I’m happy to have read a new novel by Urquhart. It’s been a while. At 11 years old, young Emer is tossed about by a huge Prairie wind storm. She is badly injured and rushed by train to a hospital. After many surgeries, she recovers but walks with a limp for the rest of her life. The story passes beautifully back and forth between young Emer’s year in hospital and her life as a teacher of music.

It’s been almost a decade since Jane Urquhart’s last novel, so I was excited that she has a new release.

In the 1950s, Emer McConnell is a middle-aged itinerant music/art teacher in rural Saskatchewan. She thinks back on her life beginning with her family’s move from Ontario to the prairies. When she was eleven, she was badly injured in a tornado and spent a year in a hospital. There she became acquainted with a child performer in a travelling theatre company, a Jewish boy from a farm collective, and a girl from a Doukhobor community. Emer also reflects on her mother’s relationship with Master Stillwell, a teacher who followed them from Ontario to Saskatchewan, her brother Danny’s spirituality, and her long-term love affair with an enigmatic man she calls Harp, a brilliant scientist whose medical discovery changed the lives of millions.

One element that bothered me is that Harp is modelled on a real person whose identity is confirmed in the author’s bibliography. The revelation did not come as a surprise because I had strong suspicions throughout. His is not an entirely positive portrayal; he is introduced as someone who “never loved me” and “broke my heart often.” Reading about his man and his treatment of Emer left me feeling as I did when I learned about the sexual abuse in Alice Munro’s family: an icon has been tarnished. I may want to read the biography of this man to determine how much poetic license Urquhart took.

The novel examines a number of topics, one of them being colonial expansion in Canada. Emer describes her father as descending “from a long line of land-grabbers” who suffered from “property hunger” and “gobbled up land” in Ontario and the prairies “without giving more than a passing thought to those who had for millennia inhabited the geography my family coveted. One tribe, forced out of its homeland by imperial dominance, war, and scarcity, migrates across the sea and forces another tribe out of its homeland.” Once land was acquired, the settlers set about changing the landscape forever: “’the wildflowers and wild grasses . . . they are quickly disappearing and will not come again.’” And with their arrival , they rename places: “I thought about those earlier Indian names, and wondered whether they were lost for good or if they would ever come back.” For the people they displaced, “pushed off this land by the clutter of avarice and insatiability,” they built “residential schools in which dwelt stolen and grief-stricken indigenous children.”

There is more of Canada’s dark history revealed in the attitude of some immigrants towards other immigrants who spoke a different language, dressed differently, or worshiped differently. Emer observes, “How strange we all are! Most of us come from Irish and Scottish tribes cast out by the mother country. But we are still reading her poems and singing her songs. How odd that we define foreignness as those whose speech hold the trace of another language, and then we ignore altogether our own foreignness on land that was never our own.” Ukrainians, Jews, and Doukhobors were victims of discrimination and even violence. Emer reads a letter her mother received that illustrates the xenophobic attitudes of some: “But when foreign fish come to these streams, the very water itself becomes unwholesome. The lakes and rivers and lesser tributaries fill with parasites and disease, until we turn away from our own murky waters in disgust.” Master Stillwell focuses his educational research on “those with the foreign tongues . . . those who wore ridiculous clothing and head coverings. Those who would need to be changed. . . . ‘We take the ignorant and cleanse them and dress them in fresh garments. We give them the gift of the English language. We make them into a reasonable facsimile of ourselves. Because who . . . has a cleaner, more reliable life-version than we ourselves.’”

The role of women is also discussed. Emer compares her mother’s situation with that of Master Stillwell who earned a PhD: “My mother, the supplemental teacher, had neither the opportunity nor the privilege of being pauperized by graduate studies. Except for the daily round of necessary domestic chores, her roles in the world were never deemed to be essential.” Emer thinks of the “thinness of my mother’s life” because “few of her generation walked away from the fields . . . and almost none who did so were women.”

Love is another topic that receives attention. Emer believes that love “is imposed upon us” and is “inconceivable, unkillable, and beyond . . . control.” She muses that “Love is uninterested in a crack in the character of the beloved. And even at its most conventional, it is the enemy of rational decisions.” Love for both Emer and her mother is often accompanied by pain but her mother says, “’I have been in love . . . And that is life. That is being alive.’” Pain “situates us and makes us present in our lives” and so reminds us that we are alive: “Perhaps that is joy – the reminder that always there is pain, the reminder that we are living beings.”

Emer also suggests that her love for Harp and her mother’s love for Master Stillwell were yearnings for what was not possible for themselves: “The presence of a man who had known cities, speakers’ halls, and crowning glories would have enlarged and brightened the thinness of my mother’s life. To be the subject of such a man’s attention would have suggested that all along the potential for such things had lain dormant inside her, and were it not for circumstance, she might have stood by his side. She was drugged by a kind of worship that circled back to the self. And in some respects, so was I.” Men can seduce a woman and then dismiss or hide it, but for a woman, “seduction is a soft thing. It fills your rooms with golden light, sings your praises, makes you feel elected. Sainted.” Certainly their relationships feel like fantasies; “Our love, you see, was like those castle hotels: full of private hidden spaces and beautiful velvet furniture, and no responsibility for tidying up afterwards.”

This novel is both entertaining and thought-provoking. As a child Emer does not always understand the significance of what she sees and I found myself anxious to learn if my suspicions were correct. I also found I could relate with Emer in many ways. At the end of the book, the author mentions that the book was almost a decade in the making; after reading the book I can only say it was so worth the wait.

