Customer Reviews

Changing Heaven

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

 

 

Jane Urquhart has created yet another masterpiece. this is the third Urquhart novel i've read, and this brillinat author never ceases to captivate my imagination with her beautiful, poetic prose. this is the story of several seemingly unrelated characters who grow and develop before the reader, and as you get deeper into the story, their lives are inevitably intertwined in peculiar and fascinating ways. the main characters are a turn-of-the-century baloonist; the young Emily Bronte; a woman in the midst of a troubled love-affair; and the man that connects the pieces in this intriguing puzzle. the main themes in this exquisitely written novel are the loves and passions that bring the characters to a common ground. they are all fascinating and eccentric, and reading about their lives and losses has definitely added to my knowledge and perspective of human nature. a must read for those fascinated by human nature and its aftermaths.

for any classic literature fan who loves Emily Bronte, this book is excellent. The way the ghost of Emily refers to Heathcliffe as "Mr. capital H" is hysterical. This Canadian author is a rare find and I love the way she writes. Maybe one hundred years from now we'll be reading her novels in high school English classes also

A brilliant riff on Emily Brontė's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, this highly original novel is as bracing and wild as the weather itself, impossible to pin down, virtually plotless, yet sweeping all before it. Just as one speaks of a novel of ideas, this is a novel of emotions -- emotions in their purest form, taking possession like a natural force, and largely divorced from the normal ties of cause and effect. This is not a book for those who demand realism and logic rather than a novel organized by poetic association and contrast. But for those who approach it as the unique vision of a poet who just happens to be writing in prose -- wondrous prose -- it is something very special indeed.

I have now read all but two of Jane Urquhart's novels, and know nothing quite like this one from 1990, which barely seems to touch the ground. True, SANCTUARY LINE, her latest, has also the structure of poetry, revisiting scraps of memory, probing and elucidating, but its basic story is down to earth; indeed that is its essence. The other three that I have read -- AWAY (1993), THE STONE CARVERS (2001), and A MAP OF GLASS (2005) -- tell their stories in a more-or-less linear way, although all show Urquhart's characteristic delight in juxtaposing different periods, and AWAY and MAP especially have traces of the otherworldly elements that are so strong here. All of her later novels are set largely in her native Ontario; although Toronto makes an appearance here (as does Venice), the primary setting is the wild Yorkshire moorland near Haworth, where the Brontė sisters grew up. And even here, her concern is less the heather and crags so much as the clouds scudding over them, driven by a restless wind.

The novel brings together three women from different centuries. One is Emily Brontė herself, who appears as a rather personable ghost. The second is a turn-of-the-century balloonist, Arianna Ether, who performed for her manager and lover Jeremy Jacobs, the "Sindbad of the Skies." The third is a Canadian, Ann Frear, who has developed her childhood passion for WUTHERING HEIGHTS into an academic career in English. Shattered by an affair with a colleague named Arthur, an art historian who is also living out a passion for the darker works of Tintoretto, she takes a sabbatical in Yorkshire to write a book on Brontė's weather. But these are just the axes around which the elemental opposites of the novel revolve: passion and peace, wildness and domesticity, heath and hearth.

For most of the novel, the more dramatic elements predominate: the wild wind, the barren landscape, Tintoretto's dark visions lit by flashes of lightning, the unbroken whiteness of the arctic wastes. But, despite what I said about the relative absence of plot, we do begin to care a lot for Ann as a person, and feel for her as she finds a different kind of love from an unexpected source. We know she will never be free of her wild side, but now the question of balance becomes important. Nothing in this novel is as impressive as the way in which Urquhart moves towards that resolution at the end, and the evocative simplicity of her final sentence is heart-stopping.

Jane Urquhart's second novel combines parallel stories of love and obsession with literary references to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Tintoretto's paintings.

Ann and Arthur are the Bronte and Tintoretto scholars, their love affair as doomed as that of the naive factory girl-balloonist, Arianna Ether, and her tormented teacher who died 100 years before. Ann flees to the Bronte moors to recover from her affair and write about wind. Arianna, in the company of a darkly whimsical Emily Bronte, haunts the place.

