4 Stars
It’s been almost a decade since Jane Urquhart’s last novel, so I was excited that she has a new release.
In the 1950s, Emer McConnell is a middle-aged itinerant music/art teacher in rural Saskatchewan. She thinks back on her life beginning with her family’s move from Ontario to the prairies. When she was eleven, she was badly injured in a tornado and spent a year in a hospital. There she became acquainted with a child performer in a travelling theatre company, a Jewish boy from a farm collective, and a girl from a Doukhobor community. Emer also reflects on her mother’s relationship with Master Stillwell, a teacher who followed them from Ontario to Saskatchewan, her brother Danny’s spirituality, and her long-term love affair with an enigmatic man she calls Harp, a brilliant scientist whose medical discovery changed the lives of millions.
One element that bothered me is that Harp is modelled on a real person whose identity is confirmed in the author’s bibliography. The revelation did not come as a surprise because I had strong suspicions throughout. His is not an entirely positive portrayal; he is introduced as someone who “never loved me” and “broke my heart often.” Reading about this man and his treatment of Emer left me feeling as I did when I learned about the sexual abuse in Alice Munro’s family: an icon has been tarnished. I may want to read the biography of this man to determine how much poetic license Urquhart took.
The novel examines a number of topics, one of them being colonial expansion in Canada. Emer describes her father as descending “from a long line of land-grabbers” who suffered from “property hunger” and “gobbled up land” in Ontario and the prairies “without giving more than a passing thought to those who had for millennia inhabited the geography my family coveted. One tribe, forced out of its homeland by imperial dominance, war, and scarcity, migrates across the sea and forces another tribe out of its homeland.” Once land was acquired, the settlers set about changing the landscape forever: “’the wildflowers and wild grasses . . . they are quickly disappearing and will not come again.’” And with their arrival , they rename places: “I thought about those earlier Indian names, and wondered whether they were lost for good or if they would ever come back.” For the people they displaced, “pushed off this land by the clutter of avarice and insatiability,” they built “residential schools in which dwelt stolen and grief-stricken indigenous children.”
There is more of Canada’s dark history revealed in the attitude of some immigrants towards other immigrants who spoke a different language, dressed differently, or worshiped differently. Emer observes, “How strange we all are! Most of us come from Irish and Scottish tribes cast out by the mother country. But we are still reading her poems and singing her songs. How odd that we define foreignness as those whose speech hold the trace of another language, and then we ignore altogether our own foreignness on land that was never our own.” Ukrainians, Jews, and Doukhobors were victims of discrimination and even violence. Emer reads a letter her mother received that illustrates the xenophobic attitudes of some: “But when foreign fish come to these streams, the very water itself becomes unwholesome. The lakes and rivers and lesser tributaries fill with parasites and disease, until we turn away from our own murky waters in disgust.” Master Stillwell focuses his educational research on “those with the foreign tongues . . . those who wore ridiculous clothing and head coverings. Those who would need to be changed. . . . ‘We take the ignorant and cleanse them and dress them in fresh garments. We give them the gift of the English language. We make them into a reasonable facsimile of ourselves. Because who . . . has a cleaner, more reliable life-version than we ourselves.’”
The role of women is also discussed. Emer compares her mother’s situation with that of Master Stillwell who earned a PhD: “My mother, the supplemental teacher, had neither the opportunity nor the privilege of being pauperized by graduate studies. Except for the daily round of necessary domestic chores, her roles in the world were never deemed to be essential.” Emer thinks of the “thinness of my mother’s life” because “few of her generation walked away from the fields . . . and almost none who did so were women.”
Love is another topic that receives attention. Emer believes that love “is imposed upon us” and is “inconceivable, unkillable, and beyond . . . control.” She muses that “Love is uninterested in a crack in the character of the beloved. And even at its most conventional, it is the enemy of rational decisions.” Love for both Emer and her mother is often accompanied by pain but her mother says, “’I have been in love . . . And that is life. That is being alive.’” Pain “situates us and makes us present in our lives” and so reminds us that we are alive: “Perhaps that is joy – the reminder that always there is pain, the reminder that we are living beings.”
Emer also suggests that her love for Harp and her mother’s love for Master Stillwell were yearnings for what was not possible for themselves: “The presence of a man who had known cities, speakers’ halls, and crowning glories would have enlarged and brightened the thinness of my mother’s life. To be the subject of such a man’s attention would have suggested that all along the potential for such things had lain dormant inside her, and were it not for circumstance, she might have stood by his side. She was drugged by a kind of worship that circled back to the self. And in some respects, so was I.” Men can seduce a woman and then dismiss or hide it, but for a woman, “seduction is a soft thing. It fills your rooms with golden light, sings your praises, makes you feel elected. Sainted.” Certainly their relationships feel like fantasies; “Our love, you see, was like those castle hotels: full of private hidden spaces and beautiful velvet furniture, and no responsibility for tidying up afterwards.”
This novel is both entertaining and thought-provoking. As a child Emer does not always understand the significance of what she sees and I found myself anxious to learn if my suspicions were correct. I also found I could relate with Emer in many ways. At the end of the book, the author mentions that the book was almost a decade in the making; after reading the book I can only say it was so worth the wait.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Nice review Doreen
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