Fiction: A young earth-artist exploring the wilds of an island in Lake Ontario for a project about landscape and change, discovers a dead man preserved in the ice.
Traumatised by the experience, he abandons the lake shore and returns home to the city.
About a year later when a middle aged woman reads about this find in a newspaper, she goes in search of the artist. The dead man, who had disappeared abruptly, had been her lover. For Sylvia, the only person who can help her solve the mystery of her lost love is the young artist.
Jane Urquhart, the Canadian novelist and poet, is a romantic with a strongly fatalistic philosophical streak. Nowhere is this more obvious than in her new novel. A Map of Glass is a dramatic, sombre work, told in formal, rather ornate language. It is long, slow moving and very intense.
Sylvia is a study in despair. Marriage to a medical colleague of her doctor father has kept her in the state of protected, extended childhood. In contrast to this suffocating protection is the strange passion she shared with Andrew, the dead man, who had given her the only sense of real life she had ever had.
Urquhart somehow manages to keep the narrative within the credible levels of sophisticated melodrama. The strength of the novel lies in the characterisation of Sylvia. Once described as beautiful, but now no longer young, Sylvia sets off on a quest. It is a brave and rash act; this is a careful individual who never acts on impulse, yet her sudden courage brings her to Toronto.
From the opening pages, the character of Sylvia is developed with immense care. "She was fifty-three years old and had never been in a city before." No wonder she announces - in Urquhart's often intensely poetic prose - "to the squares of cement that were passing beneath her feet 'I am now in the world'."
But the lushness is justified. This is a determined, bleak story about damaged people. Sylvia's grasp of life and reality is so delicate that she is dependent on the slightest detail as a form of self-vindication. It is her only hope. Even as she stands before the young man whom she believes can help her, and on meeting him must also meet his intimidating girlfriend, Mira, Sylvia notices the cat. On being asked to sit down, she is conscious of the sofa. "Thinking of her coat, of the cat hair, Sylvia chose a chair", leaving the couple to sit on the sofa.
In her previous novel, The Stone Carvers which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize, she drew on the Great War as the source for much of her narrative. However, the real intensity of that book lies in her heartbreaking humanity. Her understanding of the agonies that create emotional turmoil is the quality that lifts her complex fiction away from romance and melodrama. If as a storyteller she can be overly complicated and at times contrived, as a reader of character she is intuitive and thoughtful.
Several of the finest scenes in A Map of Glass are those in which the respective tragedies of Sylvia and Jerome, the young artist, are balanced against each other. Tension is provided in the presence of Mira, pronounced mirror. It is a loaded device, considering that Sylvia and Jerome are mirror images of each other. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that Jerome is almost as troubled as Sylvia; his early life was also an ordeal for different reasons and in his girlfriend he has found a protector of sorts.
Interestingly, in a book in which Urquhart draws on the past and the realities of family based social history - A Map of Glass includes a long middle section in which Andrew supplies the story of his family as it established itself over the generations in Canada - she is at her most convincing when attempting to enter the world of the mind that is Sylvia.
In this troubled character lies a despair created by memory, longing and possibly fantasy. At times it is difficult to identify the point at which memory ends and imagination takes over. For Sylvia, the ghostly Andrew is life in death, and in death has remained her only path to life: "Sometimes in those final weeks, because it had seemed that the only way to bring him back into the room was to escort him toward the sensations of his own body, she'd had to find new ways of giving him pleasure. And even in the midst of this, even when his response was charged with heat or laced with desperation, she would feel him begin to forget her as if the act in which they were engaged were unprecedented and terrifying. There were few words between them then, and no laughter." These moments of stark clarity occur throughout the book. Urquhart is deliberate and as precise as a surgeon. It is a book of relentless craft.
Sylvia is in agony but she remains alert to others, at least to a fellow sufferer as wounded as Jerome. "What is he seeing in his mind? Sylvia wondered. Certainly not Andrew. He wouldn't want to remember that, wouldn't want to think about it . . . As a younger woman, Sylvia had been baffled by the gestures of others. She could never understand, for example, why people raised their hands when they spoke . . ."
Urquhart tracks the fragile intelligence of Sylvia, her needs and hopes; responses and possibly, her delusions are all bound up in the character of Andrew, dead a year before the narrative even begins. Equally, there is Jerome, fascinated and perhaps even frightened by the capable, watchful Mira.
At times, Urquhart allows Sylvia to speak with the eloquence of an anthropologist applying the full force of her analytical skills to herself as she recalls her time with Andrew. "I was so awkwardly vulnerable, so stupid. People like me are supposed to have next to no attention span. But, in fact, in my case, quite the opposite is true: my attention span is limitless: it's just a matter of where my focus settles . . . The idea of him , you see, kept its arm around my shoulders . . . and kept me safely distant from everyone else."
Just over halfway through the narrative, Urquhart writes: "It is a sad fact that into any individual's life there will stroll only a very few irreplaceable fellow creatures . . ." Statements such as this render A Map of Glass into a book of truths. Elsewhere, a character remarks: "Nothing goes on forever." Change and time emerge as constant themes. Even Mira, who as the narrative unfolds becomes less intimidating, more thoughtful, remarks of Sylvia's version of Andrew's story: "Decay and change . . . People moving from place to place, leaving things behind." Stories possess their own truths. Urquhart's eerie, intense meditation about damaged seekers tracking salvation balances personal chaos with wider reflections on life and loss. For all the darkness, the, at times, rigid telling, and multiple images, this strange, thoughtful book achieves an odd beauty and unsettling urgency that may linger beyond the expected.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
A Map of Glass By Jane Urquhart Bloomsbury, 370pp. £10.99
