The Stone Carvers [Paperback]

Jane Urquhart is one of Canada's best-known novelists. In her latest work, the sweeping and ambitious The Stone Carvers, she mines the depths of obsession as a source of creativity and of destruction, and the redemptive nature of art. Like Rose Tremain's Music and Silence, historical incident is the novel's leaping-off point. Written in the cadences and colour of legend, this richly imagined tale moves from the 19th into the 20th century and from Germany to Canada and to France to achieve an intriguing and satisfying whole.

In the mid-19th century young Father Pater Archangel Gstir is sent to Shoneval, a tiny, bleak settlement in the wilds of Ontario by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Gstir becomes obsessed with the building of an immense stone church for his motley flock, all of whom he draws into his ambitious plans. Among them is a wood carver, Joseph Becker, whom he commissions to carve a crucifix and Virgin and Child and whose memories of these harsh but fulfilling years are cherished by his granddaughter, Klara. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Klara carries on the family's traditions of carving and tailoring--as well as exploring the entrancements of new love. 20 years on, Klara lives still in Shoneval, now a spinster caught in the grip and illusion of memory, having lost Eamon O'Sullivan to the Great War. At Vimy in France, the Canadian architect Walter Allward, begins the construction of his vast monument to the thousands of soldiers who went missing in battle--and it is this that rekindles Klara's urgency to pay homage to the past and define her own future. --Ruth Petrie --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Wartime romance, lowlife adventure and modern parable ... Urquhart's prose is as smooth and uncluttered as Margaret Atwood's .. triumphant'

'Jane Urquhart has created a monument to monuments, of great beauty and originality'

'...it does exactly what a novel is supposed to do - captivates, transports and beguiles'

'A remarkable novel ... Urquhart is a writer of great intelligence'

"it boasts a rich brew of character and incident and isn't afraid to tackle the big themes."

In 1867 Pater Archangel Gstir is sent by God to the Canadian wilds. Soon the backwoods are transformed into a parish and the settlers into a congregation, and Joseph Becker, a woodcarver, is brought together with his future wife. Decades later their grandchild Klara holds young Eamon O'Sullivan in thrall as he sits speechless in her kitchen, suffering her anger and stirring her desire. Yet just as he wins this war of love, his victory is lost to the Great War in Europe, and Klara is left alone. But when an architect plans an ambitious memorial to the Canadian dead in France, Klara must use her family skills - to carve, to create and to remember.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

Jane Urquhart is the author of the novels: THE WHIRLPOOL, CHANGING HEAVEN, AWAY, which won the Trillium Award in 1993 and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and THE UNDERPAINTER, winner of the Governor General's Award. She lives in south-western Ontario.

Excerpted from The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
In the June of 1934, two men stand talking in the shadow of the great unfinished monument. Behind them rises a massive marble base flanked by classically sculpted groups of figures and surmounted by an enormous stone woman who is hooded and draped in the manner of a medieval mourner. At her back, a shedlike building occupies the space between twin obelisk-shaped pylons, each with their own wooden rooms attached to it at a great height.

The taller man wears a dark overcoat and hat and carried a pole, about the size of a walking stick, that he swings out in front of him now and then as if to make a point. The other man, less formally clad in a oilskin jacket buttoned tightly over his round belly, appears to be more involved in the conversation, looking intently at his companion and rising on his toes and opening his arms while he is speaking. All around then, all around the monument is a sea of men and mud, except in the far distance where the dark mountains of the coal fields of Lens can be seen to the northeast, and he white slabs of graveyards, some only partially sodded, can be seen to the south and to the west.

Despite the fact that the ground the men stand on is French, and the month is June, it is not a warm day; there is no sun, and the wind howls across the coal fields toward the monument in increasingly strong gusts so that the taller man is forced to place a hand on his hat. At one point both men stop talking and look up at a large wooden shed that stands on a forest of scaffolding and is secured by thick ropes to the larger of the two pylons. They listen to the strange noise these ropes make as they rub together, a noise the taller man knows to be remarkably similar to the sound of two pines scraping against each other in a wind-filled Canadian forest. Along with the wind and the sound of the ropes there is the staccato noise of several stonecutters' tools as men in overalls carve words onto the extensive stone wall. The taller man walks across the broken marble and rutted mud to see how this work is going. He says a few words to one of the stone carvers, then returns to his companion.

It begins to rain.