The Night Stages
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Set mainly in a remote westerly tip of Ireland in the 1940s and '50s, this stunning new novel from one of Canada's bestselling authors is at once intimate and epic in scope.
Tam, an Englishwoman, has been living in this harshly beautiful region since shortly after World War II, in which she served as an auxiliary pilot. She is now leaving her lover, Niall, who, like his father before him, is a meteorologist. On her way to New York, the airliner she is traveling on becomes grounded by heavy fog at Gander Airport in Newfoundland. As she waits for the fog to clear, she notices an enigmatic mural that moves her to revisit not only the circumstances that brought her to Ireland but her intense relationship with Niall and his growing despondency over the disappearance of his younger brother, Kieran.
We learn of Kieran's troubled childhood and of the tragedy that caused him as a boy to be separated from his family and taken in by a widowed countrywoman who lives in the mountains. There he comes to know the local people, among them a tailor, a fisherman-teacher, and a sheep farmer who is an astonishing philosopher. There is also the jeweler's daughter, a young woman who will come to change the course of several lives.
Running parallel is the story of the painter Kenneth Lochhead and his creation of the mural at Gander that is Tam's only companion through three long days and nights.
An elegiac novel of unusual emotional depth, The Night Stages explores the meaning of separation, the sorrows of fractured families, and the profound effect of Ireland's wild and elemental landscape on lives shaped by its beauty. It is Jane Urquhart's richest, most rewarding novel to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Urquhart (Sanctuary Line) delivers an impressionistic and forlorn postwar romance. Framed by the career of an ingenious real-life artist named Kenneth, the novel emulates an actual mural of his, Gander Airport's Flight and Its Allegories. But only gradually is Kenneth's mural connected to the recollections of an auxiliary pilot named Tamara and the life she lived in rural Ireland with her lover, the meteorologist Niall and his tortured brother, Kieran. As Tamara and Niall live a life of relative calm punctuated by the gorgeously evoked Irish landscape and their memories of the war, Kieran becomes a bicycle racer and, following a prestigious race, disappears completely. Niall blames himself and undertakes a fruitless search for his brother. But Tamara understands Kieran's love of speed better than she admits, and even as she prepares to leave Ireland, a love triangle develops. Uruquart's evocative novel may not exactly break new ground, but passages rich with the aura of distant love make this novel a lovely dream of and emotional landscapes. Kieran, Tamara, and Niall are well drawn, never succumbing to stereotype or symbolic shorthand but the long chapters detailing Kenneth's labors on his mural make for laborious reading and come off as only incidentally connected to the central love story. For readers willing to surrender to the mood, this stands as an exemplar of both Canadian and Irish literature.