The Stone Carvers

Klara Becker had decided to live like a spinster. Although still young, she doesn't expect any more from life: tending the animals on her inherited farm, sewing clothes for the villagers to earn a little extra money, and burying the memories of love and loss, until... She is unquestionably Jane Urquhart's heroine in this wonderfully rich and absorbing novel about deep emotions, drive and determination. Set in the nineteen thirties, against the continuing aftermath of the most devastating historical event of the early twentieth century, World War I, the author by concentrating on intimate portraits of her protagonists brings to life the personal challenges ordinary people faced during these difficult times. The novel is structured into three distinct sections, focusing in turn on Klara, her brother Tilman and the construction of the Canadian War Memorial in Vimy, northern France. Klara's character comes to life primarily through her own observations and inner reflections. The depth of her emotional being that stands in sharp contrast to her external "spinster" persona, is exquisitely evoked in Urquhart's lyrical language. The following quote gives a taste of it: "When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind?..." In this section, the narrative moves easily between the thirties and the late eighteen eighties when Klara's grandfather, master woodcarver Joseph Becker, immigrated from Bavaria to southwestern Ontario in search for a new life. He settled in the village of Shonegal where he found work with Father Gstir's ambitious church project for his small Catholic German congregation. Shoneval remained the centre of Klara's world; wood carving the craft to be passed on through the generations. Tilman, Klara's older brother, less interested in wood carving than in following the migrating birds, leaves home at a young age. Klara, on the other hand, quietly imitated her grandfather until she was ready to embark on her own carving project. Urquhart draws on the close interaction between her heroine and her work in progress - the statue of an abbess - to reveal the different emotional stages Klara experienced. Joseph could describe the changes he saw in the abbess's face, yet only guessing the source for his granddaughter's inner upheavals. The third section of the novel draws the different threads of the story together and moves it to a different, yet intensely compelling level. The author provides an almost intimate account of the Canadian Vimy Memorial and the last stages of the work in progress, personalizing the direct involvement of its architect, Canadian Walter Allward and of the many skilled carvers implementing his dream. Her description of the enormous Monument, built on

For almost the first half of this book by Canadian author Jane Urquhart, I was thinking that it was one of the most entrancing novels I had read in a long time. Now having finished it, I still consider it a very good one, though it could not quite sustain the miraculous balance of its opening. This tells how Father Archangel Gstir, a 19th-century Bavarian priest, comes to a small German logging settlement in the forests of Ontario and establishes a church, adorned by the wood carvings of another immigrant, Joseph Becker. Moving ahead to the inter-war years, we see the small village, Shoneval, decayed a bit but with the church still standing, a convent by its side, and Becker's granddaughter Klara an eccentric spinster in her late thirties living on a farm at the edge of town. The short chapters jump around in time (though always with perfect clarity) throughout this 75-year span, piecing together Klara's story: how she learned wood-carving from her grandfather and tailoring from her grandmother, how her brother Tilman ran away from home, and how she fell in love, only to see her lover also leave home at the outbreak of war. The characters are rich, the emotions are strong, and the shifts in time give the story enormous scope, yet it remains rooted in that one small part of the Canadian landscape. So much power in such containment -- it is a remarkable achievement. But the other two parts of the novel take us away from Shoneval. The second follows Tilman, Klara's runaway brother. Sensitive but claustrophobic, he wanders all over Canada as a hobo before falling in with a family of stone masons and learning something of that trade. The shift from wood to stone is a significant one, I think: a live material to a dead one, small scale to large, immediate to eternal. The third part is set in Picardy, where the great Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge is being built to the design of the sculptor Walter Allward. There, amid the work of executing the sculptures and engraving the names of the fallen, the various strands from earlier in the novel are pulled together, enabling the characters to reach their own kind of completion. Several times, I was reminded of David Malouf's FLY AWAY PETER, another marvelous novel that starts in a small corner of the British Empire (in his case Australia) and moves to Europe; in both books, a loving sense of place is an essential prelude to the wasteland of the battlefields. But THE STONE CARVERS is unusual in skipping the war scenes completely and returning to France over a decade later. The elegiac feeling that this creates is unique, but it comes with a loss of immediacy. It may very well be, however, that the novel works differently for Canadian readers, who would be able to follow Tilman's wanderings with more understanding, and for whom the Vimy memorial is a national icon. The perfect photograph on the cover of the Penguin edition captures the mood of the book beautifully, but I strongly advise readers to Google

The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart tells the story of two long-estranged siblings and a visionary 19th Century German priest, and an obsessive sculptor by the name of Walter Allward. Klara Becker (the granddaughter of a master carver), is a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by World War I and the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman. After a number of years Klara and Tilman find themselves involved with Walter Allward's ambitious war memorial at Vimy, France. This highly recommended, deftly abridged, flawlessly recorded, CD audiobook is brilliantly narrated by Nicky Guadagni who does full justice to Jane Urquhart's panoramic novel whose stories and characters sweep across three countries and two centuries.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It brought back memories of my family's experience as immigrants to Canada and the culture we brought with us as artists and art lovers. The story of Vimy Ridge was extraordinary and in my opinioin was one of the most significant parts of the book. Most Canadians know little if anything about this WW1 historic event. This book would be an excellent read for all high school English and History students. As an artist I found the text revealing and meaningful.

As historical fiction, Jane Urquhart's new book "The Stone Carvers" had the same immense impact for me that Taylor Caldwell's "Dear and Glorious Physician" did many years ago. There are several good summaries of the plot above, so I won't go into that here. (I will say that the character of Tilman reminded me so much of Mary in Urquhart's "Away", though!) I've been fortunate to read lots of good Canadian literature recently such as "From Bruised Fell" by Jane Finlay-Young and "A Good House" by Bonnie Burnard. Although I was given "The Stone Carvers" as a gift in November, it was only recently, after finishing "What's Bred in the Bone" by Robertson Davies and wanting more good Canadian literature, that it felt like the time to read this. And it was. Once begun, I could not bear to put this book down each night. The characters' humanness and deeply felt emotions, like those in Urquhart's "Away", got under my skin and I could not wait to find out what happened as the story moved along. This book is intelligent in a way not many are these days, directly addressing the longings of the heart. In my estimation, you can't go wrong reading this book. After reading "Away", I had a deep longing to visit Ireland and Wales; now, having just read "The Stone Carvers", a visit to the monument at Vimy seems inevitable too. I love the quote from the review above about the redemptive nature of art - this book itself proves that to be true. Enjoy!