Jane Urquhart (Sanctuary Line) returns to her trademark themes of place, memory and loss in The Night Stages, a quietly lyrical novel about a woman who attempts to escape the limitations of her life in postwar, rural Ireland for a new life in America. Tam's journey becomes a reckoning when she is stranded by intractable fog at the airport in Gander, Newfoundland.
The airport, a real-life jewel of mid-century architecture and dominated by the waiting room's majestic mural called "Flight and Its Allegories," provides the setting that organizes the novel. This mural triggers Tam's memories and ruminations over the course of three fog-bound days after leaving Ireland and her married lover, Niall. Figures and scenes within the painting prompt specific memories for a narrative that weaves back and forth in time to tell stories of Niall, his estranged brother, Kieran--for whose disappearance Niall cannot forgive himself--Tam herself and Kenneth Lochhead, the historically based artist who painted the mural.
For the most part, Kieran and Kenneth's stories are told from their respective points of view, while those of Tam and Niall are reported and described as though from a distance and have the feel of reconstructed memory. The novel is slightly uneven as a result. Yet as ever, Urquhart's prose, melodic with Irish names and inflections, is gorgeous, her images incisive. A face is "stern with thinking" or an angry child is "full of refusal." The Night Stages is an elegiac novel that describes the landscapes of home and heart with Urquhart's trademark grace. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer