Jane Urquhart’s new novel, “A Map of Glass,” begins with Andrew, a man suffering from Alzheimer’s, struggling to walk through deep snow in a barren part of Canada “where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River.” After getting tired he lies down to rest in a snowdrift and freezes to death.
The rest of the book builds on this theme of one entity forcefully changing another – usually man’s effect on nature, but sometimes it is a person’s soul that gets permanently altered.
Urquhart is the Canadian author of such acclaimed novels as “The Stone Carvers” and “The Underpainter.” In her characteristic style, she writes about forces of nature and how they relate to human loss. She puts the events into a specific historical unit of time and spins it into lyrical poetry. Poetry is what she was first noted for so it’s no surprise that her prose turns toward the poetic.
Andrew, frozen inside a chunk of ice, is discovered by a 20-something Toronto artist named Jerome. After reading about her lover’s death in the newspaper, Sylvia finds Jerome. She wants to ask him about Andrew’s death and to share Andrew’s ancestral history with him. Leaving her husband behind, she goes to Toronto, her first visit to a city after living in the country her entire life.
Jerome, surprisingly, is not annoyed with the woman, and listens intently to the story of Andrew’s ancestors and their involvement in the timber industry and eventual destruction of Timber Island. It’s hard to believe that he would actually sit and listen and it’s even harder to believe that he cares.
The novel is set up as a story within a story. Andrew’s history is the extensive middle section of the book. It is plopped in the there in the middle without warning, as though we must stop and read the inserted book to understand the book we are reading.
The history is interesting and in some ways the heart of the novel because the characters are better developed than the ones in the main story, but it still feels out of place.
Andrew has spent much of his adult life looking for changes in landscape and researching the effect of his ancestors on the land. Sylvia, in what seems an effort to be closer to her lost lover, luxuriates in finding the evidence of changes on objects rather than landscapes:
“He always told me that there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it. Even if it is just a trace – all but invisible – it is there for those willing to look hard enough.”
Sylvia does look hard enough. We see this when she notices how a pen has left a “scar” on a wooden desk when viewed in a certain light.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to know any of the characters very well, and that’s too bad because they seem interesting. The only character we have a good understanding of is Sylvia, but even then, much is left unknown. She is seemingly autistic, with her lack of social interaction and attachment to objects, but her illness is only referred to as a mysterious “condition.” She has never liked touch, change or emotion. Something as simple as fluttering curtains causes anxiety.
Upon marriage, it was agreed that her husband would never touch her unless she decided she wanted him to. She never has. It is only with Andrew that Sylvia has allowed herself to be touched – emotionally or physically. Their relationship is vague, though. We hear about some of their meetings but we never really see the love or affection she pines over and in the back of our minds, we wonder if she has embellished the relationship.
“A Map of Glass” is ultimately about touch and how touching transforms physical landscapes or the personal landscape of the soul. The concept is interesting, but Urquhart tries too hard to keep the theme in the forefront, never giving us a break from it. Like the pervasive sand that has buried Timber Island because of misuse, we feel bombarded.
The novel isn’t one of Urquhart’s best. Her writing is still lyrical, sweeping and delicate. But it’s not an easy book to read, with its pervasive theme taking over the novel and leaving the characters, and the story, on the sidelines.
Renee Warner is a freelance writer in Atlanta.
A Map of Glass
By Jane Urquhart
MacAdam/Cage, 375 pages, $25
