The Whirlpool

This beautifully written book captures romantic obsession in alternating chapters told from the points of view of the three main characters: Maud, the undertaker's young widow; Fleda, the young wife of a military historian obsessed by his work, who is herself obsessed by the poetry of Robert Browning and who prefers the woods above the whirlpool of the title to a proper woman's domestic life in a house; and Patrick, the unsuccessful poet who becomes obsessed with Fleda.Urquhart's luminous prose draws the reader in to experience the large and small frustrations and tragedies that swirl around the three in this novel set against the backdrop of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, in the summer of 1889. She has a wonderful eye for the telling detail and draws her characters with a meticulous hand, so that the reader almost comes to inhabit their world of pine forests carpeted with trilliums, mysteriously mute children, unspoken desire, and underlying everything, the river, with its falls and whirlpools and floating bodies. This novel is not plot-driven, not one to be rushed through, though readers will keep turning pages to learn what happens to the characters; rather it is one to be savored, not only for the story but also, perhaps even more so, for the unfolding pleasures of the text itself, for the richness and perfection of Urquhart's language. It is the perfect book to read, as Fleda reads Browning, quietly in the shade of a tree.