An intriguing premise and Urquhart's ("The Whirlpool") writing is almost poetry. But it doesn't go anywhere. Although the story is about elemental passions, the passion is bled off into descriptions of the elements and fanciful allusions.

THIS is the true sequel to Wuthering Heights. Not that Jane Urquhart intended it to be, but it so outstrips Return To Wuthering Heights by Anna L'Estrange that it cannot help but unwittingly assume that mantle.

Whereas L'Estrange's sequel is a fairly linear novel, which continues the saga through the lives of Heathcliffe and Catherine's descendants, Hareton and young Cathy, Urquhart gets inside Bronte's head and brings us the spirit of her creation, rather than the mere mechanics.

Urquhart's stunning grasp of Emily Bronte's psyche is echoed in Camille Paglia's own cracking assessment of Bronte and her work in the magnificent Sexual Personae. Here, in Paglia's analysis of Bronte's self-referential high romantic prose poem, she writes of how the Byronic Heathcliffe is both Bronte's own projected animus (put simplistically, her Jungian Inner Male component) and in the context of the story, Cathy's as well.

This metathesis, or literary transsexualization comes across in Urquhart's own brilliant re-weaving of the Brontean strands. Yet, such is the subtlety of Jane's unfoldment, that the female characters, including Emily Bronte (in spirit form, as is Arianna Ether) seem almost peripheral to the calculatedly one-dimensional, self-indulgent male characters. Such of course, is the history of patriarchy, in which women have traditionally been the Second Sex.

The only exception to the male group thus defined is the character Hartley, who, by comparison is an almost Shamanic figure - a man in balance, who has surrendered to the wisdom of the eternal Feminine.

I believe that Jane Urquhart has captured the elemental genius of Bronte's original work, with its relatively anarchic temporal shifting and box structure, in particular Bronte's deliberate use of the singular form of 'heaven' (in a related poem), rather than 'the heavens', which would be a more common choice when writing about the weather, the sky etc. The changing heaven is the changing Heaven, and the use of weather as a metaphor in Wuthering Heights, and therefore Changing Heaven, reminds you of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, which again represented a vortex, connecting the worlds at the opposite ends of the labyrinth. Yin and Yang, Life and Death, Masculine and Feminine etc.

Yet, as Dorothy discovered, when you have truly found yourself, Oz is Kansas. She never left, she merely transformed. Similarly, the temporal convergence that finally connects the female divine Trinity in Jane's epic work is a simliar point of transcendence, and resolution.

I was so impressed by Changing Heaven that I even mentioned it at a pivotal point in my own impending modern gothic novel 'One Star Awake', and in my first work of non-fiction, Sirius Moonlight - concerning the suppression of the Feminine in patriarchal culture - such is the influence that Urquhart's mistresspiece has had on me - likewise, with Camille Paglia.

Even the inspired act of latching onto the Bronte poem's phrase 'changing heaven' and relating it to the absolute core of Wuthering Heights, is a measure of Jane Urquhart's own genius.

I simply cannot recommend this wonderful book highly enough.

This book was brought to my attention by my editor who (like Urquhard, I think) hails from Canada. What a treat I had reading it. There were strong, feminist themes throughout the book that reminded me a little of Urquhard's collegue, Margaret Atwood (argh! I told myself I wasn't going to make this comparison...), but the work in Changing Heaven is much gentler than what I would expect to see from Atwood (whom I also enjoy).

And then there are Urquhard's landscapes. Normally, I'm an inveterate skimmer of descriptive prose, but not here. Her descriptions were just too good to miss.

Last but not least, Emily Bronte shows up toward the end of the book. How massively cool can a book get?

I know it's a Canadian best seller, and I want to support our writers - there are some of great merit, but this book just didn't do it for me. The style was okay, and the story line imaginative, but it never quite got there. I assume it was headed for a story of romantic characters with depth, but Ms. Urquhart just never got them there. Changing Heaven - I doubt it. But if you have nothing else to read, you could kill an afternoon with it and not feel too bad about wasting the day relaxing with a book.