SOURCE: "Train & Balloon," in Canadian Literature, No. 132, Spring, 1992, pp. 209-10.

In the following excerpt, Macfarlane praises Urquhart's "tight interlacing of metaphor, structure and theme" in Changing Heaven.

Changing Heaven is a novel apparently fragmented into individual stories telling of separate characters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…. [T]hese stories are linked through theme and recurrent images, but the characters, too, begin to merge into each other's stories. Arthur and Ann, two twentieth-century academics, have at first separate chapters, but their stories converge as they become enmeshed in an increasingly stormy affair. The story of two nineteenth-century balloonists parallels Wuthering Heights in some aspects and the ghost of Emily Brontë figures in their tale, told intratextually by a moorland sage Ann is coming to love. In this intense and complicated structure, time is spatialized to bring the stories of these characters together under the (internal) storyteller's control in...