Searching in the dark to light up life’s stories

THE landscape where Jane Urquhart sets her latest novel is as rich in stories as it once was in the fruit trees the eccentric Stanley Butler cultivated.

His niece, Liz, recently returned to the abandoned orchards to study the migrating monarch butterflies that so fascinated her as a child, tends those tales the way Stanley once cared for his crops.

Blending memories of cherished childhood summers on the farm with family folklore passed down through the generations, she keeps the land alive in her mind long after the trees have ceased to produce.

It provides a refuge for her, the sanctuary of the book’s title that takes its name from the road that leads to and from her ancestral settlement on the shores of Lake Erie in Canada.

But it also traps her because, unlike Stanley who assiduously planned each crop and nurtured the soil accordingly up until his sudden disappearance, Liz is making no preparations for the next season of her own life.

She’s stuck, endlessly travelling Sanctuary Line which puzzles her by virtue of the fact that it holds the same name regardless of which direction she drives it.

She feels that when she turns on to it from the farm at Sanctuary Point, it should have a new name reflecting the destination at the other end. It doesn’t occur to her that she needs to identify a destination to travel towards.

Attachment to the land and the place of history in the heart are just some of the themes Urquhart explores in her eighth novel along with — to name a few — personal awakenings, lost love, race relations, war, commercialisation, globalisation and environmental degradation.

She stresses the term “explores” for although the life depicted reflects the Canadian native and part-time Kerry resident’s own childhood experiences and the changes that have occurred since, she says she’s not trying to sell any particular message.

“Hopefully I don’t really have an agenda when I’m writing a novel. You never know, I could have an unconscious one.

“But I think to use a political motivation to write a novel is dangerous artistically and aesthetically. There are other ways of doing that — a book of essays perhaps — but it would just be an undimensional way of writing a novel.”

Urquhart, whose mother was a Quinn from Co Antrim, was born in a mining community in northern Ontario but spent holidays at her parents’ summer house among the farms her maternal uncles worked along the shores of Lake Ontario.

“I did have that sense given to me by my mother that when we went to the farm, we were in a place where all was right with the world, that when she got to go home — it’s that Irish thing really and even as a child I knew it — the real world was there.”

And yet it’s not to a retreat in rural Canada but to a cottage in Macgillycuddy’s Reeks that Urquhart goes several times a year to write — something that seems strange given the impression her home country creates of being a haven of space and peace.

“That’s actually kind of a mistaken impression. The major part of the population of Canada hugs the American border, so it’s quite dense. Above us there is this vast huge space but it’s predominantly uninhabited and cannot be inhabited — there are no roads for a start — so while it’s heart-warming to know it’s there, you really can’t do much with it.”

In Kerry, where she has been coming for more than 15 years, her road may occasionally be blocked by livestock and her artist husband restricted by the confines of his tiny turf shed-come-studio, but they love the combination of peace and companionship that life in a lived-in land creates.

“Land that has been worked by the agri-industry, as is now predominantly the case in Canada, doesn’t have any charm. It somehow has had its soul ripped out.

“Everything becomes very regulated and very much the same as everything else, so it’s not interesting, it’s not engaging and the loss of the paysannerie — the people of the land — is just immeasurable and quite terrifying.

“I know that there are movements afoot to eat locally — and I’m sure that’s true here as well — but it seems a little crazy that we have to make that a movement, that we can’t naturally get our own produce to eat in our own shops.”

Not that she overly romanticises Kerry — the discovery of fruit labelled produce of Chile while out shopping recently reminded her that nowhere is immune to globalisation.

But she has found it fertile ground for true-life inspiration, no more so than when she witnessed the reaction to the death of John B Keane. “I have never seen a funeral like that in my life and I will never see another. It was so moving and so affirming — large numbers of Kerry farmers marching in the funeral cortege.

“It illustrated for me how important on a real human level literature is, and it was just marvellous. Maybe it’s a terrible thing to say about someone’s funeral, but it was marvellous, very enriching.”

Other real-life stories have also inspired her. In Sanctuary Line, one of the stories passed down to the young Liz is about an Irish ancestor, a lighthouse keeper on the Skelligs, whose two children were plucked from where they played by the ever-prowling waves and drowned within sight of their home.

In the book, Urquhart has him return to the mainland to father two more children, one of whom emigrates to Canada to bring Irish blood into Liz’s family line.

She doesn’t know what actually became of the keeper but she did find in the Skelligs Heritage Museum his heart-breaking formal request to the Commissioner of Irish Lights for a transfer off the island following the tragic loss of his children.

“The two little graves are there in the monk’s graveyard. It’s almost incredibly sad and yet absolutely true.”

Sad endings are not something Urquhart shies away from. The stories told about the ancestors, Liz’s own first tentative romance, the drama behind Uncle Stanley’s disappearance and the mystery affair that consumes her soldier cousin Mandy before she dies on another kind of battlefield in Afghanistan, all bring an air of lament to the novel and seem to assert that love inevitably equates to loss.

“It’s a desire to look at the dark. I think that I have always been attracted to the northern place, the Strindberg, Ibsen kind of darkness. After all — and this sounds sentimental and crazy but it is true — if we don’t have enough dark you can’t see the stars.

“And it is true, let’s face it — a tragic love affair is more interesting than a happy-go-lucky one. Although I have to admit I like Fred and Ginger. Everybody’s tap-dancing, everything’s terrific — I like that. I just think the other side makes for a more interesting novel.”