Delighted to include this title in the August edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national lifestyle and culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

This was a beautifully written story about trauma, pain and healing. Feeling like you're stuck and all you can do is wait while the world keeps spinning around you. This book was well put together. The way the author strings and ties everything together is remarkable. This novel has left me speechless and gave me a lot to think about.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read and review this novel.

The Robert Louis Stevenson poem, from which the title is derived, is often cited by this novel’s main character. It speaks to a child’s frustration at having to wait for the sun to rise or set when it should logically have done so at bedtime and the beginning of another day. This is very much a novel about waiting while the world continues to turn.

Jane Urquhart holds a reserved spot among the glitterati of Canadian literature, with a revered line of dazzling historical novels behind her. She has a rare sensibility for capturing both important historical moments and persons—the kind who should be somewhat familiar at least to Canadian readers—without the overt exposition that can make historical fiction so tedious and encourage skipping pages.

No one will be tempted to skip a single line in this beautifully crafted novel that shows Urquhart at her best. Set in the 1920s, the ´everyday’ part of the narrative involves a common family strategy of the day: leaving Ontario for the promised land’ represented by the wide-open expanses of prairie. By this time, in the new Canadian optimism with the Great War behind them and the Plains Indians removed to reserves, the railway had forged its way through the territory, making resettlement a bit more convenient though certainly not easy. The train, in reality and metaphorically, is a very Canadian trope that she uses to advantage. The McConnell family, parents, older brother Danny, young Emer, and toddler twins Patrick and Timmy, take this train to begin a new life homesteading in Saskatchewan.

Except for the trains and the forces of nature—in this instance the kind of sudden prairie storm that blows over recently erected buildings, tears babies from their mothers’ arms, kills and maims with impunity—the action, as noted, consists mostly of waiting. The family wait on a long train journey to reach their new home, they wait while the land is cleared and their new house and barn are built, they wait for spring during long isolating winters and for respite from hot insect plagued summers. And, in the wake of a life-changing storm, ´the great wind,´ Emer waits to recover from terrible injuries that leave her visibly scarred and limping, the widening space between surgeries her only respite from pain and loneliness. Her childhood is suspended in the small world of the children’s ward in a hospital so far from home that her father and siblings can do nothing more than wait until she is released a year later. She waits and wonders when she can go home, go back to school, see the schoolmaster who held her in thrall, find out what happened to her mother who was also caught up in the storm. Her mother’s life, and fate, are an integral part of the story, a mystery that she slowly pieces together in adulthood. That story is intriguing and reflects women’s place in the social hierarchy at the time, but sometimes it seems to take up too much space in Emer’s own story without really giving her much insight into her own needs and choices.

The dual timeline is divided between Emer’s recovery, literally immobilized by a heavy body cast and, at first, the inability to speak in sentences because of head trauma and morphine for pain. Much of this story takes place in her head, as she makes up her own stories based on the patterns etched by damp and age into the hospital walls, or, when she is painfully turned, her glimpses of Saskatchewan’s endless blue skies. When she is unconscious or at least semi-conscious, she dreams about the train her father and brother flagged down to carry her broken body to hospital, relinquished to the kindly Black porter and the strange ´Conductor’ who visits her in nightmares and hallucinations, while Mister Porter Abel is her only human visitor in her waking life. The childhood timeline, which flashes back in memory through the adult timeline, is the best part of the story, especially in her interactions with the children, in particular the larger-than - life Friedrich. He also figures in her adulthood.

The adult timeline is somewhat less effective. It is dominated by a lover referred to only as ´the man I loved,’ for whom she waits in ´another of the castle hotels’ (the iconic CN hotels) because he ´couldn’t, or didn’t wish to, love me in a daily way’. She is in her forties, an itinerant music teacher in the public school system, and wonders if this man, so much a celebrity that he feels compelled to disguise himself, is only attracted to her because of the smallness of her life,’ in contrast to his worldwide fame. Curiously, Urquhart never identifies him, despite his centrality to the 1920s Canadian scene and his wider reputation for his much alluded to but also unnamed ‘Discovery’. Emer calls him Harp, which she reveals as her personal name for him. The author doesn’t even identify him in her afterword, though she does cite his biography. Much of what she describes is true to his life story, despite the fictional elements and it’s doubtful any Canadian reader will fail to guess. Why the subterfuge then?

In the end, whatever questions her approach might raise, Urquhart ´s style and characterization are as deep and beautiful as always. This is one to place at the top of 2024’s must-reads.

In Winter I Get Up at Night is a beautifully considered and composed history of Canada’s expansion west into the “northern Great Plains”. Jane Urquhart’s writing is fluid and reads effortlessly as her main character, Emer McConnell — a middle-aged itinerant teacher of music, and less frequently, art — goes about her business, driving long stretches from rural classroom to rural classroom, and remembers her own time as a student in one-room schoolhouses (and the imperious Inspector of Schools, and sometimes instructor, who followed her family from Ontario to Saskatchewan), the time she was severely injured in a tornado (and the year she spend recovering on a children’s ward with a colourful group of other patients, doctors, and nursing sisters), and the great love of her life: a famous scientist who would meet the permanently disabled Emer at remote hotels along the railway’s spur lines for years, but who would not agree to be seen with her in public. Exploring imperialism, racism, what women will do for love, and the true history of a people who are not as blameless as we may like to think we are, Urquhart forces us to reevaluate the Canada of the twentieth century through the eyes of a good person mulling over terrible events. It takes the entire novel to tie a bunch of threads together, and while I wasn’t exactly surprised by any of the ultimate revelations, everything does conclude on a satisfying note. I’ve been a longtime fan of Urquhart’s work, and this is a tour de force; rounding up to five stars.