Two Solitudes (Hugh MacLennan)

I reread my favourite novel this week. 

Each Man's Son (Hugh MacLennan)

When I closed the back cover of Each Man's Son I felt a little sad. I have now read all of Hugh MacLennan's novels. I will never again open a new one and discover his prose for the first time. There are, of course, essay collections that I can read, but essays are not novels. Now I can only re-explore the ground that I have already tread upon. 

Each Man's Son was originally published in 1951 and is MacLennan's fourth novel. Set primarily in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the story focuses on Mollie MacNeil and her son Alan. At the opening of the novel Mollie has been waiting four years for her husband Archie, a prize fighter who has abandoned her and gone to the United States, to return. 

Mollie's loyalty to her absent husband is complicated by the attention of Louis Camire, a Frenchman who chose to stay on the island after a ship-wreak, and by the attention that the local Doctor, Daniel Ainslie shows to her son Alan. 

Archie's eventual return to Nova Scotia results in a violent confrontation, which drastically and permanently alters the lives of those closet to Mollie MacNeil. 

Although Each Man's Son is by no means MacLennan's best novel, it is not bad. I gave it three stars of goodreads. I liked it. In comparison, I've given all six of MacLennan's other novels five stars. This one didn't blow me away. 

When I read Two Solitudes and The Precipice I frequently found myself stopping to read passages aloud to myself, to underline, or to just take in the beauty and significance of MacLennan's prose. With Each Man's Son there wasn't a single moment when I did this. It was a good story. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't amazing. 

Return of the Sphinx (Hugh MacLennan)

Today I spent most of my afternoon reading Hugh MacLennan's Return of the Sphinx.  Originally published in 1967, this novel approaches the French-Canadian independence/separatist movement from a reactionary and nationalist perspective. The movement, as the novel's title alludes to, is portrayed as a sphinx. "In the old Greek legend," says the plot synopsis on the back cover, "the Sphinx made the cities sick, tore families asunder, and set sons against fathers and daughters against mothers." For MacLennan, evidently, this is effect that the political atmosphere in Quebec had in the 1960s. In Return of the Sphinx politics literally tear the Ainslie family apart.

Through his older, wiser character Alan Ainslie, MacLennan does his best to tear down and discredit the legitimacy of the French-Canadian subjugated and separatist perspective. He condemns the separatist movement and the generation of the 1960s as being the immoral product of a break down in morals and education. He likens it to a kind of insanity in which people have become victims of their own thinking and narrow perspectives. MacLennan portrays Alan Ainslie's son, Daniel, as a lost and manipulated victim who needs to be saved from his insane and misguided perceptions of the world which are leading him towards terrorism. For MacLennan, as portrayed through Alan, the only correct way to view separatism seems to be from a nationalist perspective.

As with many of his novels, MacLennan also draws on the First and Second World Wars, using them to explain why his older characters are wiser, and why they are disenchanted with radical political ideologies. For Alan Ainslie, the Quebec independence movement is nothing more than  a continuation of the conflicts, civil wars, and disorder that have always been occurring.

While I enjoyed this novel, I found MacLennan's condemnation of the separatist movement problematic. While violence was not, and will not ever be the answer, the separatist movement did and does have legitimacy and should not be discounted as the product of insanity or the misguided victims of radical political ideologies.

Overall, though, Return of the Sphinx is worth the read. Regardless of MacLennan's political perspective, the novel is a beautiful and fascinating portrayal of 1960s Canada.

The Watch that Ends the Night (Hugh MacLennan)

First published in 1958, this Hugh MacLennan novel is set in Montreal primarily in the 1930s and 1950s. Written while MacLennan's wife Dorthy suffered from a fatal illness, The Watch that Ends the Night is a novel about continuing to live while waiting for death. As Jerome, a doctor and veteran of multiple wars puts it near the close of the novel, Catherine--who has had a fatal heart condition since birth-- is living her death. George, Catherine's second husband, and the narrator, describes his marriage with Catherine as beginning in the early evening of her life. Quite literally, George and Catherine are on a death watch.

