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The title of Joan Clark's latest novel for adults has great poetic appeal. Clark uses it in this book as a metaphor for understanding the life of Aurora, the main character, who, as a baby, is found by two fishermen on the Grand Banks. Rowing towards land in their dory after being separated in fog from their crew and ship, they find Aurora wrapped comfortably in a basket that has been placed on a chair on a small drifting pan of ice. One of the fishermen, Francis St. Croix, brings her home to his family at the Drook, a small community near Cape Race, Newfoundland, and they name her Aurora because he "had come upon her in a gleaming dawn." Soon after, they realize it is the dawn of the night the Titanic sank. From this prologue, Clark takes us through Aurora's unusual life, commenting regularly on the continual process of identity formation, the cosmic nature of the human soul, and on Newfoundland's history and culture.

Right from the start, though, the reader has to decide whether or not to buy into this story, not because of Aurora's extraordinary rescue, but because of the degree to which Clark mixes mysticism and reality, two magnetic currents that in this narrative field tend to repel each other. We are told, for example, that Aurora is an unusual baby. She has white hair, pallid skin, and fairy eyes, one blue and one brown, and, as an older child, she remembers being in her mother's womb. She is also referred to as the "Bride of Christ" and has the power in one scene to convince an intrusive polar bear to leave her adoptive mother's kitchen.

Against this, however, we have some of the best writing in the book, Clark's account of the sinking of the Titanic and the selfless efforts of Aurora's mother, Mary, and two passengers, Stella and Ernest, as they swim in the icy seas to save Aurora's life. Clark, in these scenes, selects her details with expert care, and all complement each other in subtle and intricate ways. The result is that the solemnity of the tragedy is caught in the fortuitous observations of the characters, who become eerily calm and passive in the face of death. As illustration, here are Stella's thoughts after being in the water for some time: "Ernest laughed. Odd to hear someone laugh when they were surrounded by sounds of terror: admonitions to God, wheedling, grovelling, pleading, weeping and praying. Stella could no longer hear Mary praying. She peered through the dark without seeing her, then paddled toward the ice pan. Mary was gone. Where had she gone? With a life jacket on, she wouldn't have sunk. Had she drifted away, become another anonymous head floating in the dark beneath the bloodless stars?" Also, Clark's consistent poetic phrasing, her interlocking metaphors of ice, stars, and light, and Aurora's developing pragmatic and no-nonsense attitude towards events in her life have the power to appease dubious readers and lure them on.

Aurora, after marrying a lighthouse keeper's son, gets to live in the lighthouse at Cape Race and raise a son and daughter there. Some sections of the novel are narrated from their perspectives, but their stories are sometimes too derivative, for example some of the sections on Stanley and Anna, the Italian woman he meets in Florence and later marries. Problematic also are Aurora's metaphysical or out-of-body experiences. Although they are partly explained near the end of the novel as semi-conscious imaginings, they are cast most everywhere else in a realistic form. In the scene in which Aurora injures her hip, we learn of her "transforming magic," her ability to allow her mind's eye to escape her body, even in moments of extreme pain: "I rose above the rockery and grass, rose until I was above the house. I hovered briefly over the rooftop and then began drifting eastward over the Barrens toward the sea." This is reminiscent of William Cartwright's afterlife flights in John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright, a novel with similar views on Newfoundland and its culture. Like Cartwright, Aurora revisits former scenes in her life, and, like Steffler, Clark shows in unique ways how political and personal identities mature with the shedding of fallacious and pretentious ideas about one's cultural roots.

Aurora loses her European identity when the Titanic sinks, but she continually reinvents herself to become an obstinately independent grandmother. Nancy, Aurora's daughter, becomes an Anglophile but then reinvents herself as a patriotic Newfoundlander. And Stanley, Aurora's son, eventually rediscovers his identity and "homescape" after struggling with Anna's death after she drowns while diving with him under an iceberg. Through these and other references to identity, Clark suggests that we are always in latitudes of melt where we continually change and evolve into different people, even after death. Demonstrably, Aurora, in a letter to her step-brother, asks him about "the company of souls," proclaiming that "after our death our souls swim in the universe like newborns, that we begin life anew as something else."

It is also through this metaphor that Clark communicates her sympathetic concern for Newfoundland's identity, its outport culture and its colonial and post-Confederation history. They become a factual backdrop intermittently illuminated for us at strategic points in the novel. The island itself is "smack in the middle of the latitudes of melt" and undergoes its own political and cultural transformations. It moves through and beyond its tragic marine history of innumerable shipwrecks, its loss of political independence, its colonial subservience to Britain, the sealing disaster, the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, the failure of its cod fishery, and other important historical moments. But it is also a place of communication and open spaces, with Signal Hill, Marconi's legacy, and the strategically placed lighthouses that become the emblem of Newfoundland's beautiful but treacherous coastline. This idea that Newfoundland is a space par excellence for nurturing one's identity is voiced partly through Anna, who believes that unlike Florence "Newfoundland was not a treadmill. No, here in this new land, you could go in different directions, here you could be yourself."

Clark, like Anna, was born elsewhere, in Nova Scotia, but has settled in Newfoundland to write about it as truly as anyone has. This novel shows she understands its places, even though St. John's comes off poorly, and writes about them with a sense of commitment. Clark seems to think, as Nancy does, that "instead of denying Newfoundland's rough edges, she could . . . help shape them."

Clark's obvious conviction here sublimates the uneasy blending of mysticism and realism, and in the end Aurora is much like Margaret Laurence's Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, in her persistent will to be independent. Her primary innate reflex is simply to be herself, to define herself. Clark sees Newfoundland in the same way. Through Nancy again she vocalizes perhaps one of her own motives for writing this novel, "that the island needed Newfoundlanders like herself to map its wildness and give it a voice, to deliver it to the world now as it was, elemental and untrammelled." Clark's mappings and articulations of Newfoundland and her characters are rendered with integrity, and it is this laudable quality that will take any reader through to the last page and back again to the beginning.