The Whirlpool (Jane Urquhart novel)
The Whirlpool, originally published in Toronto by McClelland and Stewart in 1986, is Canadian author Jane Urquhart's first novel. It was subsequently published in the United Kingdom by Simon and Schuster, in the US by David R. Godine, and in translation in France (under the title Niagara) by Maurice Nadeau. It was the first Canadian novel to be awarded France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1992, and was afterward published in several other European countries. Plot The novel is set in Niagara Falls in the summer of 1889, and focuses on the lives of several characters whose numerous obsessions, “concentrated chiefly in the image of the whirlpool, draw them inexorably together.” The story, bracketed by scenes of Robert Browning's last days in Venice, follows the lives of Patrick, a “chronically ill clerk and would-be poet"; David McDougal, an Americaphobe military historian; his eccentric wife, Fleda, who “spends her days in the woods, reading Browning's poetry”, and Maude, the widow of the undertaker with a mute four-year-old son. Against the backdrop of a river, its whirlpool and the forest, the poet Patrick fantasizes of Fleda rather than accepting her offer of a real relationship. Fleda goes to live in the