Memory, Music, Love, and the Wind: Jane Urquhart’s Captivating Novel of a Woman’s Life on the Prairies
In Winter I Get Up at Night, Jane Urquhart. McClelland & Stewart, 2024.
Jane Urquhart’s most recent novel, In Winter I Get Up at Night, might remind readers fondly of one of her earliest celebrated works of fiction: Away. In both books, the narrator at a late stage in life reflects on her past, collecting and reconstructing the most significant intervals, to discern from a distance their meaning as a whole in an intricate plot that encompasses ancestry, family, migration, farming, education, and love. In both novels, Urquhart also gives to her central characters — Esther in the first instance, and Emer in the second — extraordinary sensitivity and a gift for storytelling; even while the narrative is uttered quietly to the self, we as readers overhear the private reflection. As well, while the settings differ in time and place — Away commencing in Ireland with a displaced family seeking refuge in Canada, while In Winter I Get Up at Night follows an Ontario family’s resettlement in the early 1900s, in rural Saskatchewan — the narrative arc in both stories is similar: ideals fall away and hardship sets in.
But Away and In Winter I Get Up at Night are different.
Emer’s memory unlike Esther’s, is fragmented. From chapter to chapter, the plot revolves from moment to moment in a story that doesn’t unfold chronologically. Trains in this era crisscross the country; Emer loves to imagine how she, too, visits and revisits pockets of time from her past, along a network of distinct but interconnected lines of thought: her life as a child in Ontario; the family’s journey to the “northern Great Plains”; the house on the farm; “the big wind,” as Emer refers to the storm that disperses the family, kills her mother, and gravely injures Emer whose “bones” are “smashed up and scattered around . . . inside my body”; the period of her hospitalization; and her relationshipas an adult, with Harpocrates, a celebrated medical scientist, whom she calls “Harp,” until Emer loses her lover’s loyalty, as does her mother, years before.
Emer reconstructs her past through shifts and gaps, advancements and reversals, questions and assertions. A fictional memoir, the book resembles forgivably our own meandering thoughts as human beings: how much can the mind remember, properly understand, or have the courage to confront? And why is the narrator reconstructing that life — what does Emer hope to achieve or find?
Is it to preserve a picture of early twentieth-century prairie life, including its politics? To ponder confinement in a hospital, when days are saturated with sadness but enlivened by the imagination, Emer pierces the walls of a single room to envision the wider world? To grapple with her love for a celebrity whose life was larger than her own, as he slipped from her grasp? To justify her choice in the present, an aging single woman who remains in rural Saskatchewan, as she travels from one isolated schoolhouse to another, a teacher sharing her joy of music — with triangles, tin whistles, recorders, tuning forks, and a piano (no harps) — even in the winter?
Yes, winter. A prairie winter: the region’s most distinguished rigorous trait when elemental severity blends with beauty.
“Because of the snow and the clear blue sky the room was full of prismatic light,” Emer remarks of the children’s hospital ward, where she and other girls and boys are sick injured or dying, and painfully alone. Prairie light somehow, acts as a healing spirit, impervious to the walls that confine the children indefinitely. With characteristic poetic inflections, Urquhart softens — not sharpens — the harshness of reality: when snow is “blue-tinted,” the atmosphere “still and clear . . . oddly bright,” and lanterns release “gold seams of light” on a “morning carpet” of whiteness.
In each of her novels, Urquhart carefully depicts seasonal distinctions and geographic locations, including the community of Muenster and St. Peter’s Abbey with its Catholic presence, which Urquhart treats beautifully. Emer’s brother Danny becomes a monk, and three courageous German nuns who arrive as young women to establish a hospital, serve the rural population, particularly the fragile patients in the children’s ward, with selflessness. One wonders, would Emer have had the will to survive in her broken body, without the “nursing nuns” at her side?
Though the plot unfolds circuitously, the settings are stable, as is the cast of characters to whom Emer returns repeatedly. Her small circumference for most of the novel is the community within the hospital. Even the “palace hotels,” as Emer calls them, where she meets privately with Harp, though never precisely located or named, do not take her far from home.
Which Emer doesn’t really have, anymore.
Why then does she endure her prairie existence in winter, at night, when she is unattached and free to leave? Does she cherish the music delivered to children in the country schools? Does she long to remain where her family resided, with her beloved brother Danny nearby whose startling story unfolds in the final chapters of the book? Is she convinced that spacious prairie parameters invite the mind to create, to write the story of a life which offers an anchor, finally, when the task is complete?
“Tomorrow,” she concludes the book, “if the weather is settled and clear, I will drive the old car out to Maplewood School, as I always do.” Elsewhere, she returns, emphatically, to the present: “This morning,” she notes, or “Today,” she remarks, the words signalling her intent to stay. Yes, how could she leave, risk the dissolution of the memory which sustains her, even as it leaves her sleepless when she gets up at night, in blue light, to ponder her past unceasingly, including the “ghost” that “haunts” her, “a perplexing . . . spirit . . . causing bewilderment”?
Urquhart’s thoughtful book deserves to be read twice, the second encounter enabling the reader to follow more richly the fragmented parts of the plot and then, to relax more fully into the beautiful prose.
— Suzanne Stewart is the author of The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons; she writes from Antigonish.
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