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.