[VM8]∎ Download Away Jane Urquhart Books

Away Jane Urquhart Books

Download As PDF : Away Jane Urquhart Books

Away Jane Urquhart Books

Unlike some other reviewers, I found the language of this book painful. The story itself is OK, not great. To me the "lyrical" writing is artificial to the point of ridiculousness. An random example: "The cows are gone, now, from Loughbreeze Beach Farm, they have drifted into the cedars beyond the ruined pastures. There is no song, no call that will make them turn and begin the sedate evening journey homewards. They graze only in fields raked by the light of memory. Esther sees herself as a child recognizing the strength of memory, putting aside ephemeral, destroyable books as old Eileen's voice built a story within the closed rectangle of a room."

As a Canadian woman whose ancestors emigrated from the British Isles one would think I might connect with the women in this story. But quite the contrary. I really had no interest in any of them, and was quite glad when the book was finished.

Not to my taste.


Tags : Amazon.com: Away (9780771086502): Jane Urquhart: Books,Jane Urquhart,Away,McClelland & Stewart,0771086504,VIB0771086504,Fiction

Away Jane Urquhart Books Reviews

I want to say at the outset, that I did enjoy this book. The trouble is, I hoped to enjoy it much more than I did.

The language of this novel, especially throughout the mystical parts, was beautiful. Like poetry or song lyrics, they created a wonderful atmosphere and a continuing theme that followed the women of the O'Malley family through generations.

But I found that many parts of the story that could have provided some substantive meat to the story, were given a quick gloss over. In part, I picked up this book because my husband's family emigrated in the same time period, and passed through Grosse Isle quarantine station. But I found that the quarantine station was given half a dozen words (they knew some people who died there), and the immigrant ships the same (it was crowded). While pages were devoted to the dwellers of tide pools, shelves of dusty puffins, and the detritus of shipwreck on a beach.

I think that the poetic language and focus on mysticism, while lovely, in some ways prevented me from connecting to the characters. while I could empathize, I couldn't really understand why they acted as they did, made the choices they did, or even got to where they were.

That said, there were gorgeous lush moments and pages that I wanted to read aloud for their beauty.

So at the end of the day, I am glad that I read the book, but I am disappointed that I didn't "love" the book, when I really really tried to.
Most of this magical novel hovers in the space between two worlds, tied in fact to one but inhabiting the other in spirit. Literally, it spans two continents; the book begins in 1842 on Rathlin Island, off the most Northerly point of Ireland; it ends 140 years later in Canada, on the shores of Lake Ontario. As the Washington Post described it, the book is an "Irish ballad sung on foreign soil, its words and music all the sweeter for being heard so far away from home." Its song has a special resonance for me, here in North America reading of my birthplace in Northern Ireland; the setting of the first part of the book is where my parents used to take me for holidays as a child. Urquhart knows the cliffs, the moorland, even the smell of a turf fire; her poetic fantasies are anchored in detail.

AWAY spans the centuries also, five generations of mothers and daughters Norah, Mary, Eileen, Deirdre, Esther. It opens with Esther as an old woman, lamenting the surrender of her family house to encroaching industry (a theme that Urquhart would revisit in A MAP OF GLASS), labeling pieces of furniture and keepsakes with hints of their stories, and recalling the story that her grandmother Eileen had told her as an old woman herself, the tale of her own mother as a girl in Ireland, the potato famine, and their new life in a forest clearing in Ontario. Mainly the book is about Mary and Eileen, but the double time-warp of the opening is essential to the atmosphere, suspending the story in a web of hints and deliberate ambiguities; the first 21 pages could stand being read a second time. Esther's labels are significant 'On an old copper boiler she had written the words "I wept for joy. The lake was calm and light engorged the kitchen." [...] Attached to the metal case of a gold pocket-watch that rests alone on the dining-room table is a luggage tag, and on this is written, "There was often one of us was away"....'

