Changing Heaven [Paperback]

Jane Urquhart has created yet another masterpiece. this is the third Urquhart novel i've read, and this brillinat author never ceases to captivate my imagination with her beautiful, poetic prose. this is the story of several seemingly unrelated characters who grow and develop before the reader, and as you get deeper into the story, their lives are inevitably intertwined in peculiar and fascinating ways. the main characters are a turn-of-the-century baloonist; the young Emily Bronte; a woman in the midst of a troubled love-affair; and the man that connects the pieces in this intriguing puzzle. the main themes in this exquisitely written novel are the loves and passions that bring the characters to a common ground. they are all fascinating and eccentric, and reading about their lives and losses has definitely added to my knowledge and perspective of human nature. a must read for those fascinated by human nature and its aftermaths.

for any classic literature fan who loves Emily Bronte, this book is excellent. The way the ghost of Emily refers to Heathcliffe as "Mr. capital H" is hysterical. This Canadian author is a rare find and I love the way she writes. Maybe one hundred years from now we'll be reading her novels in high school English classes also

A brilliant riff on Emily Brontė's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, this highly original novel is as bracing and wild as the weather itself, impossible to pin down, virtually plotless, yet sweeping all before it. Just as one speaks of a novel of ideas, this is a novel of emotions -- emotions in their purest form, taking possession like a natural force, and largely divorced from the normal ties of cause and effect. This is not a book for those who demand realism and logic rather than a novel organized by poetic association and contrast. But for those who approach it as the unique vision of a poet who just happens to be writing in prose -- wondrous prose -- it is something very special indeed.

I have now read all but two of Jane Urquhart's novels, and know nothing quite like this one from 1990, which barely seems to touch the ground. True, SANCTUARY LINE, her latest, has also the structure of poetry, revisiting scraps of memory, probing and elucidating, but its basic story is down to earth; indeed that is its essence. The other three that I have read -- AWAY (1993), THE STONE CARVERS (2001), and A MAP OF GLASS (2005) -- tell their stories in a more-or-less linear way, although all show Urquhart's characteristic delight in juxtaposing different periods, and AWAY and MAP especially have traces of the otherworldly elements that are so strong here. All of her later novels are set largely in her native Ontario; although Toronto makes an appearance here (as does Venice), the primary setting is the wild Yorkshire moorland near Haworth, where the Brontė sisters grew up. And even here, her concern is less the heather and crags so much as the clouds scudding over them, driven by a restless wind.

The novel brings together three women from different centuries. One is Emily Brontė herself, who appears as a rather personable ghost. The second is a turn-of-the-century balloonist, Arianna Ether, who performed for her manager and lover Jeremy Jacobs, the "Sindbad of the Skies." The third is a Canadian, Ann Frear, who has developed her childhood passion for WUTHERING HEIGHTS into an academic career in English. Shattered by an affair with a colleague named Arthur, an art historian who is also living out a passion for the darker works of Tintoretto, she takes a sabbatical in Yorkshire to write a book on Brontė's weather. But these are just the axes around which the elemental opposites of the novel revolve: passion and peace, wildness and domesticity, heath and hearth.

For most of the novel, the more dramatic elements predominate: the wild wind, the barren landscape, Tintoretto's dark visions lit by flashes of lightning, the unbroken whiteness of the arctic wastes. But, despite what I said about the relative absence of plot, we do begin to care a lot for Ann as a person, and feel for her as she finds a different kind of love from an unexpected source. We know she will never be free of her wild side, but now the question of balance becomes important. Nothing in this novel is as impressive as the way in which Urquhart moves towards that resolution at the end, and the evocative simplicity of her final sentence is heart-stopping.