As a child it would put me in mind of a line of that poem that had been read aloud to us by our poetry-loving Master back in Ontario: “‘In winter I get up at night ,’” he had begun, “‘and dress by yellow candle-light.’” Then came the musical rhythm of poetics, with a onesyllabled final verse that began with the line “‘And does it not seem hard to you?’”
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. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
My family, whose ancestors had endured the outlawing of their language and religion, the imperial takeover of their land, and the peril of famine, could never free themselves from property hunger. They gobbled up land in Ontario, field by field. Then they sent my father out to feast on the prairies in a similar fashion. All this 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.
My husband had a great uncle who, injured at Vimy Ridge, was granted a large section of land in Saskatchewan and moved out there to ranch after WWI, but I had never before heard, as is written here, that just as in Ireland a family would expect one of their sons to become a priest, an Irish immigrant family in rural Ontario would instruct one of their sons “to go west for the land that was being made available there” at the beginning of the twentieth century (or that relatives with Irish backgrounds would hold an “immigration wake” for family members leaving the province, knowing that they would never see them again). Urquhart mentions the displaced First Nations a few times, but this is really more about the irony (and ugliness) of people who — immigrants to the land themselves — were capable of racism (and even violence) against fellow immigrants who didn’t quite talk, act, or believe in the same God as themselves. As Emer scrolls through her memories, she reveals a lot of the systemic ugliness she grew up with (unremarkable to her at the time), and when she got older, the even uglier ideas she was exposed to from the powerful world in which her famous lover lived.
When I think of the scene now, my legs braided with Harp’s, my head on his arm, speaking about my brother, it seems to come from a country so far away and visited so long ago, no memory can recover its shorelines. Harp’s long body. And that woman who was me, not young, but so much younger than I am now. What of her? How did she manage it all? The man, his body. No one before or after. I was helpless and adrift. He was unknowable. And that meant there wasn’t any part of me that I didn’t want him to understand, to know.
“Harp” is a nickname that Emer gave to her secret lover (an inside joke based on Harpocrates, the Hellenistic god of silence and secrecy), but it eventually becomes clear who this real life man is supposed to be — and that kind of bothered me. Urquhart lists a biography of the man among the “dozens of books and articles related to my subject” that she read in preparation for this novel, but even if he was actually a cad and a playboy (and a racist sympathiser with a fetish for scarred bodies?), something feels off about him being an officially unnamed secondary character in this novel — I’m looking forward to seeing what other readers think about this.
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.
I first learned of the Doukhobors (a fascinating people, beloved of Tolstoy, and integral to the storyline) when my own family moved out west in the 1980s; and although their protests and nudity and fire-setting were all very shocking to my young sensibilities, my mother (of pure Irish immigrant background) urged me to open my mind to their beliefs and perspective, so maybe that’s progress? Even so: Urquhart weaves a fascinating story of our little-acknowledged history — with consistently beautiful writing about ugly events — and I am grateful and delighted that this exists.
