[accessibleimage] A Map of Glass -book review

Hi,
Perhaps a bit of subject. This is a book review, but in it there is a bit about tactile maps.
"...But what she knows, she knows in almost magical depth: not merely the contents of her kitchen cupboards, but the byways and topography of her native landscape, its intimate histories. Her gift to her one close friend, a blind woman named Julia, is a series of tactile maps that endeavour to convey the splendour of their region."

Regards,
Lisa

Into the Ontario woods By CLAIRE MESSUD

Saturday, September 3, 2005 Page

*A Map of Glass*
By Jane Urquhart

McClelland & Stewart,

371 pages, $34.99

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Sylvia, whose quest forms the central thread of Jane Urquhart's complex new novel, is a woman, according to her late lover, deeply "emplaced" -- by which he means the opposite of displaced. Considered by her parents and her relentlessly patient husband to have an undiagnosed syndrome akin to autism, Sylvia, religiously particular about objects, has always lived in her parents' house, and has rarely ventured beyond the confines of Prince Edward County. But what she knows, she knows in almost magical depth: not merely the contents of her kitchen cupboards, but the byways and topography of her native landscape, its intimate histories. Her gift to her one close friend, a blind woman named Julia, is a series of tactile maps that endeavour to convey the splendour of their region.

Urquhart's novel is, among other things, a hymn to eastern Ontario, a loving unfurling of its 19th-century history; as well as a meditation -- shared by almost all the novel's characters -- upon the transitory passage of man's hand upon the landscape. One 19th-century character observes that "steamships will go on forever," only to have his wiser sister counter, "I doubt it. . . . Nothing goes on forever."

The book is also a paean to the visual arts, to individuals' attempts, over time, to capture nature's ferocity and glory. In this much-peopled novel, almost everyone is an artist of one kind or another -- whether a painter, or a scrapbook-maker, or a cartographer either traditional or fanciful; or, indeed, like Sylvia's unlikely central interlocutor, Jerome McNaughton, an artist by profession. His work deliberately sets out to recreate -- through arrangements in earth or snow, and photographs of those arrangements -- man's always-dwindling trace upon the Earth.

/A Map of Glass/, structured in three main sections, opens with an ambitious, highly lyrical and mysterious chapter in which a man, lost in every sense -- above all, lost in language, a hideous irony at such a verbally facile authorial hand -- stumbles through the winter landscape to his death upon the ice: "The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved."

This man, we will subsequently learn, is Andrew Woodman, upon whom nature has performed the bitter erasures of Alzheimer's. A long-time cartographer, author, academic and student of local history, descendant of a local timber-farming family, Andrew is also Sylvia's long-time lover, the only man (including her husband) with whom she has been sexually intimate.

Andrew's corpse is found by the artist Jerome in the spring thaw, on Timber Island, the long-abandoned Woodman family seat, to which Jerome has retreated in isolation to create his artworks. This link between the two men prompts Sylvia to leave her home and husband for Toronto for the first time in her long life, in order to speak to Jerome and his girlfriend Mira (also an artist, who makes tea cozies for random objects and is filmed dancing in sand) about the dead man they did not know.

She brings with her Andrew's notebooks, and the heart of the book is made up of his reconstruction of his ancestors' movements along the shores of Lake Ontario at the cusp of the St. Lawrence: In the company of the Woodman family -- Annabelle, Branwell, his wife Marie and their descendants -- we chart the rise and fall of the timber trade; the rise and fall of a lakeside hotel, devoured by sand in an unlikely natural development that owes something to Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and the rise and fall of the barley crops (an "epoch" known in the county as the "Barley Days."

As her immensely successful oeuvre has amply shown, Urquhart has a great gift for the historical novel, for the melding of ideas, events and individuals into a significant whole. Her prose style, rich, evocative and controlled, conjures for us a vivid, if speedy, panorama of the quickly changing world through which the early Woodmans lived. Andrew's memoir is, to us as well as to the novel's contemporary characters, highly compelling and illuminating, an account which, for all it is picaresque, and for all it at times limns the Gothic, accrues a broader cultural import.

The novel's frame, however, is a rather more complicated proposition. Urquhart is a writer -- a poet, indeed, in the first instance -- whose concerns are more literary than mundane, by which I mean that she cares more about the consistency and significance of the world of words and ideas than she does, perhaps, about honouring the realities with which we live.

Somehow, this difficulty is elided in her historical worlds -- or perhaps we are merely more tolerant of it. But the story involving Sylvia and Jerome creaks repeatedly under the weight of Urquhart's will: I found myself unable to believe in the handy tidiness of their mutual preoccupations and thematically complementary pasts (Sylvia carries hers with her; Jerome has left his behind. Sylvia preserves man's trace upon nature; Jerome, whose father was part of a failed mining expedition, has seen nature wholly reclaim man's imprint; etc.); but, more egregiously, unable to comprehend the actions and reactions of these people.

What, if anything, is wrong with Sylvia, who seems to have both insight into and articulacy about her condition, and yet allows a 19th-century obscurantism to veil it? And why, if getting to Toronto and putting up in a hotel proves quite so easy, hasn't she done it a thousand times before? Why would Jerome indulge this peculiar stranger, allowing her to sit in his studio and chat about Andrew and the Woodman family not merely for a day but for days on end, especially when we're given to understand he is not readily a social animal? And above all, what is wrong with Malcolm, Sylvia's husband, that he has cheerfully endured a /mariage blanc/ for decades, and still insists upon having her back?

Readers can be made to believe anything, as long as it is consistent. The consistency of Urquhart's historical worlds is, in its very story-ness, unquestioned and mellifluous; but Sylvia, Jerome and those around them behave in ways that don't make sense, or don't make sense without a deeper understanding of their characterological oddities. Then again, that so much of their behaviour should depend on characterological oddities bespeaks a weakness, perhaps, in their imagining.

Ultimately, in spite of this, the spell holds. It is a testament to

Urquhart's gifts that we are increasingly prepared to overlook the artificiality of the novel's contemporary premise in order to revel in the greater lyrical accomplishment, in the book's interweaving of earthly detail and abstraction, in the way Urquhart successfully pursues ideas through the movement of her imagined familial history.

Perhaps ultimately what she has achieved is a grand, sustained lyric poem, at once an elegy to eastern Ontario's past and an exploration of the nature of loss. As Jerome says, with a resonant if rather willed thoughtfulness, "I think maybe landscape -- place -- makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past. It seems there's not much of that left now. Everyone's moving, and the landscape, well, the landscape is disappearing." It is to Urquhart's credit that she makes it so beautifully reappear.

/Claire Messud's most recent book is The Hunters. Her next novel, The Emperor's Children, will be published in 2006./

*Chapter One*

Readers can find the first chapter of /A Map of Glass/ today on our website, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/bookclub. As well, Jane Urquhart reads a selection from the novel.**


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