Northern LightI just finished Jane Urqhuart's The Underpainter last night. A great novel, beautifully understated in Urqhuart's manner. Apparently she came up with it during a stint at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
It's the story of Austin Fraser, an American minimalist painter who is telling his life story from his vantage point at the end of his career. His life and work spans the early part of the twentieth century.
From his teenage years he spent his summers painting landscapes on the Canadian shores of Lake Superior and Lake Ontario.
The story is about what an utter bollox he was to everyone he ever met, including his muse, lover and long time friend Sara, whom he painted for fifteen summers and then abandoned when a painter friend remarked on how cold his paintings were, how loveless.
Reminded me a lot of an ex of mine actually.
But that's not what I'm writing about tonight.
The novel talks about light a lot, in particular the Canadian winter light. In one particular scene, he has a little panic about his life, after inadvertently causing disaster to visit some friends, he travels to see Sara who must ski across the lake for a day to meet up with him. He sits in his hotel waiting for her to appear on the horizon.
The shopkeeper told me the temperature was thirty below zero. But the sun, the white blaze was everywhere and so the chill seemed irrelevant.
Or
I sat in a room blade bright with sun. Prisms angled towards me from the bevelled edges of mirrors, and anything made of metal - the lamp base, a castor on the foot of my bed, my zippo lighter - glared.
This is my world in the winter. And it's breathtakingly, achingly, deceivingly beautiful. I wake up every morning facing the most glorious colours of dawn streaming in the eastern window of our room.
Then I go into the eastern facing bathroom and look in the mirror and see EVERY LINE AND WRINKLE AND GREY HAIR AND FRECKLE AND BLOCKED PORE.
There's a lot to be said for the soft fuzz of an Irish dawn drizzle.
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