Customer Reviews

The Stone Carvers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book was the first I've read of Jane Urquhart's novels. I read reviews about it here on Amazon before I read the book, and I was worried that I would find it too long as some reviews suggested, but I loved it. I didn't find it long at all. In fact I couldn't put it down! I took it with me everywhere, even to the golf course! Ha. The descriptions of the work that went into the stone and wood carving performed in the book made me want to go out and buy a set of carving tools. Today I went out and bought two more of her books; Away and The Underpainter. I'm hoping I will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed this one.

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!

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.

I enjoyed much of this novel, but I have not been swayed either in finishing the book or by the lofty reviews that this is a great book. It's a good book -- it's solid, but not spectacular. Tilman is a fine character, a young man who knows from a very young age that his role is not to live in one place, but to roam. His sister Klara absorbs the family's obsession with carving in his absence. She falls for the silent Irishman, Eamon, and watches him go off to war.

Eventually a few of these characters make their way to Vimy to participate in the completion of the memorial -- an insufferable pilgrimage that to me does not work at all. I understand that Vimy is the crescendo of the novel, but to me it's an unlikely and uninteresting finale.

It's been 5 years since I read the book and longer ago that I had wanted to visit the Vimy memorial. So I read the book in the summer of 2001 and travelled to France in Oct 2001.

I found the combination of book + visit very moving and recommend both to any Canadian with an interest on what Canadians have done in the name of the country elsewhere in the world (though in WWI, in the name of the "empire" would be closer to the truth). I recall the story as being a good read and the fictional story told of the carver's assistants added additional interest and meaning to what I actually saw upon arrival at Vimy (went directly there off the flight). The story can fit in, in a manner, as a surrogate for the actual sculpture's own story, which is not told in great depth.

The monument is an amazingly powerful place to me. The book sets up the visit very nicely.

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 the actual battle field, and erected in memory of the many thousands of Canadian soldiers who perished in this decisive battle, leaves no doubt as to its impact on anybody seeing it. Urquhart's lyrical language evokes the eerie atmosphere that surrounds the carvers working high up on fragile platforms on either of the white limestone pylons that form the centre of the monument. The passages describing the intricate work of stone carvers whether swinging on ropes high up or working on engraving the thousands of names of the missing are some of the most memorable of the novel. The author imagines the stone carvers' daily existence: carving from dawn to dusk; living and breathing the atmosphere of the land, still saturated with the evidence of the war. For some, like for Klara and Tilman, the work is a release from the past, a new beginning that is grounded in forgiveness, closure and redemption. Not surprisingly, Urquhart, asked about what the novel was about, responded: "it is about the redemptive nature of art". Yes, indeed.

By bringing the different threads of the novel together around the Vimy memorial, Urquhart also achieves an admirable harmonization between the intimately imagined lives of her characters and the broader historical reality. Shonegal, for example, is based on the town of Formosa, the actual Father Gstir built the enormous church up on the hill as described in the novel. The imposing Vimy Monument continues to be well known to Canadians of all generations; Walter Allward, almost forgotten since as the architect of the Monument, has been given a well-deserved tribute in Urquhart's novel. [Friederike Knabe]

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.

The idea for this book is fascinating - Urquhart uses as the centrepiece the building of the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge. The history she provides is something that every Canadian should know and is probably unaware of. She uses the war memorial as a symbol of both obsession and redemption.

Urquhart very convincingly conveys the futility of war and depicts how young men go off to war for all the wrong reasons - hoping to fly an airplane, for instance.

Urquhart's strenth as a writer is her ability to paint beautiful pictures with words - her description is unsurpassed. She uses symbols quite well, although at times not subtly enough. In this book, the bird imagery was a little overdone when it came to Tilman. However, she portrays the grand sweep of history while, at the same time, evoking the mood and atmosphere of a small Ontario town.

