FICTION: MARY MORRISSYreviews Sanctuary LineBy Jane Urquhart MacLehose Press, 253pp. £12.99
WHEN A CANADIAN novel comes with a front-cover blurb from Alice Munro that describes it as “the most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives”, it’s bound to make the reader sit up. Particularly as Jane Urquhart is writing about southern Ontario, Munro’s exclusive literary landscape. This is Urquhart’s seventh novel, and she is on home territory, not just geographically but in terms of theme: how the present and past can combine.
Liz Crane is 40, an entomologist who returns to live on her uncle’s abandoned fruit farm on Lake Erie when she gets a research posting to study the migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly.
The place has fallen into disrepair, the orchards are overgrown and, where the lakeside house was once crowded with extended family, cousins from the city and from across Lake Erie in Ohio, as well as the yearly influx of migrant Mexican workers who came for the fruit harvests, it is now peopled by ghosts. The ghosts of history, and more immediate relations: Liz’s cousin Mandy, for one, an army officer recently killed in the Afghanistan conflict.
Mandy’s father, Stanley Butler, the beloved if volatile paterfamilias of the lakeside homestead, walks out on the family one pivotal summer in Liz’s youth when she’s discovering the intensity and frailty of first love. And it’s that summer and the uncle’s disappearance that Liz approaches – and retreats from – throughout the narrative.
But Sanctuary Lineis less about plot than about excavation of memory and the evocation of place. The moody lake, the burgeoning orchards, the florid migrations of the butterflies, the rendering of the house's crumbling interiors are lingered over with exquisite care. Urquhart is unafraid to move slowly – at the pace of those youthful summers, in fact, when children were "overindulged and blissfully ignored".
Few writers have the steadiness of nerve to go against the prevailing appetite for adrenaline-induced narrative; in this, Urquhart's style is reminiscent of that of the Pulitzer-winner Marilynne Robinson, who bucked this trend in Gileadand, more recently, in Home. Romanticism, with both a big and a small R, informs the narrative.
During those childhood summers, young Liz learns the history of the Butler clan from the talk of adults, particularly the garrulous tales of her uncle Stanley. Originally from Ireland, two Butler brothers emigrate to Canada in the 1780s, but it isn’t long before the famed Irish split occurs: Amos supports the British, Samuel the American revolutionaries, hence the two camps of cousins who live on opposite sides of Lake Erie.
Another bifurcation occurs when one branch of the family chooses to work the land, propagating fruit, while the other, echoing their Irish forebears, look to the sea and become lighthousekeepers.
The family history appears to sit lightly with Stanley – the family disparagingly refers to any ancestor further back than grandparents as “great-greats”, suggesting a remoteness from the past, and a jokey failure to distinguish between the generations, but Urquhart’s novel gently proves the opposite.
The fault lines in the Butlers’ broken family, the ruin of the farm, the deaths and disappearances, loyalties and betrayals, repeat themselves in every generation. History, she seems to say, is cyclical, not progressive, although Urquhart is never didactic; she resists the temptation to reach for easy chimings with the blunders of the past.
Sanctuary Lineis a loosely woven novel, discursive, not linear. It's high on atmosphere but low on incident, so much so that when the denouement comes it seems all the more ordinarily shocking. The real delight in Urquhart's story is the language she uses to weave it. She's a poet, even when she's writing novels. Here she is on a summer's night by the lake: "The cicadas had lifted up their nocturnal tambourines." Liz's lovelorn cousin Mandy is "a slender artery clogged by romance and war".
If history is omnipresent, literature, too, plays its part. Trawling through her dead cousin’s bookshelves, Liz relives the sisterly closeness she and Mandy shared, but also comes to know her inner, secret life. Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stephenson, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath are invoked as presences as powerful as the family ghosts.
Other writers have a more direct bearing on events. Reading a story by Stephen Crane so distracts one of Liz’s lighthousekeeper ancestors that he neglects to keep watch and a life is lost at sea.
And, though this is not a book of twists, there are disclosures that produce a soft “oh” of surprise. Liz’s narrative is addressed to an intimate but unnamed listener, and it’s only at the end of the novel that we realise to whom the story is told.
Urquhart has Irish connections – she lives part of the year in Co Kerry – and though this novel is about the far side, the legacy of historical emigration on the other shore, the cycles of gaiety and gloom that pervade these characters’ lives will seem utterly familiar to anyone with Irish genes.
The novel’s tempo, full of stalling and hesitation, may irritate some readers, but the haunting spell of the lakeside home with its mysterious continuities will be impossible to shake off.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic. She is currently writer in residence at University College Dublin
