As the book begins, Esther remembers her childhood and her Great-Aunt Eileen telling her to be where she is. An old woman now, Esther faces her last day and night in her home on Lake Ontario. She uses that time, interrupted as it is by the sounds and imagined actions of the shift workers at the quarry next door as they work around the clock, to recall and relive once more the sequence of stories that Eileen told her so long ago.
The tales start with Mary, Eileen's mother and Esther's great-grandmother, who in 1842 stumbles upon a shipwrecked sailor on the storm-strewn beach of Rathlin, a small island off the northern coast of Ireland. This brief encounter marks Mary, such that all the islanders and Mary herself believe that she has been “away”, that is, taken by the otherworldly “them” and returned changed forever. The priest, Father Quinn, finds Mary a husband on the big island where she manages to lead a semblance of a normal life until the Hunger forces them to emigrate to Canada.
Later, Eileen herself, having traveled from the backwoods homestead of her childhood to the house on the lake, is touched in turn by a fleeting relationship with a man who is described by the men around him as “the best of us”, a man who could dance the world into being.
Urquhart is one of my favorite writers. Her prose sings with poetry, not just the songs the women compose and sing in their altered states, but everyday sentences imbued with a bardic lilt that makes me hold my breath and listen. This is Mary in the northern Ontario forest: “The woods suggested, in their uncertainties of space, transparencies of light—their rumours of entities glimpsed, then lost—that some magnificent event was always on the edge of taking place . . . “
If I had read this book when I was twenty, I would have seen only romance. In those days I read Faulkner's Wild Palms and grasped only a woman setting her eyes on a man for the first time and saying yes. I managed to ignore all that came later. Reading this book now in my cynical late middle age, it is old Eileen's voice that rings true to me: be where you are. I take this to mean: don't be seduced by all those lovely stories.
Subtly Urquhart expands that idea beyond the usual “First comes love; then comes marriage” to include all the romantic stories we use to frame our lives: the islanders with their myths, the two elderly brothers in Puffin Court living out an Anglo-Irish aristocratic fantasy and not perceiving the blight destroying their tenants' crops, the immigrants with their fight for Irish nationalism, the Canadians with their dream of a dominion that will magically wash away all inequity.
The book has won many awards, deservedly so. I have a few minor quibbles, disappointment, for example, at how skimpy and unmemorable Esther's own story is, surprise that a mother would do what Mary did, but these are minor indeed. This lovely story, with its warnings about the ability of stories to enchant those who believe them, will stay with me for a long time.