The Whirlpool [Paperback]

This beautifully written book captures romantic obsession in alternating chapters told from the points of view of the three main characters: Maud, the undertaker's young widow; Fleda, the young wife of a military historian obsessed by his work, who is herself obsessed by the poetry of Robert Browning and who prefers the woods above the whirlpool of the title to a proper woman's domestic life in a house; and Patrick, the unsuccessful poet who becomes obsessed with Fleda.

Urquhart's luminous prose draws the reader in to experience the large and small frustrations and tragedies that swirl around the three in this novel set against the backdrop of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, in the summer of 1889. She has a wonderful eye for the telling detail and draws her characters with a meticulous hand, so that the reader almost comes to inhabit their world of pine forests carpeted with trilliums, mysteriously mute children, unspoken desire, and underlying everything, the river, with its falls and whirlpools and floating bodies.

This novel is not plot-driven, not one to be rushed through, though readers will keep turning pages to learn what happens to the characters; rather it is one to be savored, not only for the story but also, perhaps even more so, for the unfolding pleasures of the text itself, for the richness and perfection of Urquhart's language. It is the perfect book to read, as Fleda reads Browning, quietly in the shade of a tree.

Of the seven Jane Urquhart novels I have read, this, her first (1986, but recently reissued in Canada), may be the least eventful viewed simply as a story, but it is unquestionably the most evocative as a piece of pure poetry. It begins and ends with a real poet; Urquhart's prologue and epilogue describe Robert Browning's last day of life in 1889, wandering through unfamiliar parts of Venice, haunted by the spirit of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Romantic poet who died young of drowning over half a century before, but whom Browning thought of as a spirit of a different element, the air, calling him an eagle, the Sun-Treader. The main story also takes place in 1889, in Niagara Falls, Canada. Browning is the favorite poet of Fleda McDougal, one of the main characters, who often jots down evocative passages in her notebook. One of these, from "Amphibian," might almost have been the epigraph for the entire book:

But sometimes when the weather
Is blue and warm waves tempt
To free one's life from tether
And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust
In the sphere which overbrims
With passion and thought -- why just
Unable to fly, one swims!

Emancipate through passion
And thought, with sea for sky
We substitute, in a fashion
For heaven -- poetry.

Fleda is most certainly determined to "try a life exempt." Moving out of the stuffy hotel in which her husband, military historian David McDougal, has housed her, she spends her days and most of her nights in a clearing in the woods overlooking the Niagara whirlpool, two miles below the Falls. David is building her a house there, but her dream home is a realm of the mind, not a thing of walls and angles. Fleda is by no means the only obsessed character in the book. She is observed by a young poet named Patrick, who catches sight of her accidentally through his binoculars while walking in the woods, and becomes obsessed with watching her unseen. But Patrick is no ordinary Peeping Tom; for him, Fleda is a pure nature spirit on the order of Shelley's skylark, and he has no idea what to do when he meets the real person. Not that Fleda's husband would have noticed anything, for he is obsessed by a rabid anti-Americanism, and his excavation of a local battle site to prove that Canada actually won the War of 1812. A fourth character, Maud Grady, the young widow of the local undertaker, seems normal enough in herself, but her young son appears to suffer from a form of autism that at first makes him unable to speak but later has him spewing out words with no logical connection to the things he is describing, but certainly a poetic one; the exchanges between this child and Patrick are especially delightful.

Urquhart will return to autistic characters again, most notably in A MAP OF GLASS. She will create other characters who reject the world for a life of the spirit, as in AWAY. She will continue to be fascinated by artists of all kinds, in THE UNDERPAINTER and THE STONE CARVERS especially. She will write more novels in the spirit of lament for a vanished rural past, most recently SANCTUARY LINE. And she would continue her romance with the English Romantics, as in CHANGING HEAVEN, which channels the spirit (literally) of Emily Brontė. There is a palpable aura that emanates from all her work, but it shines here in its purest form, being so little encumbered by the mechanics of plot. Going back to the last stanza of the Browning above, the book is about the emancipation of passion and thought, those things that cannot be achieved through mundane action or even through the literalism of language. It is about what we substitute for heaven: a poetry not of words but of ideas. And its central symbol is the Whirlpool. Maud performs her own rituals to give spiritual identity to the drowned people who are found there. Her child, liberated by the whirlpool of his mind, creates a new order out of seeming chaos. For Fleda, the whirling waters are the visible part of the turning aether that lifts her free from temporal concerns. The poet Patrick, his thoughts aloft but unable to fly, determines to swim the pool. Another Byron conquering the Hellespont, or poor tragic Shelley, the drowned Sun-Treader? It hardly matters, for in this miracle of a novel, Jane Urquhart, a poet herself, has done the almost impossible: tied the aery world of the Romantic poets to the very real history, landscape, and even streetcars of a vanished Canada.

There is much to enjoy and equally much to wonder at in this work. It's worth a look if, as I am, you are a fan of Jane Urquhart's work.