"Away" is the Irish term for being possessed by the spirits, and the spirit world is never far from Urquhart's tale. Near the opening of the book, Mary watches the flotsam from a shipwreck wash ashore a prodigious number of cabbages, silver teapots bobbing in the brine, barrels of whiskey, and carried on them like a raft, a half-drowned young man. In trying to restore him to life, Mary becomes possessed, and although she will eventually marry, move to Canada, and bear children, she will never be free of that pull of the water. It is a spell she bequeaths to her descendants "They were plagued by revenants. Men, landscapes, states of mind, went away and came back again. Over the years, over the decades. There was always water involved, exaggerated youth or exaggerated age. Afterwards there was absence. That is the way it was for the women of this family. It was part of their destiny."

I am amazed by Urquhart's ability to balance fantasy with fact. This could so easily have been a fey, whimsical subject, but it is rooted in harsh reality. Nothing could be more different from the barren Antrim headlands than the forest in Upper Canada. Urquhart is as detailed in describing the difficulties of pioneer life as she had been in depicting subsistence farming in Ulster, but her scene has undergone a sea-change. She recreates the magic out of other materials -- forests, streams, Indian neighbors -- even her language shifts from poetic Irish lilt to a more down-to-earth tongue. One of the most striking moments in the second part is when, after a first night in the forest filled with despair, "men with wild hair and unkempt beards began to emerge from between the trees" carrying axes and saws, neighbors come to fell a clearing and build a house. The moment is a miracle of savage grace, but its fierce magic is worked out in totally real terms. The poetry of this novel may rest in its metaphors, but they are metaphors that are lived.

Most of the characters are quite ordinary people whose lives nonetheless touch something universal. The final section, however, introduces an offstage personage who was very famous indeed. This is the Irish-Canadian politician Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an orator with a silver tongue who preached an end of sectarian strife in the confederation of the new Canada. This message is an appropriate conclusion to Urquhart's themes of deracination and reintegration, and for Canadian readers McGee's larger-than-life status would sustain the almost-mythic quality of the novel. But for those of us who are unfamiliar with him, the change from the universal to the particular makes an awkward gear change that rather weakens the conclusion of a book that seems too short as it is. All the same, this merely reduces a seven-star marvel to a still-extraordinary six stars. Read it!
I'm sure there are lots of readers who will love this novel, and I resolutely recommend it to them, but they'll have to self-identify. There's a little of every genre in it a novel of "generations", a immigration tale of hardships, a 'poetic' romance with a demon lover, a fervent protest against progress at the cost of cultural identity, a historical rebuke of English brutality in Ireland, and an overarching despair that the triumphs and catastrophes of the pioneers generations will be obliterated along with the ecology of their lives. It's a "potboiler", in short, or what some people call a "sweeping romance". I can aver in good conscience that, as such, it's crafty in its language; that's the rationale of my four-star rating, an attempt to be fair and helpful to readers with different tastes from mine ...

... but I didn't enjoy it much at all. I had to struggle to keep reading. It's too rhapsodic for me. As a gothic romance, it falls way short of the Bronte Sisters. As an immigration saga, it doesn't come close to Willa Cather's "O Pioneers", or Ole Rolvaag's "Giants in the Earth", or the greatest of all frontier novels, the immigrant tetralogy by Vilhelm Moberg. And as a portrayal of real human joys and sorrows out on the empty expanses of Ontario, it doesn't have the potency of even one short story by Alice Munro, Canada's finest fiction writer ever. Actually, the cover picture gives a clearer impression of this novel than anything I can say about it, so I'll bid it adieu.
Unlike some other reviewers, I found the language of this book painful. The story itself is OK, not great. To me the "lyrical" writing is artificial to the point of ridiculousness. An random example "The cows are gone, now, from Loughbreeze Beach Farm, they have drifted into the cedars beyond the ruined pastures. There is no song, no call that will make them turn and begin the sedate evening journey homewards. They graze only in fields raked by the light of memory. Esther sees herself as a child recognizing the strength of memory, putting aside ephemeral, destroyable books as old Eileen's voice built a story within the closed rectangle of a room."

As a Canadian woman whose ancestors emigrated from the British Isles one would think I might connect with the women in this story. But quite the contrary. I really had no interest in any of them, and was quite glad when the book was finished.

Not to my taste.