The Stone Carvers

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
The Stone Carvers

“Jane Urquhart carves an ambitious and risky novel about obsession and the extraordinary power it holds over life and love.”

—Jury Citation for The Giller Prize

“Absorbing … Urquhart is the most lyrical of writers, handling exuberance and meditation with equal grace.”

—
Sunday Times

“It underscores Urquhart’s remarkable ability to paint a large historical picture on the smaller canvas of individual human lives … . Powerful … . Its concern with art and craftsmanship, emotion and detachment, death and remembrance as well as its fine evocation of place, set it among [Urquhart’s] most moving and engrossing novels.”

—
London Free Press

“Superb … . She is a gifted storyteller … . Urquhart’s story, which is at once a romance drama, war epic and trail-blazing story of pioneers, speaks of the small actions—like the minute movements that make up the stone cutter’s craft—taken by individuals in the past that make our own future possible.”

—
Ottawa Citizen

“Sculptors are like lovers in this saga, awakening rock instead of flesh … .”

—
Maclean’s

“The Stone Carvers
flows like a wide, strong river that’ll sweep you off your feet and carry you along … . Jane Urquhart is a powerful storyteller … . Compelling … .”

—
NOW
magazine

“Urquhart’s most voluptuous novel … . Remarkable … .”

—
New Brunswick Reader

“Beautiful, polished, finely calibrated, achingly human … .
The Stone Carvers
is a wonderful novel.”

—
Image Magazine
(U.K.)

“
The Stone Carvers
has the immediacy and wisdom of a folk tale … . It offers total enchantment.”

—
National Post

“Urquhart’s most ambitious and most accomplished novel to date. The story, so clear and translucent, seems to be carved of marble. It is also her most intimate, most personal, most tender novel. The sense of loss and regret are powerfully conveyed, as is the celebration of deep and abiding love.”

— Kitchener-Waterloo
Record

“It does exactly what a novel is supposed to do—captivates, transports and beguiles … . [Urquhart] has made her contribution to the arts of permanence and understanding.”

—
Irish Independent

“[Urquhart is] a spellbinder, using her powers of storytelling, her facility with language and her gift for conjuring characters rich and whole onto the page … .
The Stone Carvers
floats effortlessly, with Urquhart’s prose and imagination carrying us through journeys real and imagined.”

—
Hamilton Spectator

Cloth edition published 2001
First Emblem edition published 2002
This Emblem edition published 2010

Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Urquhart, Jane, 1949—The stone carvers / Jane Urquhart.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-427-7

I. Title.

PS8591.R68S76 2010 c813.’54 C2010-901585-1

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario

www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

For G. P.
and in memory of Sandra Gwyn

“I have been eating and sleeping stone for so long it has become an obsession with me. And, incidentally, a nightmare.”

— Walter Allward

I
n June of 1934, two men stand talking in the shadow of the great unfinished monument. Behind them rises a massive marble base flanked by classically sculpted groups of figures and surmounted by an enormous stone woman who is hooded and draped in the manner of a medieval mourner. At her back, a shedlike building occupies the space between twin obelisk-shaped pylons, each with their own wooden rooms attached to it at a great height.

The taller man wears a dark overcoat and hat and carries a pole, about the size of a walking stick, that he swings out in front of him now and then as if to make a point. The other man, less formally clad in an oilskin jacket buttoned tightly over his round belly, appears to be more involved in the conversation, looking intently at his companion and rising on his toes and opening his arms while he is speaking. All around them, all around the monument is a sea of men and mud, except in the far distance where the dark mountains of the coal fields of Lens can be seen to the northeast, and the white slabs of graveyards, some only partially sodded, can be seen to the south and to the west.

Despite the fact that the ground the men stand on is French, and the month is June, it is not a warm day; there is no sun, and the wind howls across the coal fields toward the monument in increasingly strong gusts so that the taller man is forced to place a hand on his hat. At one point both men stop talking and look up at a large wooden shed that stands on a forest of scaffolding and is secured by thick ropes to the larger of the two pylons. They listen to the strange noise these ropes make as they rub together, a noise the taller man knows to be remarkably similar to the sound of two pines scraping against each other in a wind-filled Canadian forest. Along with the wind and the sound of the ropes there is the staccato noise of several stonecutters’ tools as men in overalls carve words onto the extensive stone wall. The taller man walks across broken marble and rutted mud to see how this work is going. He says a few words to one of the stone carvers, then returns to his companion.