Sanctuary Line
By Jane Urquhart
This book is full of symbolism and pensive reflections. It is well structured, with all the subplots
neatly interwoven. It has beautiful
descriptions of the north coast of Lake Erie and interesting historical
background. It has tragic themes of
innocence lost and star-crossed love.
There are thoughtful questions on many subjects: memory, religion,
family, allegiance. It draws interesting
parallels between the children's poetry of R.L. Stevenson and Emily Dickenson.
But the whole plot is centred on the behaviour of one man
who evidently has a mental problem and is weak, erratic, ineffective and
tiresome. The narrator professes to hate
him and this creates a problem for the reader who is unable to warm to him
also. I don't think it is possible to
engage a reader with a character whom the narrator dislikes.
Another problem for me is the character of the narrator, a
pale studious woman, unable to refocus her life after a tragic love affair when
she was 16. Her job is tagging
butterflies day after day and she lives alone on a run-down ancestral farm with
the ghosts of her past. She is sympathetic but passion-less.
I read and loved Urquhart's The Stone Carvers and Map
of Glass, but I found this book slow and unemotional. I loved the prose, the descriptions, the
allusions, the structure, the insights and reflections. Urquhart is a beautiful, intelligent writer,
but I didn't feel any urgency in this book.
I hate to be negative when the writing is so beautiful, but in the end,
I didn't really care about any of the characters.
