The Night Stages

By Jane Urquhart

Set mainly in a remote area of County Kerry in the ’40s and ’50s, Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel is at once intimate and epic in scope.
Tam, an English woman in her thirties, has been living in this harshly beautiful region since shortly after the war, in which she served as an auxiliary pilot. She is now leaving her lover, Niall, who, like his father before him, is a meteorologist.

The airliner she is travelling on becomes grounded by fog at Gander Airport, Newfoundland. As she waits, she regards an enigmatic mural, and revisits not only the circumstances that brought her to Ireland but her intense relationship with Niall and his growing despondency over his younger brother Kieran’s disappearance years before.

We learn of Kieran’s troubled childhood and the tragedy that caused him as a boy to be separated from home and taken in by a widowed countrywoman who lives in the mountains behind the town. He comes to know the local people, among them a tailor, a fisherman-teacher, and a sheep farmer who is a great philosopher.  There is also the jeweller’s daughter, a young woman who will come to change the course of several lives. 

Running parallel is the story of Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead and how he created the mural that is Tam’s only companion through three long days and nights. 
An elegiac novel of emotional depth that vividly evokes a time and a place, The Night Stages explores the meaning of separation, the sorrows of fractured families, and the profound effect of home in a world where a way of life is changing. It is Jane Urquhart’s richest, most rewarding novel to date.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9780771094446

Jane Urquhart

JANE URQUHART was born in the far north of Ontario. She is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, among them The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Orange Prize; Away, winner of the Trillium Book Award; and The Stone Carvers, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Man Booker Prize. Her work, which is published in many countries, has been translated into numerous languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. She is a chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Her most recent novel, The Night Stages, was published in 2015. Urquhart lives in southeastern Ontario with her husband, artist Tony Urquhart. SCOTT MCKOWEN is an award-winning illustrator and graphic designer. He works in scratchboard, an engraving medium in which white lines are carved into a black surface with a sharp blade. McKowen has illustrated a number of titles for a wide range of publishers. Based in Stratford, Ontario, he operates the design studio Punch & Judy Inc., which creates theatre posters and graphics for leading performance art companies across North America.    

Reviews for The Night Stages

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lindsay_w_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[schatje_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

On 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!