A Map of Glass [Paperback]

[5 stars plus] This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: "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." He is walking, as one of the other characters later remarks, toward his past. The book that follows will be the slow uncovering of that past, not only as it applies to Andrew and his forebears, but by extension to the whole of Canada, its natural resources, and the way of life that squandered then vanished with them.

All this will be the subject of the central section of this three-part novel, an elegantly-told family saga beginning with an English immigrant, Joseph Woodman, who founds a timber and ship-building empire on an island just where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. But the main focus is on Joseph's son, Branwell, Andrew's great-grandfather. Trained in Paris as an artist, he spends the rest of his life on an uneasy balance between art and commerce, two opposing viewpoints that emerge as one of the philosophical axes of the book. Branwell's sister Annabelle in a way has it easier, because as a woman she is not expected to enter the business and so can devote herself to painting -- but all she paints are her father's ships and their destruction by water, fire, or time.

Were the novel confined to this historical story, it would still be a very good one. What makes it remarkable are the framing sections set in the present. Andrew, it turns out, was a landscape geographer, a kind of archaeologist who reconstructs earlier lives from the traces people leave in their surrounding world. Jerome McNaughton, who finds Andrew's frozen body, is an artist engaged in similar pursuits, making careful excavations, taking photographs, and building imaginative reconstructions. Both, in their different ways, make maps. So does Urquhart's primary character, Sylvia, who makes tactile maps for a blind friend, Julia, so that she may explore her landscape by feel. It is Sylvia's closeness to Andrew that brings her to Jerome's studio and begins the process of linking past to present -- a linkage that Urquhart reinforces by a web of subtle cross-references that are intricate without ever being obtrusive.

Julia is blind; Andrew developed Alzheimer's; Annabelle was lame; Sylvia appears to suffer from a form of autism; even the young and apparently healthy Jerome will turn out to have been spiritually crippled by the legacy of an alcoholic father. The most amazing of Urquhart's many feats of alchemy is that she manages to turn these apparent disabilities into gifts. The reader turns the pages with wonder, enthralled by the writer's inexhaustible ability to see familiar things in a new way. Central to it all is Sylvia, whose social limitations and fear of change will nonetheless turn her into the virtual author of a story of love and family whose very subject is change.

A MAP OF GLASS is even greater than Urquhart's excellent previous novel, THE STONE CARVERS. Both share a three-part structure; both go back into Canadian history; and both are centered around a work of visual art. The underlying inspiration here is a 1969 piece by Robert Smithson entitled "A Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)," an 18-by-15 foot pile of broken window panes that suggests the debris of lost civilizations, but which nonetheless catches the light in unexpected ways and glistens with a mystery of its own. Urquhart's MAP is also a lament for the past, but its quiet glow of consolation is nothing short of a miracle.

Map of Glass was a tough read for me. Very respected reviewers enjoyed this very much which gave me pause to see what was it that did not appeal to me. The book centers around a married early 50's woman who explores the details surrounding the death of her former lover; Andrew. Sylvia lives in a rapidly developing exurb far from Toronto with her physician husband in the same house she grew up in. She appears to have agoraphobia. Other commentators have speculated that it may be autism. It's left vague and for the reader to interpret.

The story moves between the current day where Sylvia searches for the people who found Andrew. Andrew's death is neither a mystery nor crime but it awakens strong memories in Sylvia and a desire to share them. This is done first through her dialogue with Jerome who had previously come across Andrew's body and then through more subtle drifting back in time. From there the story takes a leap back a further 100 or 150 years to life on the eastern side of Lake Ontario which was just beginning to boom with agriculture, mining, forestry all from a booming immigration from Europe.

There were a number of things that bothered me as I continued to read. How did this woman with clear phobias if not outright illnesses suddenly find the ability to leave her house and venture into a a big unpredictable city (Toronto)? Orderliness and predictability are dwelled upon as critical to her and for her. She has an episode as a child where she cannot adjust to even a breeze moving through an open window. Still later how could she possibly have had a intimate romance when she again is so challenged to have any relationship deeper than a brief discussion let alone a physical encounter?

These thoughts lingered on. Further on I found myself drifting constantly from the page. The timeline bounces from present, near past and far past which I think adversely slowed down the pace.

One character takes a full chapter to travel for work which seems to only result in the author introducing another minor character (Ghost).

When Sylvia and Jerome talk about Andrew it provokes Jerome to recall his own sad childhood ruined by an alcoholic father. He recounts his father's death leading ultimately to his mother's death. At which point Sylvia says "she died for him (the father)". It seemed too strong. The conversation was too elevated. It strained credibility.

Sylvia constantly has second thoughts about sharing memories of Andrew with Jerome. She realizes he is young (25). At one point she makes a self-deprecating comment about her bad cooking or coffee. It's unlikely that someone with the myriad of socialization problems brought to light at the beginning of the book would have such capacity for insight, empathy or humility. Gentle poking humor at oneself is generally a sign of a very high functioning adult which she clearly is not supposed to be.

