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Quill & Quire
It is not a fictional location, but in Jane Urquhart’s hands, Southern Ontario has become an entire imagined world, much like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Urquhart returns once again to this literary landscape in her latest work, a melancholy history of a family of orchardists living on the north shore of Lake Erie.
Narrated by Liz Crane, the last remaining member of the Butler family, Sanctuary Line is a story of decay – topographical, familial, and moral. “I live in a landscape where absence confronts me daily,” laments Liz, an entomologist who has returned to the now-derelict family farm to monitor the migration of monarch butterflies. Mourning her charismatic but unstable Uncle Stanley, who vanished years earlier, and her cousin Mandy, a military strategist killed in Afghanistan, Liz becomes absorbed with the task of recreating the events that led to her family’s disintegration.
Through flashbacks to her childhood, a narrative slowly emerges. Liz, we learn, is the “summer cousin,” a city girl who returns every summer to the thriving fruit farm operated by her uncle. Stanley is an industrious agriculturalist, employing migrant Mexican workers to till his land and inventing new methods of chemical irrigation to enhance the crops. Liz and her cousins frolic among the trees and swim in the glimmer of the lake. They are ignorant of the dark secrets that Stanley is hoarding, secrets that will ultimately lead to the family’s fall and expulsion from this Eden.
Of course, paradise is relative; the Butler farm is no Eden for the Mexican labourers who are shipped in via cargo plane and sleep in cramped bunkhouses throughout the growing season. If the farm provides a picturesque portrait of respectable Canadian life, these workers lurk constantly in the shadows of the frame.
Woven into the narrative are Stanley’s myths of the Butler “great-greats” – the family’s Irish ancestors, all of whom worked as either farmers or lighthouse-keepers. These stories are among the novel’s highlights, juxtaposing the material of 18th- and 19th-century romance against the staid, unruffled composure of small-town Ontario. Uncle Stanley fortifies the Butler myth with tales of the great-greats’ fabled adventures – tales of ships lost at sea, drowned orphans, and long-separated lovers.
Like her uncle, Liz is a gifted storyteller. But for Liz, remembering is an exercise in reconstruction, shaping the past as a way of making sense of it. “What can I do with all that ambiguity and doubt?” she asks. “There is no information I can bring to it, no light I can shine on it to make it any clearer.” She can be a frustrating narrator, withholding and secretive, but her fragmented perspective mirrors the non-linear nature of memory itself.
Few of the book’s characters escape comparisons to the monarchs. In addition to symbolizing Liz’s migration to and from the Butler farm, the butterflies are used to describe young Mandy’s shy teenage years (“the chrysalis phase”) and even the end of the family line: “It will die in flight, without mating,” Liz says, “and the exquisite possibilities it carries in its cells and in the thrall of its migration will simply never come to pass.”
Butterflies are just one of many symbolic motifs that pepper the text. Doubles and doppelgängers ripple throughout the novel, which also teems with references to glass and reflective surfaces that serve to isolate characters, refract images, and distort perceptions.
The novel’s overreliance on symbolism can grate, but from a narrative perspective, it results from Liz’s attempt to reconstruct an ordered world where everything makes sense, something the scientific method is incapable of. “The thing about scientific system taxonomy … is that while it pretends to inject predictability and comfort into our world, it can’t really cause either of these states to come into being.”
Liz’s narrative engenders an inescapable intimacy with her character and the landscape, but unfortunately the other Butlers are not as fully formed. Mandy and Stanley, two figures whose losses should be deeply and viscerally felt, never really become more than names. Their personalities and inner lives are described, but not experienced. The material that could have been devoted to character development instead falls victim to rambling rhetoric and empty prose. For example, Liz argues, “I might have become acquainted with the hesitancy, the frailty of spirit that attends certain kinds of love, as well as the baffling tenacity of a passion as difficult as Mandy’s appeared to be.” It all sounds extraordinarily pretty, but the writing is bloated: it manages to say a great deal that means very little.
The novel’s pacing is also hindered by this tendency to veer into poetic, yet often vapid, digression. It bogs the story down, making it difficult to care what happens to characters that have already been given short shrift.
The story does pick up as it nears its climax, however, and comes to a poignant, somber close as Liz’s history finally comes into focus. Sanctuary Line is, ultimately, a sensitive meditation on the fragile but inexorable ties between place, identity, and history. In it, Urquhart simultaneously honours and destabilizes the tradition of Canadian pastoral.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.Review
—The Observer
"The most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives."
—Alice Munro
"Urquhart weaves centuries and stories together… She displays a masterful command of language and a grasp of the complexities that form the tapestry of each individual person."
—Winnipeg Free Press
"Jane Urquhart is one of the country's most accomplished writers."
