Poignant and profound

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This article was published 31/08/2024 (700 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In novels such as The Stone Carvers, Away and the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning The Underpainter, Jane Urquhart long ago cemented her status as a master chronicler of Canada’s past, people and landscapes. Her newest novel, a decade in the making, reinforces that status.

In Winter I Get Up at Night is a beautiful, evocative and moving tale of memory and manipulation, family, friendship, trauma and acceptance. The tale is told by Emer, a middle-aged itinerant music teacher living by herself in rural Saskatchewan.

Driving alone each day on often-precarious winter roads to get to her small, isolated school houses, Emer is beset by memories of her childhood. That iconic childhood — with a loving father, a distracted mother and a devoted older brother — changed forever when a great wind swept on to the family’s prairie farm, and shattered their home and their lives forever.

Her body broken, Emer spends the next year bedridden in a distant hospital, separated from her family but sustained by two skilful doctors, the loving care of three cloistered nursing nuns, a kind train porter and the tender friendships she develops with the other children in the ward. Emer, Friedrich, Eli, Lily and Tatiana come from vastly different backgrounds, and although each one of them is fighting demons and disease, they entertain and enthrall one another, and serve as a source of light and hope for one another.

The same cannot be said for the three men, aside from her father, that loom large in Emer’s life. A school inspector referred to as the Master, a vile train conductor and the only romantic love of Emer’s life are all men of real (or, in one case, imagined) power, pretense and pomposity. The cruel and taunting train conductor haunts Emer’s dreams and delusions for years, while the seductive Master forces Emer to reimagine her mother’s life and longing. Emer’s love interest Harp, on the other hand, enraptures and soothes Emer, even as he fails or refuses to acknowledge what it is that Emer desires from him.

“But what he didn’t know was compliant though I appeared to be, I wanted everything he had,” Emer recalls. “Every stray thought, each gesture, the length and breadth of him. It wasn’t enough for me to accept the wonder and mystery that the love of him brought out in me. I wanted pledges and allegiances. I wanted complete surrender and treaties with firmly emplaced measures and reparations, in truth, I wanted to clear his wildernesses and plant his fields and colonize him. As he had colonized me.”

The act of colonizing, like the act of cloistering, is one of the many larger themes Urquhart explores in this captivating work of historical and literary fiction. Canada’s Great Plains in the early decades of the 20th century, Urquhart makes clear, were a not just a place for small, intimate dramas about damaged children and unrequited love. They were a battlefield too — a place where religious beliefs, political theory and ideas about the social construct often collided.

And the winds and the snow and the sun had the capacity to make any day better or worse than the day before.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer.