A Map of Glass

... even if it is just a trace - all but invisible - it is there for those willing to look hard enough." Like her protagonists, Jane Urquhart delights in following those traces in a landscape. Southern Ontario, an important backdrop in her previous, exquisite novel, The Stone Carvers, is explored here primarily as an essential part of a family history. Going back some hundred years, "Timber Island" is the intricate setting for this profound and brilliantly developed multi-faceted novel that explores a lot more, of course, than the interdependence between human beings and their land. The central figure providing the glue, so to say, for the story's different threads is Sylvia, middle-aged and apparently suffering from a "condition" that, while not defined, suggests some form of autism. Since childhood she has been more comfortable with objects rather than people, preferring to touch their permanent and solid surfaces. The unpredictability and change that human beings represent made her withdraw, until... Nevertheless, she has married her doctor who had moved into the family home, taking over her father's surgery and the gentle and considerate treatment of the "patient". Under his guidance, Sylvia slowly learns to move cautiously beyond her familiar territory into the wider neighbourhood, concentrating on establishing clear landmarks for herself. During one of these outings, she meets Andrew, a landscape and historical geographer, a man "who walked into the past", who has been researching his family history. A secret friendship ensues that lasts on and off for many years, until he disappears from her life. The novel opens with Andrew, suffering from Alzheimer's, attempting to return to the island where his forbears had created their timber business. This is one of the most delicate and evocatively beautiful passages in the book. "...The palms of his gloved hands are open to the sky as if he were silently requesting that the world come back to him, that the broken connections of heart and mind be mended, that language and the knowledge of a cherished place re-enter his consciousness..." While there are many other sections of moving lyricism and rich imagery, making reading Urquhart's prose such a delight, this first passage draws the reader right into the mysterious connections between Andrew, Sylvia and a young, "conceptual artist", Jerome. Jerome had found Andrew's body, frozen in ice during a visit to the now abandoned island. In his art he attempts to capture civilization debris, remnants of earlier human habitation. To some extent Jerome symbolizes Urquhart's own exploration of Robert Smithson's aesthetics. The novel's title is derived from Smithson's sculpture "Map of Broken Glass"; Smithson's contention that "the artist seeks.... the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate" can be interpreted as one of the novel's underlying motives. Sylvia, having learned of Andrew's death, seeks out Jerome, who she feels is holding "the

[5 stars plus] This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: "The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved." He is walking, as one of the other characters later remarks, toward his past. The book that follows will be the slow uncovering of that past, not only as it applies to Andrew and his forebears, but by extension to the whole of Canada, its natural resources, and the way of life that squandered then vanished with them. All this will be the subject of the central section of this three-part novel, an elegantly-told family saga beginning with an English immigrant, Joseph Woodman, who founds a timber and ship-building empire on an island just where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. But the main focus is on Joseph's son, Branwell, Andrew's great-grandfather. Trained in Paris as an artist, he spends the rest of his life on an uneasy balance between art and commerce, two opposing viewpoints that emerge as one of the philosophical axes of the book. Branwell's sister Annabelle in a way has it easier, because as a woman she is not expected to enter the business and so can devote herself to painting -- but all she paints are her father's ships and their destruction by water, fire, or time. Were the novel confined to this historical story, it would still be a very good one. What makes it remarkable are the framing sections set in the present. Andrew, it turns out, was a landscape geographer, a kind of archaeologist who reconstructs earlier lives from the traces people leave in their surrounding world. Jerome McNaughton, who finds Andrew's frozen body, is an artist engaged in similar pursuits, making careful excavations, taking photographs, and building imaginative reconstructions. Both, in their different ways, make maps. So does Urquhart's primary character, Sylvia, who makes tactile maps for a blind friend, Julia, so that she may explore her landscape by feel. It is Sylvia's closeness to Andrew that brings her to Jerome's studio and begins the process of linking past to present -- a linkage that Urquhart reinforces by a web of subtle cross-references that are intricate without ever being obtrusive. Julia is blind; Andrew developed Alzheimer's; Annabelle was lame; Sylvia appears to suffer from a form of autism; even the young and apparently healthy Jerome will turn out to have been spiritually crippled by the legacy of an alcoholic father. The most amazing of Urquhart's many feats of alchemy is that she manages to turn these apparent disabilities into gifts. The reader turns the pages with wonder, enthralled by the writer's inexhaustible ability to see familiar things in a new way. Cen

I had mixed feelings about this book, but by the end I really liked it. It was a very interesting exploration of memory, loss, impermanence, and the fragmentary nature of life. It was a very atmospheric book, evocative and descriptive, not a driven by twists and turns of plot or dialogue, but it is thought provoking, and multi-layered. I am surprised by how long it has stayed with me, and how many times I find myself thinking about it and recommending it to others...

Jane Urquhart's new novel, A Map of Glass, is a richly rextured and complex work of genius. Magnificent descriptive passages illuminate and delight. This novel is deeply insightful,exceptionally thought provoking and remarkably moving. Intelligent readers eveywhere, will be delighted by this rare literary jewel.

As always, Jane Uquhart is a master story teller. She writes like an angel. I don't want to give "too much of the plot away" but it's set in both modern day Toronto and in the 19th century. You will love it...