JANE URQUHART HAS a memory etched onto her brain: a tree at the end of a lane, every inch covered with monarch butterflies to such an extent that it appeared to be on fire. The butterflies haven’t returned to her family’s rural farm in years, but it was an easy image to recall and one that was the jumping off point for her new novel, Sanctuary Line. The seventh novel for the award- winning novelist arrived at bookstores on Aug.31.
"It was magical, to say the least, because it was transforming a tree beyond all recognition, and we were always surprised by it,” says Urquhart, a Toronto native who moved off the family farm to the city as a child. “But for the last 15 years or so, the tree has remained empty of butterflies, and I am very disturbed about this.”
Urquhart’s narrarator is an entomologist who has returned to her family’s historic rural homestead to study butterflies. The story weaves together a star- crossed romance, monarch butterflies, Mexican migrant workers, the death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan and the history of a settler family, with startling ease.
The novel is partly an homage to Ontario’s family farms that Urquhart says are fading from existence here in Canada.
“It is partly about the disappearance of the family farm, another environmental indicator by the way, and my reaction to that,” Urquhart explains. “I think we’re coming to the end of a huge era, and I don’t think it is specific to Canada, but the end of the peasantry of the earth … I mean, we’re talking about the end of a tradition, the entire agricultural class upon whom we’re all dependent, by the way. And I feel this great loss.”
Urquhart herself comes from a family that would have been part of the settlement of Ontario. (Her family name is Quinn, and her roots extend back to Ireland where she still keeps a small cottage.)
As a result, she has become fascinated by settler history that saw poor families from overseas descend on the area to hack out a bit of bush and plant crops of one form or another.
“There is a kind of person whose way of life is dependent upon working the land, and I think those people are being pushed off the land,” she says. “They are disappearing in much the same way the monarch is disappearing.”
Catch Jane Urquhart at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront from Oct.20-30.