Jane Urquhart's latest novel deals with the Irish in Canada and it's populated with characters inspired by her own family, their fear of change, and their obsession with landscape, writes ARMINTA WALLACE
THE IRISH in America is a familiar subject in fiction. Or is it? Many wonderful novels, from Alice McDermott's Charming Billythrough to Colm Tóibín's Brooklynand Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spinhave explored the immigrant experience in the US. The stories of Irish families who settled in Canada, however, are still largely untold.
One such family is at the centre of Jane Urquhart's new novel, Sanctuary Line. The book is narrated by an entomologist who has returned to Lake Erie to study the migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly. Wandering through the now-deserted farmhouse where she spent her childhood summers, she finds herself thinking about the family she took for granted.
Foremost in Liz Crane’s thoughts is her cousin Amanda, a military strategist who has recently been killed in Afghanistan. Then there’s Amanda’s father, the charismatic “character” whose vivid presence holds the family together. Further back in time are the shadowy folk Liz refers to as the “great greats” – the Butler ancestors who carved the family farm out of an unforgiving landscape, and other Butlers who fled from the tyranny of tending the land and ran away to sea to become lighthouse keepers.
Behind these fictional characters are the great-greats of Urquhart’s own family; Quinns from Antrim who emigrated to Canada in the 1840s. The details of her own past, she admits, remain elusive. “We’re not entirely sure about them,” she says, “because some time after they arrived in Canada the family – as we say – ‘went Proddy’.” The story she has been told is that the only available church in the area where the family settled was of the Protestant persuasion. Keen to be part of what was a scattered and isolated community, the Quinns joined up.
Back in Antrim, predictably, this went down like a ton of bricks. “My mother remembered having seen a letter at some time during her childhood – although it’s also possible that she only heard about it,” Urquhart says. “A letter of complete severance from the family back in Ireland.”
This shocking dislocation didn’t detach her Canadian relatives from their Irish roots. On the contrary, it seemed to cement their emotional attachment. “The uncle in this book is a composite of my many wonderful uncles, who were so sentimentally attached to Ireland – a place they had never seen. It was quite astonishing. An abandoned homeland of the imagination, in a sense.”
That said, Sanctuary Lineis a work of fiction. "This is my disclaimer – and it's actually true," Urquhart says. "All of the good and crazy things about the character of the uncle in this book are very much like the good and crazy things about my six Irish uncles, or uncles of Irish descent. But none of the bad things – or the more complicated things. Many of them did have farms. They never employed Mexican seasonal labour or anything like that. But I do remember childhoods filled with this wonderful joy, and these wonderful Irish uncles."
Now, many of Urquhart’s days are spent in a cottage in Co Kerry, where she wrote “a significant part” of this and her four previous novels. It’s a very different landscape from the northern Ontario her family would have encountered in the old days. Can she paint a picture, for Irish readers, of the latter? “They went to clear a farm on the edge of the Canadian Shield,” she says. “Hudson Bay sits in the middle of Canada; and as if there were a kind of bib around Hudson Bay – a very big bib; an apron, almost – there’s a shield of rock. Which means you can’t farm it anyway.
“Not surprisingly, the Irish were often situated on this rock by the powers-that-be. It was really tough. It would have been very dark, with a lot of virgin forest to clear. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for those pioneer people to come to a place like Canada. You would never choose it, I don’t think. The climate would have been so brutal. And the conditions were so bad. A lot of women died, and a lot of children died. Tons of children; you see the pioneer graveyards filled with little babies. But at least our family made it across the ocean – made it through the fever sheds of Grosse-Île and to the place where they finally settled.”
As the narrator of Sanctuary Linewanders the empty farmhouse, passing familiar pieces of furniture and rooms full of memories, she recalls the Butlers of years past, and the family stories – some tragic, some hilarious – that were told and retold until they took on a ritualistic quality. This, too, is a trait out of Urquhart's own family album.
“All those uncles – and my mother, who was the oldest of the tribe – were terribly sentimental about landscape. Hugely sentimental. The whole business of something having happened in a particular spot was central to the way they viewed the world. ‘That’s the field where the favourite work-horse is buried.’ They would be grief-stricken by a change in the landscape. So I grew up with the feeling that landscape was the thing that mattered more than anything else.”
One of the most seductive aspects of Sanctuary Lineis its skilful depiction of landscapes, both present and historical. Urquhart's husband is a painter, and I wonder whether that has altered the way in which she sees the world around her?
“Yes, I think it has,” she says. “As an artist Tony does a number of things, but among the things that he does are very, very detailed fine pen-and-ink drawings of landscape. And of corners – you know, very odd little corners of landscape.
“A friend of ours said that she had seen entire landscapes change just because Tony was looking at them. So I think that might explain it right there. Being in the company, every day, of somebody who is going to stop and look at a clump of flowers for two and a half hours does make you much more visually aware.”
The book’s elegiac tone has led to it being described as “romantic”. But farming is nothing if not a pragmatic occupation – would Urquhart agree? “I think that what has happened in the last couple of decades is that farming itself has come to be seen as romantic,” she says. “I suspect that that has partly to do with the agri-industry, and how the family farm is so threatened now that it’s almost seen as an indulgence. It’s a vanishing thing. And it’s something that very few people have had much contact with.
“I mean, if you’re under 50, I don’t think you’ll have had much contact with a working family farm – in North America, or England, or even France. Possibly not even here in Ireland. In fact, there has been a whole spilt now in literary thinking between that which is rural and that which is urban. There’s a feeling that rural is somehow sentimental – which, of course, it isn’t at all – and a sense that the only relevant experience is happening in the city.
“I find that kind of dangerous and disturbing. I don’t think you can legislate for where authentic experience is happening. I think it’s happening everywhere. And there are wonderful novels to be written now about the disintegration of that whole world of farming. It’s the end of something which is thousands of years old.”
It’s also part of the process of change which underpins, well, pretty much everything. This is one of Urquhart’s themes, not just in Sanctuary Line but in her previous novels and in her four published collections of poetry.
“I hate the word ‘theme’, but I can’t think of another word for it,” she says, laughing. “Connections. What sets me off into a book is that moment when I have discovered connections among various things. Mexican workers, monarch butterflies, migration and mutability.
“I’m of an age now where I have to admit that not only do I know that everything changes: I’ve seen everything change. It’s both a bad and a very good thing. Because the opposite of change is stasis – and that’s what my narrator is dealing with. The kind of stasis that happens when you’re unable to accept change.”
Yes, but it’s so appealing: that golden childhood, those sunny summers. Urquhart looks dubious. “Well, yes. But it was never as golden as we thought it was. And that’s an important part of this book as well. What we didn’t see; what we weren’t shown.”
It is, Urquhart adds, the saddest book she has ever written. But funny, too, surely? What about the fact that the narrator’s mother is living in an old folk’s home called The Golden Field? Urquhart grins. “Or how about the lighthouse keeper who is reading Moby Dick while poor Stephen Crane drowns offshore,” she offers. “That was fun.” She pauses for just the tiniest beat. “I made it up, of course.” Well, she did and she didn’t. But that’s a whole other story.
Sanctuary Lineby Jane Urquhart is published by Maclehose Press, £13.99