—London Free Press
"No other Canadian novelist knows more about the history of rural southern Ontario than Jane Urquhart."
—Toronto Star
"Sanctuary Line is a book lover's novel… her writing is often beautiful, stirring"
—The Globe and Mail
"Urquhart's prose is pure gold…"
—Winnipeg Free Press
"Urquhart builds stories like an architect… and the brilliance of Urquhart's powerful ending is that it makes us want to start again…"
—Toronto Star
"Measured, dignified, calm on the surface but containing as much thematic richness and plain literary pleasure as a reader could care to dig for…"
—Montreal Gazette
"I'm grateful to have spent time with Sanctuary Line and soaked up Urquhart's nuanced wisdom…"
—Vancouver Sun
"Urquhart has a great gift for the historical novel, for the melding of ideas, events and individuals into a significant whole."
—Claire Messud, The Globe and Mail
From the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended for die-hard Urquhart fans and those with patience,
By
This review is from: Sanctuary Line (Hardcover)
I am a die-hard Urquhart fan so I hung in there despite being disappointed in the distance I felt from the characters and the meandering plot (much of which seemed to have little to no effect on either character or plot development; in my opinion, it was just back story that needed to be edited out). However, by the end, the story comes together (albeit a little too late) and I felt engaged with two of the characters. Oddly, I felt least connected to the uncle which permeates each page and the most connected to a character that isn't even introduced until the last pages, the character that is the reason for the occasional second-person point of view (which was interesting from a literature perspective but annoying from a personal one). An important part of the novel, for me, was Urquhart's apt and sad description of the disappearance of "local" orchards/farms from Southwestern Ontario. I live on Lake Huron close to Arkona which had a plethora of thriving orchards just twenty years ago, most of which are now gone. It saddens me that most of the tree fruit I buy now is shipped from all over the world. The thirty minute drive to Arkona every summer for cherries and every fall for bushels of freshly picked apples was one of my greatest pleasures. I found myself quite dispirited for a couple of days over the "progress" we've made. So, there's no doubt that Urquhard knows how to affect her readers.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Look out the window...,
By Friederike Knabe "“We write to taste life twi... (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Sanctuary Line (Hardcover)
"...The cultivated landscape of this farm has decayed so completely now, it is difficult to believe that the fields and orchards ever existed outside my own memories, my own imagination... ". With these opening lines Liz Crane, forty-year old entomologist and the central voice in Jane Urquhart's new, engrossing and most personal novel invites us into her world and into her mind. Having recently returned to the old Butler homestead and studying monarch butterfly behaviour at the nearby Sanctuary Research Centre, Liz feels she needs to reconnect with all that is familiar from the past. She let's her mind wander back to the fun-filled summers of her childhood, spent amongst her cousins and the rest of the extended family. Important questions have remained since then about the whereabouts of some and she hopes that by going through the remnants of memorabilia kept in the farmhouse she will shed some light on these.Much of the story takes place in the nineteen eighties at the Butler family farm on the northern, Canadian, shore of Lake Erie, a landscape that is depicted with detailed and loving attention and that is somewhat familiar to readers of Urquhart's previous novels. She and many of her characters feel grounded there. Liz, the city girl is the enthusiastic "summer cousin" immersed in play and exploration, especially with her cousin Mandy. Mandy and her father Stanley, the head of the Butler clan, are often on Liz's mind now in her ruminations about the past. Mandy, the poetry lover turned military officer, was killed on duty in Afghanistan not long ago, and Stan, the life-loving, "innovative" farmer disappeared without a trace one day, twenty years earlier. Memories also take her back to Teo, the Mexican boy, whom she met over several summers at the farm where his mother and other Mexicans were working. They had become close friends, until... "There is no one, no one left. I live in a landscape where absence confronts me daily," she reflects, and later on: "Hardly ever has memory been good for people ..." Multi-generational intriguing family sagas, reaching back in time to Irish immigration to North America, are one of Urquhart's familiar themes. In SANCTUARY LINE the primary family storyteller is uncle Stan, who captures Liz's attention with his absorbing tales of the family's forbearers, the "Great-greats". His recounting of the past is not linear and, similarly, Liz's mind is wandering in and out of memory snippets, the history of the Butlers is revealed in small, apparently disconnected, summer installments. Central to the family traditions, beginning in Ireland, is "bifurcation": between farmers and lighthouse keepers, and in North America between those settlers on the southern shore of Lake Erie and those on the northern side. Family dramas and politics have come into play resulting, finally, in peaceful coexistence and more between the two branches. Still now, Liz keeps wondering how much of Stan's rich lore was based on fact and how much a construction of his creative mind, deliberately invented for the benefit of the children. Mystery and questions remain as far as the family saga is concerned. Having read most of Urquhart's previous novels and enjoyed her insightful realization of engaging characters and her often lyrical and vivid evocation of the beautiful and diverse