Sanctuary Line is Jane Urquhart’s seventh novel. Other works of fiction from this Ontario native include The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven, Away, The Underpainter, The Stone Carvers, and most recently, A Map of Glass. Her books typically explore family dynamics and tragedies from an unexpected angle. She has a way of taking you through a character’s experience and relating it directly to your own. Also, a trend covered in many of her works is war.
Urquhart’s novels have gotten critical acclaim, and have earned awards such as the 1994 Trillium Book Award for Away, the 1997 Governor General’s Award for The Underpainter, and the Giller Prize for The Stone Carvers just to name a few.
Sanctuary Line is a story of a life lived years ago told in the present day by Liz, an entomologist who studies the migratory patterns of the Monarch butterfly. It is a story about a developing first love, tragedy, abandonment, and family trials.
Chronologically, the story’s origin begins hundreds of years ago on the shores of Ireland with the Butler family. When they come to North America, two Butler brothers separate; one going to the Canadian side of Lake Erie to be an Orchard farmer, the other to the United States side to man lighthouses.
In the 1980’s, events take place at the Canadian Orchard farm one night that change the lives of all Butler family members. The head of the farm, Stan Butler, is married to Sadie and has three children; two boys and Mandy, who eventually ends up joining the Canadian Forces and is killed on a tour of duty while in Afghanistan. Mandy grows up without her dad, after he leaves the farm after that one fateful night never to return. Liz is Mandy’s city cousin who visits the farm with her mother in the summers, who has also had to grow up without a father.
Each summer at the farm, Mexican workers arrive to work on the Orchard. One of the workers’ children, the young boy named Tao, is pushed to play with the cousins by Stan throughout the years. He and Liz develop an attraction that she is unprepared for, but evolves into her first love.
The book is presented in a way so that we, the readers, know from early on that Stan had walked out on the family, but are left wondering what actions caused such an act until the end. In present day, Liz hasn’t seen or heard from her uncle in twenty years. In addition, we learn early on that Mandy has been dead for one year, due to unfriendly fire while in Kandahar. Also, as we read on, we discover that Liz is forty-years-old and is alone on the decaying farm, visiting her mother only occasionally at a nursing home. By the time the foreboding of Tao and Liz’s relationship begins, the reader may not want to read on, but the writing style impedes on the ability to stop. It is written in first person narrative in the style of a letter to a specific character of whom we have no idea. That alone is enough to compel you to read on, never mind the question of what were the events that led to such an undoing?
Urquhart’s writing is beautiful and intuitive. She uses the Monarch’s life cycle and migratory patterns as a metaphor for how she sees the events of her past. This is stated late in the book on page 218,
“And, even now I can only understand it in the way that I understand butterflies; I know what they do, but I am at a loss to explain why they do it. Perhaps we are drawn to the beauty of difficulty, the limited access to a sacred space, the arbitrariness of one species surviving while another vanishes overnight, a magnificently complicated relationship.”
She also brings the butterfly metaphor in to describe Liz’s view of Mandy and her highly secretive love affair overseas also on page 218, “I have never fully understood poetry. I have never been a soldier. I have never been a butterfly. I have never loved in the difficult way Mandy loved.”
Sanctuary Line gives us an opportunity to experience not only the events through Liz’s eyes, but also to experience her thought processes. When she herself comes upon an epiphany, you feel that familiar light-bulb moment as if you’d come up with it yourself. For example, on page 86, we get to experience how Liz has associated a meaning to a word. “I knew her moods, her romantic and poetic side, and something else in her that was a combination of pride and stubbornness, a recipe that would later evolve into what I saw as ambition.”
The way in which this novel is presented is very effective. Urquhart really gives the ending away in the first few chapters, but we feel like we don’t actually know what’s going to happen. In my opinion, it takes a masterfulness of leading a reader through a journey to achieve that.
Some research Urquhart did when writing this book include looking into Mexican migrant worker conditions in the 1980’s, fruit farming in southern Ontario, and also details from the royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, as stated in the acknowledgements section of the novel.
The audience for Sanctuary Line is very broad. Most people who enjoy the written word will love the way this book takes you through a journey of the past as well as the present. Also, if you’ve ever experienced a loss, this book will speak volumes to you. The narrative encourages the examination of your own thought processes. It’s a quick read, rich in language, thought, and experience.
One of my favourite aspects of this book was that you learn about Liz, the narrator, quite slowly. You get to know her through her actions and reactions, as well as her comments towards others. Every once and a while I pick up a book where I simply enjoy the act of reading, this is one of those books.
