The Trillium and the Maple Leaf

Today I read Canadian author Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers. She is speaking at my library tomorrow, and I want the essence of her prose to be fresh in my mind when I introduce her.

I really, really liked this book. It’s wonderfully written, with descriptions so beautiful that I quoted them aloud to my husband. Take this passage as an example:

“Having looked at the river for so long, Tilman was able finally to understand the language of water: quiet water, and water that speaks. He knew the slow, almost imperceptible sigh of it during weeks of drought, and its more aggressive babble after four or five days of rain.”

The story spans three decades and takes place, for the most part, in a small Ontario town, where the lives of Klara Becker and her wanderlust-stricken brother get separated then woven together again. Granddaughter of a master woodcarver, she tragically falls in love with a man who dies during the Great War, and is haunted thereafter. Tilman ends up a tramp, a craftsman, then a soldier, before returning to his sister, the last remaining member of his family. The pair voyage to France so that they might work on the Vimy Ridge memorial and find peace and stability at long last.

When I read the text, I was reminded of another great Canadian (actually, Ontarian) writer, Robertson Davies, whose Cornish Trilogy is magnificent. I started with the second novel, What’s Bred in the Bone, rather than the first, and I preferred it that way. Come to think of it, I adored the Deptford Trilogy as well, and devoured it in a relatively short time, although in the right order.

I don’t as a rule set out to read authors from my own country, any more than I seek British, French, or American ones. That said, if I happen upon one whose work I come to love, then all the better.