The Night Stages
Written by Jane Urquhart
Narrated by Charlotte Anne Dore
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Tamara makes her way from Ireland to New York. During a layover in Gander, Newfoundland, a fog moves in, grounding her plane and stranding her in front of the airport's mural. As she gazes at the nutcracker-like children, missile-shaped birds, and fruit blossoms, she revisits the circumstances that brought her to Ireland and the family entanglement that has forced her into exile.
Jane Urquhart
Jane Urquhart's previous novels are The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven, Away, The Underpainter, The Stone Carvers, A Map of Glass, and Sanctuary Line, all of which have been published internationally. She is also the author of a story collection, Storm Glass, and four books of poetry. A nationally bestselling author, Urquhart has received numerous awards, including the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Harbourfront Festival Prize, and Canada's Governor General's Award. She divides her time between Ontario, Canada, and Ireland.
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Reviews for The Night Stages
28 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Jane 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tamara 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5On a flight from Ireland to New York, Tam is stranded for three days at the Gander Airport because of fog, “’fog that blinds and deafens and causes that stillness . . . followed by the kind of clarity that causes you to wince’” (229). The fog grounds her, but it is a mural in the terminal which inspires her to reflect – on her past life as an auxiliary pilot in WWII; her relationship with Niall, an emotionally remote meteorologist whom she has just left; and Niall’s search for Kieran, his missing brother. Interspersed with her reflections are vignettes of the life of Kenneth Lochhead, the artist who painted the mural, and that of Kieran after he left home.The mural is entitled Flight and Its Allegories and a major theme in the book is that of flight: Tam’s “ridiculous joy” (118) when flying a plane and her fleeing from Niall; Kieran’s flight from his family home after a tragedy and his happiness when exploring on his bicycle, “always happiest on higher ground” so he is described as a climber “’Always heading for the sky’” (156); Niall’s withdrawals from Tam, retreats so frequent that they form a “familiar pattern” (197). It is flight that becomes the sustaining metaphor throughout. When her job as an auxiliary pilot comes to an end after the war, Tam talks of having “lost her compass” (130) and finding herself “so essentially adrift” (254). In her relationship with Niall she realizes she has become “in every possible way, a passenger” (10) and feels she has “lost her bearings. Her instruments were lying to her. She would not be able to make her way, even with familiar territory under her, toward any kind of landing strip” (331).The characterization of Tam is unsatisfactory. In her youth she was adventurous as evidenced by her transporting planes throughout the war. When Niall entered her life, she exchanged her “then-vivid life” for one that is “very likely uninteresting”: “The young pilot she had been then, the young woman behind the controls, would have been disdainful of what she has become: a sombre person” (10). In her thirties she acquiesces to a life with a “Lack of certainty, ambivalence, impossibility, and no hope whatsoever of resolution” (385)? Why? The mural with its exploration of “speed and stasis” (221) is perhaps a symbol of Tam’s life but, unfortunately, she also seems as flat and inert and unknowable as the figures on the mural.I am unclear as to why Kenneth Lochhead is included as a major character. The flashbacks into his life before his painting of the mural suggest how his experiences affected his rendering, but he has no connection to Tam, Niall or Kieran. (I almost felt Lochhead was inserted because he was a friend of Urquhart’s husband.) For this reason, I take exception to Claire Messud’s assertion that Urquhart has a gift “for the melding of ideas, events and individuals into a significant whole.” I was not left with a sense of a whole.The book, until the An Post Rás, is very slow-paced. The first 350 pages have the reader feeling as if he/she is in the night stage of the bicycle race but there is no drinking nor does it serve as “an antidote of sorts to the day’s suffering” (355). I guess Tam’s interrupted journey in Gander is a night stage of sorts with the race resuming once she makes her decision about where she will continue from Gander. Unfortunately, if the night stage is too prolonged, interest is lost in the rest of the race though, indeed, “’It’s not finished yet’” (389).Though I have read and enjoyed most of Urquhart’s other novels, I was not as enamoured with this one. Though the language is lyrical, the novel does not feel like a cohesive unit, and parts are tedious like a long delay in a journey. I do, however, want to go and see Lochhead’s mural!