This is a very richly woven book that blends different stories and themes. The opening scene, a rather confused man who arrives in full winter on a desolate island in Canada, is beautifully portrayed. It also contains a mysterious undertone that makes the jumps that the story then makes palatable. The focus briefly shifts to an artist who temporarily settles on that island and finds a corpse, and then to a woman 'with a condition' (a form of autism/Asperger's) who apparently had a relationship with the deceased man and now wants to become “the keeper of his past”. The three storylines mesh neatly together, but then Urquhart begins a very long family chronicle in a somewhat epic, even Marquezian style, including magical elements. That chronicle also eventually appears to merge with the previous storylines. In the meantime, various themes have been addressed, such as the question of normality and dealing with people with a condition, of the importance of being geography and landscapes, of the inevitable transience of life and the destructive power of the human will, of the illuminating force of love, etc. Also the very detached, somewhat dreamy atmosphere that surrounds Sylvia (the autistic woman) appealed to me, with her emphasis on introspection, on looking through things, and on the all-consuming power of time. Urquhart connects it all with awesome Canadian landscapes, and with an artwork by Robert Smithson, A Map of Glass (hence the title), in which the fragility and sublimity of life and matter, and the destructive relationship between man and nature are expressed. In short, this book has quite a bit of meat on the bone, and Urquhart is a stylist who definitely has literary talent. Yet something gnawed while reading; there is something wrong with the book's lavish structure, the different storylines and the sometimes opaque accumulation of images. So, it didn't really fully resonated. Maybe worth a reread? ( )

Definitely there is a thing as “the right book at the right time”. This a second read for me. Alas, I didn’t write a review for it the first time around, although I did give it 4 stars. This time I am upgrading it to 5 stars though.

I re-read it for my bookclub, and I confess that I had not retained much of it from the first time, albeit the 4 stars it had faded out of my memory. But this time I was struck by Jane Urquhart’s poetic descriptions of landscapes and characters.

I did read some of the negative reviews in here and I cannot even say that I don’t agree with some of the objections of other readers towards this book: mainly that the characters are unbelievable. Sylvia, the main character, certainly isn’t a typical autistic individual. But I have chosen to believe in her as someone trapped in a world of feelings and longing.

Loss is the great thread unifying the characters, and Urquhart prose forces us – or forced me, as a reader – to scrutinize deep feelings about death, aging, memory loss and love.

This book hit a cord I guess, in a way that it did not on my first go around with it. Maybe I am older, maybe it was a recent death to someone close to me, maybe it is watching at a distance acquaintances struggling with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Maybe, maybe... loss is everywhere.

( )

I've been thinking for days what to say about this book. I am still at a loss but time to get it off my desk so I'll give it a go. Be assured, I loved this book; Jane Urquhart has a masterful touch with words. It doesn't come as a surprise to me to learn that her first published works were poems.

A man with dementia wanders off in the winter time and eventually walks onto a frozen river. Overcome with exhaustion he lies down and sleeps. He awakens once and speaks his last words "I have lost everything". Later in the winter an artist from Toronto goes to a retreat on a small island in Lake Ontario. Jerome will be staying by himself in the one habitable building on the island, a former sail loft, giving a hint of the people who used to live here and the work they carried out. One day when he is out near the shore he sees a body among the ice. Of course, it is the man with dementia. As we will find out, it is fitting that this island is where his body came to rest. We find out the man's story from Sylvia who was his lover. She had read a newspaper article about Jerome finding the body and decided that she had to go find Jerome and tell him about Andrew Woodman. For Sylvia this was a momentous decision because she has never left the small area in Ontario where she lives. She doesn't tell her husband that she is going; she just gets in her car, drives to Bellville and then takes the train to Toronto. Sylvia has two journals with her in which Andrew wrote the story of his family starting with his great-great-grandfather Joseph who came from England. Joseph started a timber business using the island as a staging ground to send huge rafts of logs up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec. He was also a shipbuilder as there was great demand for ships on the Great Lakes. His daughter Annabelle never married but stayed on the island for her life even after the timber and shipbuilding businesses failed. His son Branwell moved off the island with his wife and child and managed a tourist hotel on the shore of Lake Ontario. The generations of Woodmans that followed never lived on the island again but they stayed in the vicinity as if connected by an umbilical cord. Sylvia shares the journals with Jerome and his girlfriend, Mira, who are fascinated by the history. And in reading them Jerome comes to terms with his feelings about his own father. Sylvia is also changed by the interaction with Jerome and Mira.

I could see rereading this book which is not something I very often contemplate. The only other book that I have plans to reread is Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries. I suppose it is not a coincidence that both are multi-generational stories by talented Canadian women. ( )

This is a slightly unusual book for my reading list, but typical of Urquhart. A quasi-historical fiction book featuring a woman with a condition that could be described as mental illness (although I wouldn't use this term, she is undoubtedly very unusual). It's essentially a story about the woman's attempt to come to terms with the death of a man with whom she had a long term affair. However, the bulk of the book is given over to describing the man's family history. I was more interested in the woman, her current marriage relationship and her affair, but these weren't explored in a lot of detail - well, not in sufficient depth for my liking, anyway. I wanted to know much more about what made the woman into the person she is, and why a man would marry her without the prospect of a physical relationship.
The whole premise of the book seemed a little shaky to me and it almost seemed as though Jane Urquhart wanted to write a book about the history of generations of a family, but thought she needed to somehow make it more contemporary or more relevant to now, in order to get people to buy it. Frankly, I think she could write a very good book about 21st century life and relationships but she seems to be stuck in the past! Actually, I think the reality is that she would find my style of book to be intellectually unsatisfying. ( )

This is the fourth novel by Jane Urquart that I have read, and once again I am impressed with her beautiful evocotive prose. I was drawn in immediately to the Canadian landscape in particular as well as into the lives of the people who inhabit it.

Sylvia is a middle aged woman, married to a country doctor and living in the house she grew up in. She has what is referred to by everyone as a “condition” although what it is, is never specified, she cannot stand to be touched, she seems to see the world differently to other people. Her husband Malcolm understands her, he accepted the limits the condition placed upon their marriage. Yet years earlier Sylvia had met and fell in love with Andrew. They parted and then came together again, before Andrew’s own illness parted them forever. Andrew’s body is found frozen in the ice along the shore of a small island near Lake Ontario by a young artist Jerome. When Sylvia reads of this in the paper she feels compelled to visit the city where Jerome lives and talk to the man who found her lover. She takes with her Andrew’s note books that tell another story, the story of Andrew’s family on Timber Island. Starting with his great grandfather Joseph Woodman who started a business selling the timber that surrounded them.

The story of Sylvia and Jerome is told in two parts, with the story related by Andrew in his note books narrated in between them. This second story which is mainly about Andrew’s grandfather Branwell and his sister Annabelle is just as engaging and beautifully written as Sylvia’s story, however it did interrupt the flow of the main narrative for me to begin with. The prose is beautiful, rich with the breathtaking scenery of the Canadian landscape and the history of the region.

This is an enormously readable novel, engaging and very well written it explores poigantly love, loss and memory and how the past so often can reach out and touch us in the present. ( )