Ursula Under (Paperback)

The various ancestors from both sides of Ursula's family include a Chinese alchemist; an orphaned lady-in-waiting to the future Queen Christina in 16th-century Sweden; the paraplegic daughter of a Chinese Minister who takes delight in out-arguing two Jesuit missionaries; a Finnish trader in fine goods along the Silk Road; a no-good immigrant to nineteenth-century California in search of gold, who is killed in a bizarre accident by an abalone snail; and a schoolmaster's widow who leaves Helsinki for the United States as wife to a taciturn copper miner she hardly knows. Their diverse tales are beautifully told with a combination of wry humour and a thrilling historical scope: there is an ever-present sense of human insignificance in the face of historical time and the vagaries of chance. For me, Hill's writing is at its best when at its darkest: the final years of orphaned Violeta's life in a Swedish leper colony, for instance, will linger in the reader's mind long after finishing the book.

Unfortunately, the present-day part of the narrative concerning Ursula and her parents isn't always so successful. Hill has a tendency here to lapse into a wholesomeness which sometimes verges on sentimentality, and some of the characters fail to convince. For instance, although Ursula's mother Annie is a well-rounded character (there is a lovely scene where she helps her less streetwise neighbour to buy a new trailer after a lottery win), Annie's husband Justin - a Shakespeare-quoting, pleasantly muscled roofing worker who also happens to be a talented amateur musician - comes across as decidedly too good to be true. Ursula's psychic gran Mindy Ji Wong similarly falls rather flat (though her estranged husband Joe Cimmer is very movingly portrayed for all his brief appearance). The book's narrative framework would have made Ursula's life seem just as precious without requiring the general worthiness and textbook-perfect parenting skills of Annie and Justin. I also have serious reservations about rich, racist and snobbish Jinx Muehlenberg, who comes uncomfortably close to being a pantomime villain. However, there are some nice touches of humour in Hill's depiction of family life prior to Ursula's accident, and on the whole the book does try to avoid easy answers.

As a multi-generational tale of emigration and immigration with an unusual narrative structure, the only real parallel that occurs to me is with Annie Proulx's "Accordion Crimes", with ancestorship to Ursula in Hill's book being substituted for ownership of the accordion in Proulx's darker tale. Although Hill's generally sweeter style is quite different from Proulx's wonderfully hardbitten and ironic writing, the two books do very much share the same massive historical sweep and impressive scale. "Ursula, Under" is a big, bold, extravagant book: though occasionally a touch sweet for my palate, this is obviously a matter of personal taste - and there are plenty darker moments here to please those of us who like our fiction on the drier side.