and mythology of both the Irish and the Canadian landscapes: landscapes of fact, of heart, and of mind. show less

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read and review this novel.

The Robert Louis Stevenson poem, from which the title is derived, is often cited by this novel’s main character. It speaks to a child’s frustration at having to wait for the sun to rise or set when it should logically have done so at bedtime and the beginning of another day. This is very much a novel about waiting while the world continues to turn.

Jane Urquhart holds a reserved spot show more among the glitterati of Canadian literature, with a revered line of dazzling historical novels behind her. She has a rare sensibility for capturing both important historical moments and persons—the kind who should be somewhat familiar at least to Canadian readers—without the overt exposition that can make historical fiction so tedious and encourage skipping pages.

No one will be tempted to skip a single line in this beautifully crafted novel that shows Urquhart at her best. Set in the 1920s, the ´everyday’ part of the narrative involves a common family strategy of the day: leaving Ontario for the promised land’ represented by the wide-open expanses of prairie. By this time, in the new Canadian optimism with the Great War behind them and the Plains Indians removed to reserves, the railway had forged its way through the territory, making resettlement a bit more convenient though certainly not easy. The train, in reality and metaphorically, is a very Canadian trope that she uses to advantage. The McConnell family, parents, older brother Danny, young Emer, and toddler twins Patrick and Timmy, take this train to begin a new life homesteading in Saskatchewan.

Except for the trains and the forces of nature—in this instance the kind of sudden prairie storm that blows over recently erected buildings, tears babies from their mothers’ arms, kills and maims with impunity—the action, as noted, consists mostly of waiting. The family wait on a long train journey to reach their new home, they wait while the land is cleared and their new house and barn are built, they wait for spring during long isolating winters and for respite from hot insect plagued summers. And, in the wake of a life-changing storm, ´the great wind,´ Emer waits to recover from terrible injuries that leave her visibly scarred and limping, the widening space between surgeries her only respite from pain and loneliness. Her childhood is suspended in the small world of the children’s ward in a hospital so far from home that her father and siblings can do nothing more than wait until she is released a year later. She waits and wonders when she can go home, go back to school, see the schoolmaster who held her in thrall, find out what happened to her mother who was also caught up in the storm. Her mother’s life, and fate, are an integral part of the story, a mystery that she slowly pieces together in adulthood. That story is intriguing and reflects women’s place in the social hierarchy at the time, but sometimes it seems to take up too much space in Emer’s own story without really giving her much insight into her own needs and choices.

The dual timeline is divided between Emer’s recovery, literally immobilized by a heavy body cast and, at first, the inability to speak in sentences because of head trauma and morphine for pain. Much of this story takes place in her head, as she makes up her own stories based on the patterns etched by damp and age into the hospital walls, or, when she is painfully turned, her glimpses of Saskatchewan’s endless blue skies. When she is unconscious or at least semi-conscious, she dreams about the train her father and brother flagged down to carry her broken body to hospital, relinquished to the kindly Black porter and the strange ´Conductor’ who visits her in nightmares and hallucinations, while Mister Porter Abel is her only human visitor in her waking life. The childhood timeline, which flashes back in memory through the adult timeline, is the best part of the story, especially in her interactions with the children, in particular the larger-than - life Friedrich. He also figures in her adulthood.

The adult timeline is somewhat less effective. It is dominated by a lover referred to only as ´the man I loved,’ for whom she waits in ´another of the castle hotels’ (the iconic CN hotels) because he ´couldn’t, or didn’t wish to, love me in a daily way’. She is in her forties, an itinerant music teacher in the public school system, and wonders if this man, so much a celebrity that he feels compelled to disguise himself, is only attracted to her because of the smallness of her life,’ in contrast to his worldwide fame. Curiously, Urquhart never identifies him, despite his centrality to the 1920s Canadian scene and his wider reputation for his much alluded to but also unnamed ‘Discovery’. Emer calls him Harp, which she reveals as her personal name for him. The author doesn’t even identify him in her afterword, though she does cite his biography. Much of what she describes is true to his life story, despite the fictional elements and it’s doubtful any Canadian reader will fail to guess. Why the subterfuge then?