How all this plays out was again in conflict. Slyvia's husband is a very intelligent and compassionate man and he has an extremely high EQ and yet Urquardt would also want us to believe that is he condescending and somehow suffocating Sylvia keeping her somehow locked in mental trap but it just does not seem to be the case. His role seemed inconsistent to me.

The book is often tedious. It felt like every word or phrase had a double with metaphors and symbolism that I was missing. The snow, vision, the way a flower might be picked or some of the dialog (Says Jerome at one point commenting on art: "It's strange, now that I think of it, how much attention is always given to construction when decay is really more pervasive, more inevitable" to which Mira responds "Decay and change," said Mira. "People moving from place to place. leaving things behind."). Syliva. I was constantly re-reading to see if I was supposed to understand more than was what literal. It frankly became nearly unreadable in parts.

What I'd suggest to the curious is to read a page or 2. The writing style is consistent throughout the book. If you like the random page or 2 than this may like it. I think it's really a question of personal taste.

... even if it is just a trace - all but invisible - it is there for those willing to look hard enough." Like her protagonists, Jane Urquhart delights in following those traces in a landscape. Southern Ontario, an important backdrop in her previous, exquisite novel, The Stone Carvers, is explored here primarily as an essential part of a family history. Going back some hundred years, "Timber Island" is the intricate setting for this profound and brilliantly developed multi-faceted novel that explores a lot more, of course, than the interdependence between human beings and their land.

The central figure providing the glue, so to say, for the story's different threads is Sylvia, middle-aged and apparently suffering from a "condition" that, while not defined, suggests some form of autism. Since childhood she has been more comfortable with objects rather than people, preferring to touch their permanent and solid surfaces. The unpredictability and change that human beings represent made her withdraw, until... Nevertheless, she has married her doctor who had moved into the family home, taking over her father's surgery and the gentle and considerate treatment of the "patient". Under his guidance, Sylvia slowly learns to move cautiously beyond her familiar territory into the wider neighbourhood, concentrating on establishing clear landmarks for herself. During one of these outings, she meets Andrew, a landscape and historical geographer, a man "who walked into the past", who has been researching his family history. A secret friendship ensues that lasts on and off for many years, until he disappears from her life.

The novel opens with Andrew, suffering from Alzheimer's, attempting to return to the island where his forbears had created their timber business. This is one of the most delicate and evocatively beautiful passages in the book. "...The palms of his gloved hands are open to the sky as if he were silently requesting that the world come back to him, that the broken connections of heart and mind be mended, that language and the knowledge of a cherished place re-enter his consciousness..." While there are many other sections of moving lyricism and rich imagery, making reading Urquhart's prose such a delight, this first passage draws the reader right into the mysterious connections between Andrew, Sylvia and a young, "conceptual artist", Jerome. Jerome had found Andrew's body, frozen in ice during a visit to the now abandoned island. In his art he attempts to capture civilization debris, remnants of earlier human habitation. To some extent Jerome symbolizes Urquhart's own exploration of Robert Smithson's aesthetics. The novel's title is derived from Smithson's sculpture "Map of Broken Glass"; Smithson's contention that "the artist seeks.... the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate" can be interpreted as one of the novel's underlying motives.

Sylvia, having learned of Andrew's death, seeks out Jerome, who she feels is holding "the end of Andrew's story... in a way, the last thing he told me". For the same reason, Sylvia feels compelled to share her life story, reluctantly at first, with this young stranger and finds an increasingly attentive listener. Jerome has his own demons to battle and, maybe, they can both help each other at some point.

Embedded in the present-day narrative, Andrew's journals form the middle section of the novel. They stand on their own and delve into the fascinating saga of his great-great grandfather, one of the early timber barons in Southern Ontario, and three generations of his offspring. Urquhart brings out Andrew's distinct voice: his description of the family's changing fortunes and long-term destiny is completely captivating. Their reign over the island leaves the land dramatically altered with consequences far beyond the landscape: symbolic for the impact of destroying its natural beauty and for the family's greed is the image of their fancy hotel, now almost totally submerged in sand. As a counterbalance to those driven solely by profit, there are those with more redeeming features, such as family values and, in particular, artistic talent and expression.

Art and artists always play an important role in Urquhart's novels. Sylvia is an artist of sorts: she creates tactile maps for her blind friend Julia. Maps are important to her as they establish some form of solidity and permanency. Her own maps reflect her very personal sense of landscapes, shapes and markers that she shares with her friend. Julia asked her once, how she could be sure that what she sees is what other people see. Maybe a more profound question than intended, it turns out as we, the readers, are encouraged to follow the fluid lines between her imagination and reality. Sylvia's version of her life's story, of her relationship with Andrew, with her husband, may not match the one the reader is being led to believe. Or is it? And, as Jerome muses: "maybe landscape -- place -- makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past". This is a novel to absorb slowly, to ponder and to be carried away into different mental and real landscapes, rich in symbolism and breathtakingly beautiful at times. [Friederike Knabe]