Jane Urquhart - The Underpainter

Urquhart is one of Canadas most accomplished and interesting writers.

Edmonton Journal

Original and dazzling, radiant and quietly perceptive, Urquharts new novel delights the senses even as it astonishes the mind.

London Free Press

A lyrical novel with a deep, unsentimental connection to ordinary life. [Urquharts] language is vivid enough to take your breath away.

Boston Globe

Urquhart explores the ability to love and the failure to love; the visual pictures and images of humanity beneath the surfaces on which art is created. The Underpainter is a savory read.

Flare

Urquharts evocation of time and place shimmers with clarity.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Urquhart has written a novel whose narrative power matches her delicate artistry with words lodges in the mind and heart forever.

Montreal Gazette

Richly textured prose, and an intricate, many layered structure.

Sunday Times (U.K.)

A rich, multi-faceted story, skillfully told

San Francisco Chronicle

The Underpainter has the force of an idea whose time has come.

Globe and Mail

Her writing shimmers with lyric sensuality.

Vancouver Sun

It is the sadness of stoic self-denial, of huge sacrifices made for questionable ends, of small and large renunciations, that haunts our collective past and rises so powerfully out of the pages of this novel.

Toronto Star

Elegant and unpretentious an absorbing, beautifully cadenced novel.

Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

Urquhart writes forcefully; her imagery is vivid, and her evocation of time and place is accomplished and assured.

Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

Urquhart is a skilled word-painter.

Washington Post Book World

Brave, intelligent and vivid.

Literary Review (U.K.)

The Underpainter is a sad, subtle work that continues [Urquharts] tradition as one of Canadas finest contemporary authors.

Winnipeg Free Press

For Tony Urquhart,
whose spirit is visible in art, in life

For Amy Quinn,
who discovered the letters, and knew

For Ellen Seligman,
with affection and gratitude

Although an even north light is preferable in the greater number of cases, direct bright sunlight is sometimes useful in examining blacks and other very dark colours.

RALPH MAYER,
The Artists Handbook of Materials and Techniques

T he woman is standing near the window in the downstairs front room of a log house on the north shore of Lake Superior.

It is the winter of 1937.

She is wearing a grey tweed skirt and a checked woollen bush jacket. Her dark-blonde hair is pulled back from her face and hangs in a thick braid almost to her waist. Despite the fact that she has kept her fires both in the Quebec heater in this room and in the stove in the kitchen burning all night, it is cold enough that she can see her breath. In her hand she holds an unopened envelope with the words Canadian National Telegram printed on it. Her head is bent and her shoulders are slightly stooped as she stares at this folded and glued piece of paper.

To the left and to the right of the house in which she stands lies a series of similar homes built for the miners who arrived in this place in the 1860s. Since the penultimate closure of the silver mine in 1884, all but a few of these dwellings are abandoned in winter. In recent decades they have been used as summer residences only by certain adventurous families from the small twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William, which are situated sixteen miles to the west but cannot be seen from here because a limb of the huge, human-shaped peninsula of rock, known as The Sleeping Giant, hides them from view.

This unconscious granite figure is famous. In the summer, tourists driving the gorgeous north shore of Lake Superior stop their cars and stare across Thunder Bay at his reclining body. Passengers who have travelled on the Trans-Canada train can bring his physique to mind long after mountains and prairies have faded from memory. He is twenty miles long, this person made from northern landscape, and, in 1937, no roads as yet have scarred his skin. According to the Ojibway, who have inhabited this region for hundreds of years, he was turned to stone as punishment for revealing the secret location of silver to white men greedy enough to demand the information. He will lie forever obdurate, unyielding, stretched across the bay.

The little settlement of Silver Islet Landing, where the woman lives, occupies a site on his anatomy sometimes referred to as the toe of the giant.

During the brief summer season, bonfires bloom nightly on the small offshore islands she can see from her front windows. Swimmers dive from the dock near the large clapboard building that acts as a hotel and a store. Steamers, which provide the only transportation to the spot, ply back and forth from Port Arthur; the narrow track near the shore is filled with running children. Occasionally games and entertainments take place on the sand beach at the end of the lane. There is often laughter, and sometimes singing.

By mid-September, stillness and quiet are reinstated, the summer population having returned to the schools and industries of daily life. One old government official, who is responsible for the maintenance of two lighthouses and for the sporadic winter postal deliveries, remains in his house near the dock. And the woman remains in her cabin a little farther down the shore. By the time the world begins to frost, and then to freeze, even the memory of the summer activity seems unreal, as if it had been a mere performance and she a witness not even a member of the audience but a stranger in the wings.

When these houses were built, almost eighty years before, the need for shelter was so pressing that the mining company was forced to use unseasoned timber, which had warped in odd directions over the course of the first year. On frigid January mornings, the miners, their wives and children, had awakened to the sight of miniature snowdrifts on the floor and ragged open spaces between the logs. The gaps were swiftly filled with anything that came to hand socks, knitted hats, treasured table linen from the Old Country. Eventually the houses gave up the struggle, settled, and became stable. Only then were the upstairs walls plastered and whitewashed. On the ground storey the logs remained and still remain exposed in the parlour and the kitchen.

Once when the woman was driving a nail between the timbers to hang a picture that I had given her a picture of herself in her summer garden a chunk of caulking gave way and an embroidered handkerchief, edged in lace, fell like a message out of the wall.

She is standing near the window beside a rough log wall. The unopened telegram in her hand appears to have already darkened with time, darkened in comparison to the white snow around her house, the brightness of sun that enters the room.

She pushes a tendril of hair behind her ear, a strand that has escaped the braid. This strand contains some threads of grey. She stares at the envelope, then lifts her head to watch the departure of the mail sled, its driver and team of noisy dogs, to watch it glide over the snow-covered ice and disappear behind Burnt Island. For several minutes she wants to refuse the message she has not yet read. The world around her is quiet and fixed, frozen and beautiful. She does not want the scene disturbed. Even the tracks of the sled irritate her; they have scarred the white surface, they have soiled the day.