Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #908383 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 476 pages

The Big Issue, 18th January 2005
'An enthralling, well-written novel... Hill offers an interesting concept and a promising debut'

Eve magazine, January 2005
'This bold novel - a tale of heredity and culture - is an enlightening, gripping read'

Time Out, 25th January 2005
'The interaction between Ursula and her parents is quirky and charming'

Customer Reviews

A novel which fails to deliver on its promise
'Ursula, Under' should have been an exceptional debut novel. The premise is intriguing - a genetic journey around the world over thousands of years, all ending in a small and very precious girl trapped down a mine shaft in North America, a threading tale of unknown ancestors and genetic dead-ends, from the consort to a Scandinavian princess, through missionaries and miners, ancient Chinese mystics and mute villagers. Yet this mammoth work, both in terms of length and scope simply fails to deliver. The prose is turgid, dull and, quite frankly, difficult to read, constantly distracting one from the flow of the story, making reading a stuttering, detached experience. The many, many characters are nicely drawn but it's hard to see why the reader should be interested in most of them. I kept reading on, waiting for a stronger connection to emerge: it never did. While Hill traces the passage of Ursula's genes down the centuries and round the world, impatience to return to the opening characters is all that keeps the reader going. And the denouncement at the end is ultimately predictable and unsatisfying. There is no element of justice, or even injustice, or salvation or redemption, or even suspense. It's just there, rather like the novel itself.

Fascinating.
A wonderful story. I bought it just out of curiosity, and when reading the first chapters, I couldn't see where it was heading, thought it would be chaotic and boring. Then the threads start coming together, braiding the story, and the book totally engulfed me.
It is in a way, partially composed of many short stories, biographies of various people through the centuries. Many chapters stand totally unsupported by themselves as short stories, and are good as such. Together the book forms an epic poem: Beautiful, narratic, epic, exiting. It grabs the reader by the heart, the fate of each person in the book becomes very important, and the thrill of seeing how each biography goes goes on.
The story has it's small faults, one feels when reading it, but as the story comes to an end, one sees the point, why it is composed like it is.
So, surpricing, different, a good book.

Big, bold and extravagant, if occasionally a bit high-sugar
This is a remarkably ambitious book for a first-time novelist, and despite a few weaknesses, the astonishing thing is how well - on the whole - Ingrid Hill carries it off. At the opening of the book, cute and precocious two-and-a-half-year-old Ursula Wong has fallen down a disused mine shaft; spoiled housewife Jinx Muehlenberg watches the rescue on attempt on TV while grumbling, "Why are they wasting all that money and energy on a ... half-breed trailer-trash kid?" The rest of the nowel goes on to show us exactly why, by focussing on Ursula as the end result of successive generations of ancestors from second-century-BC China onwards, many of whom themselves narrowly escaped never being born. The ancestors' tales are intercut with the life stories of Ursula's parents Annie and Justin, and with the ongoing rescue attempt, to build up a narrative which insists on the absolute value of individual human life, with a massive cumulative impact.

The various ancestors from both sides of Ursula's family include a Chinese alchemist; an orphaned lady-in-waiting to the future Queen Christina in 16th-century Sweden; the paraplegic daughter of a Chinese Minister who takes delight in out-arguing two Jesuit missionaries; a Finnish trader in fine goods along the Silk Road; a no-good immigrant to nineteenth-century California in search of gold, who is killed in a bizarre accident by an abalone snail; and a schoolmaster's widow who leaves Helsinki for the United States as wife to a taciturn copper miner she hardly knows. Their diverse tales are beautifully told with a combination of wry humour and a thrilling historical scope: there is an ever-present sense of human insignificance in the face of historical time and the vagaries of chance. For me, Hill's writing is at its best when at its darkest: the final years of orphaned Violeta's life in a Swedish leper colony, for instance, will linger in the reader's mind long after finishing the book.

Unfortunately, the present-day part of the narrative concerning Ursula and her parents isn't always so successful. Hill has a tendency here to lapse into a wholesomeness which sometimes verges on sentimentality, and some of the characters fail to convince. For instance, although Ursula's mother Annie is a well-rounded character (there is a lovely scene where she helps her less streetwise neighbour to buy a new trailer after a lottery win), Annie's husband Justin - a Shakespeare-quoting, pleasantly muscled roofing worker who also happens to be a talented amateur musician - comes across as decidedly too good to be true. Ursula's psychic gran Mindy Ji Wong similarly falls rather flat (though her estranged husband Joe Cimmer is very movingly portrayed for all his brief appearance). The book's narrative framework would have made Ursula's life seem just as precious without requiring the general worthiness and textbook-perfect parenting skills of Annie and Justin. I also have serious reservations about rich, racist and snobbish Jinx Muehlenberg, who comes uncomfortably close to being a pantomime villain. However, there are some nice touches of humour in Hill's depiction of family life prior to Ursula's accident, and on the whole the book does try to avoid easy answers.

As a multi-generational tale of emigration and immigration with an unusual narrative structure, the only real parallel that occurs to me is with Annie Proulx's "Accordion Crimes", with ancestorship to Ursula in Hill's book being substituted for ownership of the accordion in Proulx's darker tale. Although Hill's generally sweeter style is quite different from Proulx's wonderfully hardbitten and ironic writing, the two books do very much share the same massive historical sweep and impressive scale. "Ursula, Under" is a big, bold, extravagant book: though occasionally a touch sweet for my palate, this is obviously a matter of personal taste - and there are plenty darker moments here to please those of us who like our fiction on the drier side.