Book review: Sanctuary Line

IF “write what you know” is the rule followed by award winning Canadian author Jane Urquhart, then it is clear what she knows is sleepy, rural southern Ontario and the generational entwinement of Irish families transplanted and taken root there.

The Sanctuary Line is the road to the remote Ontario farm of the narrator, entomologist Liz Crane. It is where, as a child, she learned to drive among the region’s orchards, and where as a scientist she plies her trade in relative isolation as she pins and organises the bodies of butterflies which, when alive, congregate by their thousands on the same tree each year.

Urquhart may be reacting to Margaret Attwood’s preoccupation with a hostile Canadian wilderness barren of European myths and legends, as she sets out to layer her landscape with quirky family histories, of suicidal lighthouse men and the dangers faced by farmers who covet their neighbour’s barn.

The novel’s story is told by Liz to a person whose identity remains compellingly mysterious until near the end. But within the narrative the histories are mostly related through the character of Liz’s uncle, a mercurial, charismatic storyteller whom we find has disappeared. The reason for his waywardness is built into the novel’s climactic finale, which also answers some of the unresolved questions in the stories of the butterfly watcher’s contemporaries, such as her poetry-loving cousin who has died in the war in Afghanistan, and her mother who refuses to remember the name of the narrator’s first love.

The histories related of the ancestral “great-greats” veer from the comic to the sentimental, like the farmer who kept secret his love for his former English teacher who wrote anodyne poems for greeting cards, until he realised the ones praising secret admirers were about him. Anecdotes set in the book’s contemporary timeline provide some dramatic moments, which cast characters anew. As Liz washes her aunt’s dusty collection of glass artifacts, they disintegrate, evidence of a rage which saw her smash them all, then carefully glue them back together.

But Urquhart is not quite the talent that Attwood is. Her vignettes provide some lovely moments, but her landscape can be bland. When the narrator writes how “she could have written an essay about the various gradations of gravel” on the Sanctuary Line, you almost fear Urquhart might actually do it.

Liz is a flawed character, perhaps lacking in insight, but it is difficult to guess how deliberate this writerly ploy is. The narrator acknowledges the oddness of her childhood acceptance of the arrival of low-paid workers from Mexico who came to work on the farm’s orchards every year. The portrayal of one of the Mexican characters, the boy Teo, is sensitive and insightful, others lack the definition of the farm’s regular residents, even those who are key to the story such as Teo’s mother. She stands in the shadows of the main characters’ dramas, only to emerge as central to them. The device seems to reflect the way the Mexicans were perceived by the land-owning Canadians, but I craved further depth from Urquhart.

I also craved more about the butterflies, deeper studies of which could have added more layers to the novel. Yet despite being a specialist in the subject, Liz doesn’t seem too well informed about the species. Or maybe it is Urquhart who isn’t.

Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

MacLehose Press, 256pp, £16.99