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Jane Urquhart. Away. New York. Viking. 1994 ((C) 1993). 355 pages. $21.95.
The title of Jane Urquhart's third novel is not just a reference to Mary, an intriguing character who, on a remote island off the northern coast of Ireland, gets taken by a daemon lover, renamed, and claimed by the "otherworld." Rather, the condition of being "away" resonates as a metaphor, reminding us how a writer must feel when she is writing or a reader when she is engaged by fiction, unwilling or unable to leave completely the world of the book, its entrancing geography interrupting the mundane here and now; or how one functions when overcome by passion for another, drifting, as if spellbound, in a dreamlike fog. Urquhart has always been superb at rendering intense states of being, and Away offers plenty of such renderings.
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