973 ( )

Jane Urquhart is a great writer. She can really evoke a sense of place, and get into the feelings of her characters. This, however, is not my favourite book by her. I found it hard to relate to the main character, Tam. There were too many gaps in her story to let me really get to know her. And the interwoven story of Kenneth Lochhead, while interesting, didn't add to the main story. ( )

I read this for a book club, which means that I started it on the day the book club was meeting and didn't finish it in time, and perhaps if I hadn't been rushing so much I would have been able to relax and enjoy it more, or perhaps if I didn't get as far as I had I wouldn't have bothered finishing it this morning. Hard to say.

This is the second Urquhart novel I've read, and while [b:Away|383690|Away|Jane Urquhart|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1353632382s/383690.jpg|112177] was alright in retrospect, it was more for other readers than myself. Like, when I read it I was actually someone else, someone I know, reading it, because she would've liked it, and I had this weird sense not of enjoying it, but of entering into my friend's consciousness and seeing what she'd find in it, while at the same time my personal consciousness was critical.

This time around I didn't get into that friend's head, and am not sure if she'd have enjoyed it even if I had. Tam was a far from interesting character, the Kenneth anecdotes are not bad but belong somewhere else entirely, and the storytelling frames were all wrong.

And the romanticized Ireland! Man. I mean, I know I'm pretty biased because my Irish Experience came with a load of Harsh Realities, and I know she's writing about an Ireland of The Past, but I don't think it existed as she imagines it even then. It was weird, having lived in County Kerry, having been on those hills, having worked with those farmers and sheep, having known the Irish Fuck-Ups. Sometimes I saw my experiences, but most times I didn't and couldn't believe the story I was being told on account of it. ( )

Tamara has just completed a trans-Atlantic flight in an effort to escape an adulterous relationship and is feeling as though she has lost her bearings and doesn’t know which way to steer. She has 72 hours fogged in at the Gander airport to take stock of the arrivals and departures of her own life and figure out where she belongs in the world. As she waits for the fog to clear, the people depicted in an airport mural provide a foil for her to reflect on the times she has spent waiting or adrift in her own life back in post WW2 Ireland.

This story has numerous threads. In addition to Tamara and her lover Niall, there is the journey of the mural’s artist in Canada and Niall’s brother Kieran back in Ireland. It felt like the book was mostly Kieran’s journey, and Tamara’s story was a bit lost, perhaps in the same way she lost herself in her relationship with Niall. The story is beautifully written especially the descriptions of the landscape. At a recent reading, Jane Urquhart revealed that she spends time in this corner of Ireland and wove in local landmarks and characters. ( )

I've spent the last ten minutes staring at this post, wondering how to start, what to say. It's like I spent the past four days reading The Night Stages in a dream, which is what the first three-hundred-and-fifty-odd pages of the book is like. It isn't a dream, but it feels like a dream. Of course, what's the one thing about other people's dreams: they are boring. I think each page of The Night Stages I read at least twice because my mind kept wandering off, and not even to interesting thoughts. Rather, I would read a sentence and think "I should really buy a new mop."

And no worries: I really did buy a new mop. My floors will be clean(-ish) soon.

We have Tamara, who was, like a character in Code Name: Verity, was in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. We have Niall and Kieran, brothers who cycle, both in love with the same woman. We have Kenneth, who painted Flight and Its Allegories at the Gander Airport, where Tamara has a stop-over while fleeing Ireland and her doomed relationship with the married Niall. In other words, we have a ninth novel with the muddle-headedness of a first novel. Tamara flew planes in World War II, so what? Niall and Tamara have an affair, so what? Kieran opens a gate for a pair of ghosts, so what? Kenneth listens to a long story about another painter, so what? We could even say Kenneth, so what? Other than Tamara looking at his mural after-the-fact, there is no connection between him and the other characters. There is all this background instead of characterization, everything shot in a blurred focus and feels a short-story run out of control, crashed like a bicycle in the Rás, which is the last fifty pages. Those fifty pages and the detailing of the Rás are heart-pounding in their intensity, as if to try and make up for the lethargy of the three-hundred-and-fifty pages that come before it. Why couldn't the whole novel be the Rás? Why couldn't the excitement of the Rás be weaved in rather than dumped at the end? The payoff for persevering comes so late.

In terms of writing, this is a ninth novel, not a first. Normally I hate description, and there's a lot of description here, but it's done so deftly, so beautifully, that it wasn't the description that bored me. The technique, if we just look at every sentence, at each page in isolation, is beautiful. This book is written, assembled, so exactly. It's just, overall, I couldn't get any fix on the characters or their necessity of being in the novel. It's like a pure technique book, all writing, story lacking. Maybe I'll feel something different after I've let it stew for awhile, but it definitely didn't endear Jane Urquhart's novels to me.

The Night Stages by Jane Urquhart went on sale April 7, 2015.

I received a copy free from Goodreads in exchange for an honest review. ( )