Customer Reviews

Away: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this acclaimed novel by Canadian writer Jane Urquhart, the story is second to the language used. Urquhart writes with such grace and mastery that one is often compelled to re-read large sections just to absorb her words.

The story is very compelling, about an Irish family who immigrate from Ulster during the Great Famine. But there have been many other books written on this topic, none of which are remotely as enjoyable to read. It is the unique strength of Urquhart's voice that makes this novel so fine.

A novel certainly for any reader interested in Irish and Irish-Canadian heritage, but also very worth reading by any who enjoy good language and style.

Extending backwards and forwards in time a hundred and forty years, Away, a novel by Canadian writer Jane Urquhart, begins with one of the female characters discovering the shoreline near her Irish home has been changed forever. Stones resembling new potatoes have replaced the sandy beach, a grim joke in this impoverished area. Then "thousands of cabbages nudged one another towards shore," followed by many silver teapots and barrels of whiskey, a semi-conscious young man the final offering. Thus begins this amazing tale, weaving together the lives of four generations of women, Ireland and and Canada, past and present, land and sea. Water becomes a character in itself, each of these women drawn to it like lemmings, lives unfolding near a stream that ebbs and flows with the seasons, a Great Lake, and the Atlantic Ocean. For readers who appreciate lyrical writing, a compelling story, and subtly evoked magic realism, this book is for you

After reading "The Underpainter" by the same author I was urged to read "Away". This book completely engulfed me and carried me away to Ireland; to the lonely, wind swept, rocky beaches, the cold, hungry nights, and into the small, mean cottages. Jane Urquhart weaves a tapestry of language that forms vivid images in the mind of every reader . We are transported onto the coffin ships to make the long voyage to Canada, that most unforgiving of lands. Following the lives of Mary and Brian and their children, as seen through the lense of memory, was my daily gift to myself. I mourned their loss when I finished reading the book, but can still bring them to life as I continue to reflect upon this poetic novel.

I have seldom enjoyed a novel as much as I enjoyed Away by Jane Urquhart. The writer's lyrical prose traverses both literal and metaphysical landscapes with equal skill. A well-crafted plot moves the novel along briskly, intriguing characters come vividly to life, and brief detours into ethereal regions of the spirit seem perfectly natural. Away is a delightful read.

I discovered this beautiful book whilst on holday in Canada, and became entranced with the world of Celtic/Canadian literature.

Jane Urquart's writing transported me into the depths of Irish-Canadian femininity with a powerful sense of tragedy, beauty and imagination. I could not put this book down, and when I finished it I felt as though I had travelled decades and miles beyond the 20th Century world of modern-day London.

Her capacity to relate the magnificence of 2 of the most beautiful places on earth is truly impressive, as is her ability to weave together history and mythology.

I would recommend this book to any other dreamer who can allow themselves to be transported into the other world.

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.

"The women of this family leaned towards extremes [...] They were plagued by revenants. There was always water involved, exaggerated youth or exaggerated age. Afterwards there was absence..."

Esther O'Malley Robertson, now in her eighties, and by her own admission "the last and most subdued" of these extreme women tells the family's story one last time "to herself and the Great Lake, there being no one to listen." The story, she muses, "will take her wherever it wants to go in the next twelve hours, and that is all that matters." And what a story it is! Like her protagonist, Jane Urquhart "paints a landscape in her mind", so rich in colours and shades, and so full of life - real and imagined, large as the ocean, minuscule as a tide pool - and so intimate in the depiction of its human inhabitants with their deep connection to the land and the waters that sustain them.

Spanning some one hundred and forty years, Urquhart creates a intricate multigenerational portrait of a family, starting out on the island of Rathlin, at the most northern coast of Ireland and leaving with Esther at Loughbreeze Beach on the shores of Lake Ontario. Mary, Esther's great-grandmother, stands tall at the beginning of the story, but, overwhelmed by what she experiences one early morning on the beach, changes into somebody that the locals refer to as being "away" - living in an otherworldly reality. She eventually returns to "normal life" thanks to the dedicated gentle care of Brian, her new husband. Urquhart's subtle and sensitive description of the young couple's evolving relationship, set against the increasingly precarious circumstances of the farming communities around them, pulls the reader right into their reality and creates an intimate empathy that only grows as the story unfolds. The contrast between the poverty stricken tenant farmers and their English landlords is stark, yet, even when portraying the latter, the author is perceptive to their limited efforts to help those dependent on them for their survival.

Urquhart touches on major historical events over the novel's time span. With heart wrenching intensity she describes the impact of the Irish potato famine, the subsequent wave of Irish immigration to then "Upper Canada", and the challenges faced by the early settlers and would-be farmers in the harsh landscape of the Canadian Shield. The struggle of the Irish immigrants goes beyond their claiming and cultivating the land and the political realities compete with the domestic; Urquhart interweaves the two component with great skill and balance. Yet, her central force are always the individuals, vividly portrayed, and their attachment, and often fascination, with the landscape they find themselves in. For Mary this deep connection is with the sea; her need for touching it will eventually dictate the rest of her life. For her children, Liam and Eileen, and all those who follow in this family tapestry, Urquhart's poetic and beautifully flowing language captures the diverse characters' deep emotions, at time haunting and heart wrenching and at others sensuous and exuberant. Some of the men are wanderers and capture the attention and love of their women in fleeting visits, others, especially Brian and his son Liam, are earthbound and provide the solid support to those who are torn between the land and the water - the 'here' and the 'away'. Esther, being the last in the line, knows that "Over the years the women of the family who have ventured out into the world have carried pictures of Loughbreeze Beach with them in their minds; its coloured stones shining through water, the places where fine pebbles give way to sand, certain paths the moon makes across the lake's surface on autumn midnights..."

The characterization of one person that he can twist " a sentence into a song" could not be a better description for the author's talents. Whether evoking the diverse emotions of individuals, the inner or outside landscapes they are connected to, the changing seasons with their atmospheric transformations, Urquhart's rich prose carries the reader into a mystical world that is both very real and richly imagined. [Friederike Knabe]

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!

The troubles in Ireland have the roots in centuries of turmoil. The Irish spirituality is innate and as the author weaves a story Irish pain she shares the strength of the Irish. As a third generation Canadian of Irish descent, I needed to know about the Irish soul and why I am the way I am. A fictional account of historic truth

Jane Uquhart's novel Away, is about Mary and Eileen, a mother, daughter duo who have their lives changed by romantic, yet tragic encounters, at different times. The novel begins in Ireland, where Mary is possessed by the spirit of a sailor who dies in her arms on Rathlin island. People of the island believed that Mary was possessed by a deamon lover, who took her away from herself, society and her family. After staring death in the face, from the potato famine, Mary and her realistic husband, Brian, migrated to Canada. Even though Mary had left her country, her deamon followed and took her away, forever, leaving behind her son Liam and her daughter, Eileen. After being told the story of her families abandonment by Exodus Crow and former landlord, Osbert, Eileen falls passionately in love with the fiery Irish patriot dancer, Aiden. Uquharts novel is full of the political and spiritual drama of Ireland, and the Irish people. Jane Uquhart is blessed with the ability to write with such magic and lyrical composition, that at times she make the interesting, even more interesting, and consequently the tedious even more tedious. Jane Uquhart's melodious language is both her greatest asset and worst liability.