The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 October 2011
by Jane Urquhart
Into all art, a little life must fall. Austin Fraser, the narrator of this novel is a famous twentieth century artist in his waning years. As his work comes to a close, he reflects upon the significant relationships in his life and how they come to inform his painting. He is an underpainter. He paints elaborate, beautifully wrought images of the events in his life, and then slowly, through a process of building up layers of semi-transparent color, obliterates the underpainting in a haze with just patches of the image remaining. It is a laborious, seemingly pointless task, but how many other artists have gone to such great lengths, creating a great work only to demostrate its meaning through its obliteration? Our narrator's work is a lot like memory, hazy and patchy, with clear spots here and there. The whole book is a work of memory for him, reflecting on events and coming to a new realization of their meaning. He is an American artist, born at the close of the 19th century, starting out in modest circumstances, but allowed by the sudden wealth of his father to explore a career in the arts. His father's riches come from some Canadian mining interests, and through that, our narrator finds his way to the northern shores of Lakes Superior and Ontario. It is here that the key moments of his story, and his life, take place. Austin meets George, who tends a china shop in a small vacation town at the edge of Lake Ontario. George paints china and is enthralled by the workmanship of great workshops in Europe. Austin, however, disdains this as not being real art, something which makes George frustrated but which he also forgives in his friend. Together, these young men experience the early yearnings of love, though the narrator is surprisingly cool to its charms. George, however, is of a much more fiery and romantic temperment, and there are vague inklings of his desperation before he finally heads off to fight in World War 1. Austin, who manages to avoid the war entirely, goes on to the tiny mining town of Silver Inlet on Lake Superior, where he falls into an artistic romance with Sara, who lives alone there in the summer light that the artist loves. For fifteen summers, he returns to paint her and her home, though, again, he is shockingly cold toward the love he receives there. Years later, when he returns to Lake Ontario with a woman George once loved, a whole world of memory and heartbreak is opened up to him. Urquhart reveals his grief and loss slowly throughout the book. The artist has taken everything from the world and has never fully understood what it has given him in return. He is a cold fish, and even the greatest tragedies in his life only make the smallest dents in his insular personality. Still, there is a richness to his recollections. The book has a somewhat dark and gloomy tone, full of foreboding and loss. It is, however, a broad tapestry of one man's recollections, and those things about other people's lives that he has finally come to understand. In the end, he is the keeper of their memories, and these become the subject of his hazy underpaintings.