landscapes in Southern Ontario, SANCTUARY LINE feels quite familiar in that respect. Yet, for this novel, the author has taken a completely new, and for me, more intimate approach to story telling. Creating an authentic first person voice, one that allows the reader to feel like an intimate companion to Liz, who, in turn, appears to invite us to "look out the window" with her into her young girl's persona and life. With the hindsight and distance of a mature person, yet filled with deep emotion and unresolved questions, she brings the past to life for her and our benefit. While we might feel addressed directly in that first line and on and off throughout the novel, the question sneaks up on us as to whether we really are the intended audience. By allowing Liz's memories to wander effortlessly - and seemingly randomly - between present and past, yet also subtly linking the two by dropping clues and small hints to future situations, Urquhart, in fact, spins a beautifully crafted delicate, yet sturdy, and increasingly tightly structured story web. It captures scattered shards of Liz's memory, splinters from Stan's imaginative and sometimes wild family stories, and builds on strong connecting threads of love and friendship, happiness and loss. It is up to the reader to carefully assemble the numerous and recurring references to individuals and relationships that will be revisited again and again, revealing a bit more each time until they are eventually explained. Monarchs appear regularly every summer on the Butler farm and the symbolism of their migratory behaviour is evident to Liz, who monitors their behaviour. She understands their genetically imprinted sense of orientation and interconnectedness through several generations to return to their summer breeding grounds. In her ruminations she returns, from time to time, to admire their strengths as a swarm and to recognize their fragility if migration patterns are changing or one butterfly is straying from the predetermined path. The parallels to her understanding of her family and human behaviour in general are evident. Sometimes, though, the connections to the story web seem arbitrarily tenuous and appear to get lost in the midst of everything else. [Friederike Knabe]
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mariposa Memories,
By Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Sanctuary Line (Hardcover)
Consider memory. At any time, a person's mind potentially holds the sum total of all her experience, though she may not be able to access all of it. She may have forgotten details, until reminded by revisiting a place or picking up a keepsake. There may be memories too painful to recall, until the recounting of simpler things clears a pathway to them. There may be things that she cannot understand until the light of maturity suddenly reveals their meaning. Unlike a tale told chronologically, a novel based on memory contains its entire story in outline from the first pages on -- although it remains unclear in detail, emotion, and significance until we have lived long enough in the narrator's mind to explore her past from within. And Jane Urquhart, in the gradual unspooling of memory that is essence of her latest novel, allows us to inhabit the mind of Liz Crane, her protagonist and narrator, as though it were our own.Liz is an entomologist, working at a sanctuary situated on a promontory of the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. She studies the Monarch butterfly, which migrates annually from Canada to Mexico and back again, the task being spread between several generations, dying so that others may live. The theme of migration is strongly present in the book. Her uncle's orchard farm, where Liz used to spend her summers, was worked each year by families flown in from Mexico. Her own family, the Butlers, emigrated from Ireland, settling on both the American and Canadian sides of the lake; the novel is full of their stories. Her uncle himself was given to unexplained disappearances, and one year he simply walked out of their lives for good. More recently, her cousin Mandy, a senior officer in the Canadian army, spent several years in Afghanistan, dying there shortly before the book opens. There are other deaths also that will emerge as the memories come into focus, but there is also life, love, and friendship, and golden echoes of those endless summer evenings of childhood in the country. The three previous novels by Jane Urquhart that I have read (in ascending order of personal preference: THE STONE CARVERS, AWAY, and A MAP OF GLASS) have all been panoramic stories told chronologically. SANCTUARY LINE is different in being intimate, personal, and reflective, the same events coming back again and again, growing in meaning with each telling. Urquhart has always been a poet, even in her prose, but only this book has the structure of poetry itself. Poetry, which was Mandy's passion, actually plays a large part in it, with well-placed quotations from Robert Louis Stevenson (whose greatness I cannot see) and Emily Dickinson (whom Urquhart makes me appreciate as never before). The prevailing poetic moods are pastoral and elegy -- Urquhart's love of the country and lament for its disappearance; in this, she very much echoes the theme of her earlier books, especially A MAP OF GLASS. But she very much needs these local roots. When Mandy goes to Afghanistan, she is in an utterly different world that Urquhart does not entirely manage to connect to her own. One of the earliest scenes in the book shows Mandy's hearse being driven along Canadian highways as policemen, firemen, and members of the public gather on overpasses. It is a hero's return, a poignant image of loss and homecoming. But not as hopeful as that of the Monarchs -- mariposas there, butterflies here -- flying to and fro between Mexico and Canada, and converting the trees on which they land into tongues of living flame.
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