A lot left unsaid

Lead review

Acclaimed Canadian writer Jane Urquhart often works within a particular wistful mood — her stories, whether contemporary or historical, are full of dormant hurts, quietly endured; long separations; sorrows. The Night Stages, her tender, meditative eighth novel, again has this tenor, suggestive of John Banville and Alice McDermott, and again demonstrates both its virtues and its flaws.

The book’s language is often lovely. Its story could be described with equal fairness as stately or static, depending on your sense of how fast a narrative should move. It’s coercively melancholy. I suspect that not many people will like it, and also that some will love it.

The Night Stages consists of three narratives, linked by a single night that an Englishwoman named Tamara spends in a Canadian airport around 1960. The first story is hers — she’s finally leaving behind her adopted country, Ireland, and with it Niall, the married man who has consumed her adult life, “leaving, she hopes, such full preoccupation and terrible necessity.”

The airport where Tamara waits to continue her journey is Gander, in Newfoundland — once an important refueling station for trans-Atlantic flights — and her eye is drawn to a mural there, “Flight and Its Allegories,” perhaps because she was a pilot herself during the war. As Tamara gazes at the painting, Urquhart, behind her back, gives us a second thread, the story of Kenneth Lochhead, its real-life creator.

Finally, and most engrossingly, there’s the history of Niall’s missing brother, Kieran. A difficult child, shattered by the suicide of their mother, Kieran eventually finds consolation in the solitude of bicycling. The book culminates in a thrillingly depicted road race — the Ras Tailteann — in which both brothers compete just before Kieran’s disappearance and in Tamara’s deciding whether to continue westward, toward a fresh start, or return to compromised happiness in Ireland.

The best thing about The Night Stages is how deftly it allows these three stories just to touch against one another, without insisting on their ultimate integration. The pain of Kieran vanishing, for example, may be what pushes Niall out of Tamara’s permanent reach, and the man who painted the mural that evokes her disappointments has had his own, as Urquhart shows us but Tamara is unlikely ever to know. It feels like life: a little bigger than any of us on our own, our moments of loneliness less unique than we imagine.

And yet, for all the obvious excellence of its design and voice, I never picked up The Night Stages with more than a feeling of dutiful respect. Often it was with something like apathy. Which is the moment when it’s worth asking: Is it that this book doesn’t work for me, or that it doesn’t work?

Some of both in this case, I think. The trouble lies in how passionately dejected a novel The Night Stages is, to the exclusion of other sensations. Every word of it, every character who crosses its pages, seems to stand in service to the emotion that Urquhart hopes to evoke — some mixture of regret, longing and loss. Tamara, Kieran: No matter how skillfully their author weaves meteorology into their stories, or Irish mysticism, or the history of flight, it never quite matters, because their only job is to incarnate this mournful feeling, to rue their lives.

Here’s a typical passage, about Tamara’s love affair with Niall. “After years of restraint,” Urquhart writes, “the relationship had slipped over an unacknowledged edge and quietly deepened for her so that everything they had missed — a child, shared sleep, the comfort of morning rooms — began to feel like possessions wrenched unfairly from her rather than those she had never owned.”

In a different book, this catalogue of missed chances might be devastating. But in The Night Stages it arrives late, and Urquhart’s unremitting dolefulness has already deadened our nerve endings to the heartache she wants to conjure. It’s so perilous for an author to chase any one specific feeling — particularly in the novel, a form whose supreme merit is its slipperiness, its ability to mingle all the stuff of life from rage to boredom to laughter in the same indifferent hour.

Maybe this is why Urquhart’s most powerful books are the shorter ones, for instance The Whirlpool and Sanctuary Line, whose brevity allows them to sustain the pressure of having a single tone. Certain stretches across the 400-odd pages of The Night Stages match their exhilarations, too, particularly the race, and Lochhead’s first epiphanies about how he wants to paint his mural.

Those moments will be enough for many readers, particularly admirers of the quiet pressure in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction, perhaps, or of Shirley Hazzard’s beautiful novel The Great Fire. At its best, the patient style of these authors achieves the kind of genuine seriousness about human emotion that hasn’t been a first priority for many writers of our odd era, which pings so frantically between the sardonic and the sincere. The Night Stages, whatever its imperfections, has the force of its utter conviction that there are other modes of expression that can illuminate the world, too.