In the end, whatever questions her approach might raise, Urquhart ´s style and characterization are as deep and beautiful as always. This is one to place at the top of 2024’s must-reads. show less

This is a very richly woven book that blends different stories and themes. The opening scene, a rather confused man who arrives in full winter on a desolate island in Canada, is beautifully portrayed. It also contains a mysterious undertone that makes the jumps that the story then makes palatable. The focus briefly shifts to an artist who temporarily settles on that island and finds a corpse, and then to a woman 'with a condition' (a form of autism/Asperger's) who apparently had a show more relationship with the deceased man and now wants to become “the keeper of his past”. The three storylines mesh neatly together, but then Urquhart begins a very long family chronicle in a somewhat epic, even Marquezian style, including magical elements. That chronicle also eventually appears to merge with the previous storylines. In the meantime, various themes have been addressed, such as the question of normality and dealing with people with a condition, of the importance of being geography and landscapes, of the inevitable transience of life and the destructive power of the human will, of the illuminating force of love, etc. Also the very detached, somewhat dreamy atmosphere that surrounds Sylvia (the autistic woman) appealed to me, with her emphasis on introspection, on looking through things, and on the all-consuming power of time. Urquhart connects it all with awesome Canadian landscapes, and with an artwork by Robert Smithson, A Map of Glass (hence the title), in which the fragility and sublimity of life and matter, and the destructive relationship between man and nature are expressed. In short, this book has quite a bit of meat on the bone, and Urquhart is a stylist who definitely has literary talent. Yet something gnawed while reading; there is something wrong with the book's lavish structure, the different storylines and the sometimes opaque accumulation of images. So, it didn't really fully resonated. Maybe worth a reread? show less

Jane Urquhart’s wistful, elegiac novel, In Winter I Get Up at Night, is narrated by teacher Emer McConnell, who is looking back from middle age on a life largely spent as an observer of human behaviour. We meet her in 1950s rural Saskatchewan. Emer is employed as an itinerant teacher of art and music, traveling from school to school giving students lessons in performing and visual mediums like drawing and painting. Of diminutive stature and average looks, Emer presents herself as bland and show more ordinary, the kind of person other people hardly notice, someone accustomed to vanishing into the background. But the life she recounts in the pages of Urquhart’s novel is anything but ordinary. “I was born twice, you see,” she tells us early in the narrative. “Once gently, and once violently, which is why, although I am not yet old, I have the stick.” Thirty years earlier, Emer’s family—mother, father and brother Danny—migrated from Ontario to Saskatchewan, becoming homesteaders trying to eke a marginal living from the land. It is a difficult life, but bearable since they’re together. But everything changes when Emer is eleven. A horrifying windstorm descends, moving across the prairie and spreading devastation in its wake. Their home is destroyed, Emer’s mother disappears, and Emer, catapulted by the “big wind,” is left with injuries too numerous to count. She ends up in a children’s ward in a city hospital where for a year or more she is subject to numerous invasive procedures as doctors try to heal and realign her shattered body. The novel remains in the hospital ward for much of its length, as this is where Emer’s social conditioning takes place, among a community of doctors, nurses and similarly damaged children, each with their own quirky or tragic life history. Emer’s other formative experience comes years later, after she’s trained to become a teacher, when she meets a man who at a young age made a scientific discovery that resulted in widespread acclaim and celebrity. Harp, as she calls him, despite his burden of fame, becomes her occasional lover. They meet sporadically, in what she calls “castle hotels,” the type of place suitable to a man of Harp’s stature but which she would never visit otherwise. As she frequently points out, it is a supremely unlikely alliance, as Harp is a famous scientist delivering lectures around the world, and she is a lame country schoolteacher from rural Saskatchewan. And she knows he does not love her.

Emer narrates her story long after these major events have occurred, after Harp has died and her life has settled into one of solitary routine. The novel is neither sad nor tragic, but Emer’s leisurely narrative is deeply shaded by the melancholy of nostalgia. And throughout, Jane Urquhart’s prose soars to dizzying lyrical heights, delivering myriad passages of searing beauty, along with pithy observations on life, love, family, the passage of time and the need for acceptance.

In Winter I Get Up at Night tells an at times mesmerizing tale that incorporates whimsical and surreal elements into a captivating mix. Jane Urquhart may have nothing left to prove, but in her latest novel she demonstrates once again that she is among the best writers of fiction working today. show less