The Night Stages
As an epigraph to The Night Stages, Jane Urquhart uses a line from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: “As if I were the ghost of the fog.” While fog plays an important role in stranding Urquhart’s protagonist, Tamara, in Newfoundland’s Gander airport in the late Fifties, where she ponders a mural, the fog is also a great metaphor for the challenges faced by the characters of this novel.
Tamara, an Englishwoman with a privileged upbringing, served as an auxiliary pilot during the war and fell in love with a married Irishman; she fails to see her relationship with Niall clearly. Niall, a meteorologist in a small Irish town, struggles to – and can’t – find happiness with his wife and family or with Tamara because of the “fog” of his lost brother Kieran’s disappearance years before, which continues to haunt him. Kieran represents Irish culture and its erosion; educated by Irish men and women who live close to the land, he respects Irish myths and traditions that, like his mentors, are dying.
Like her other works, The Stone Carvers for example, Urquhart inserts the journey of an artist in his creation of an important piece of Canadian art. Whereas in The Stone Carvers she explored Walter Allward’s design and construction of the Vimy Memorial, in The Night Stages she examines Kenneth Lochhead and his mural, Flights and Its Allegories, created for the Gander airport. This novel is a fine exploration of the importance of home and the metaphorical fog that can challenge relationships. The scenes in which Kieran prepares for the bicycle race that occurs at the climax of the novel are especially rewarding for their imagery of the Irish countryside.