The weakness in this book is the characterization - for the most part, these characters are one-dimensional and just not believable as real people. For one thing, they are too nice. It is hard to believe that Tilman, on his own since the age of 6 and losing a leg in the war, would not be more bitterly scarred than he is.

Read this book for the beauty of the images and for the history lesson. If you're looking for great characters, you won't find them here. The flaw with this book is that the characters are just not deep enough to adequately deal with the grand themes of obsession and redemption.

In the gloomy 1930s we look back over a span of a hundred years to the start of a pioneer village in Ontario. The village can now, due to the depression, be considered a failure. It was not always so. In 1866, a Bavarian priest was instructed by God and by `mad' King Ludwig, his two bosses, to move to Canada to attend to the spiritual needs of a flock of Bavarians who had started a village in the woods. The region was called Upper Canada at the time, and the village acquired the name Shonevale, which I believe to be a garbled variation on the German for Beautiful Valley. The previous name had been Carrick, as Irish settlers had been there first. We learn the story of the priest and how he built his church in Canada. The Becker family are the main heroes of the epic.


By the 1930s only the nuns of a local convent and a particular `spinster', Klara Becker, still know about the history. Rumor among the nuns has it that only her affection for 'manly work' had kept the spinster from becoming one of them. Manly work in her case means primarily carving: wood is her element. She is also an accomplished tailor. And she runs a farm with livestock. The story is assembled in bits and pieces back and forth with Klara being the centre of attention in the first part, called Needle and Chisel. By the time she is a young woman in love with a pretty Irish boy she has seen tragic things in her family. The Great War demolishes her romance, as it did for so many. The people of Shonevale mostly resist enlistment. Those of Bavarian or Alsatian origin had come here to escape European wars, not to be dragged into one. Those of Irish origin wouldn't dream of fighting for the English. Klara's lover was different, he wanted to fly an airplane.

For the whole first part and nearly half of the book, nobody carves stone, by the way. We have only woodcarvers. Part 2 is called The Road (but has no likeness with MacCarthy) and follows Klara's brother Tilman, who had run away from home at age 12. His name honors the great carver Tilman Riemenschneider. This part is short and conventional. We stay with Tilman until WW1 breaks out. He has settled with the family of an Italian fellow tramp and has become a wood carver. Still, the only stone carving is done by others, not the Beckers.
Part 3, The Monument, reunites the siblings at home in the early 30s. Tilman has lost a leg in the war. He has also learned stone carving in the meantime. In France a huge Canadian war memorial is being built, carved from stone. The siblings decide to join the project. The story becomes something like a non-fiction tale about the monument, which really exists in France.
By half way I had lost some of my enthusiasm for the book. Its original freshness has given way to a conventional novel, if still well written and emotionally appealing. The breadth of narration and the sense of humor are charming. The legend is cute and the family drama is dramatic. I sense a taste of Macondo in Ontarian woods. Urquart's technique is partly based in Marquezian narrative tricks and characters. Her courage doesn't carry all the way though.
I have some concerns, like this one: the lover boy is not an entirely plausible character. He is not one, but two men, first an oafish yokel, then a normal charming seducer. The jump is needed for the plot, but not made quite understandable. That is a flaw, in my view.

There are also some minor misdemeanors. Generally the accuracy level of using German words is not great in this book. The Ludwig Missions Verein becomes a Verig.
The book also has its share of anachronisms: e.g. the priest is said to have enjoyed his choice of European wines after his meals, while working in his parish in Innzell, back home in Bavaria. Innzell is a pretty place (at least last time I checked) and probably was so already in 1866, but is it realistic to say that the local priest had access to a selection of European wines?
Is fiction free with facts? I don't think so. Placing a specific man at a specific place in a specific year generates the obligation to be accurate about circumstances.
But these are minor problems. All in all, the book is well worth reading. The author is an established contemporary author in Canada, a regular prize winner. I wouldn't know about her without the amazon friends system, which shows that it is good for something.

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 images of Vimy to get a fuller sense of the visionary scale of this remarkable monument, which almost begs to have a novel written about it.