Like many of MacLennan's novels, The Watch that Ends the Night is also about coming to terms with the First and Second World Wars. More than once MacLennan mentions Hemingway. For MacLennan, his characters as he portrays them during the 1930s--as products of the First World War and the Depression--are his lost generation. Jerome, Catherine's first husband who turns up at the start of the novel after having been thought dead for a decade, is the most symbolic figure of this generation. Jerome, after enduring the horrors of the First World War, was swept up in a political ideology and climate which, combined with his need to find a new "god" caused him to abandon his wife and daughter. 

Also hanging over this novel is the threat of nuclear war. The Watch that Ends the Night is more overtly political than some of MacLennan's other novels. George, who is a radio personality for the CBC, has come to the conclusion that events cannot be controlled or understood, and even when you believe that you can understand them, it doesn't do you any good. George, like many people in the 1950s, is disenchanted. He's very cynical towards any political system that claims to understand everything. "In the thirties we tried to make gods out of the political systems and worship and serve them," he tells the reader (p.334). For George, the cold war environment wields a sword over the heads of everyone which could drop and kill them all at any moment, in the same way that Catherine's bad heart wields a sword over her life and his life. 

Overall, The Watch that Ends the Night is beautiful novel. I won't pretend that the final two chapters didn't nearly bring me to tears because they did. Once again I'm left wishing that everyone would read Hugh MacLennan. 

The Precipice (Hugh MacLennan)

If you've never read a Hugh MacLennan book, please do so now. Go out and buy this book or Two Solitudes, or Barometer Rising, or any of his novels. Even if you've never heard of MacLennan until now, don't put it off any longer. Today it occurred to me, as I closed the back cover of The Precipice, his third novel, that Hugh MacLennan is, without a doubt, my favourite author. 

The Precipice is a love story set during the Second World War. Lucy is Canadian from small-town Ontario, a setting that I am very familiar with as I've spent my entire life gazing out over Ontario cornfields and forests, and the Great Lakes are the closet I've ever come to the ocean. Steven enters Lucy's life when he, an American, comes to oversee bureaucratic changes to a porcelain bathroom fixture manufacturer that has been bought out by an American company. Lucy, who lives alone with her two sisters, soon finds herself falling in love with Steven. The novel follows her through the wartime years of her marriage. 

While the plot of this novel sounds like that of countless other novels of the era,  it's not. It is a novel about rejecting Canada and then returning. It's about the ups and downs of making a marriage last and about the differences between the two countries on either side of the 49 parallel. It's about coming to terms with the war, and with progress (which is portrayed as an American fixation), which has come to, as the novel illustrates, a precipice. 

One of the most poignant passages in this novel appears near the end. "Each day for years," writes MacLennan, "they measured out the distance they'd advanced.They were trained to believe there was nothing any of them had to do but keep on travelling in the same way. And then suddenly they were brought up short at the edge of a precipice which hadn't been marked on the map. There they were with all their vehicles and equipment, jostling and piling up on the front rank. For of course the ones behind didn't know the precipice was there and couldn't understand why the one's up front had stopped advancing. The pressure from behind kept increasing on the front ranks and they were all shouting so loudly nobody could hear anything"(336). This criticism of progress seems to be a theme of more than one of MacLennan's novels. In this novel, the theme is key to understanding everything. 

Although Elspeth Cameron, in the introduction to my edition, dishes out much criticism against this novel, charging that MacLennan "fumbles awkwardly and inconsistently to make sense of the human condition," and  MacLennan himself had his doubts about the quality of this novel, I love it. 

Voices in Time (Hugh MacLeenan)

First of all, I really love this edition of Voices in Time. I'm glad that I was able to order not only this book, but two more of Hugh MacLennan's novels in these editions. Secondly, I loved the book.

Based on the reviews that I've read, and on the Introduction to this edition, Voices in Time is considered, by many, as MacLennan's worst novel. At the time of its publication in 1980, it was not well received.

As Micheal Gnarowski writes in the Introduction, "a major shift was taking place in Canadian writing and Voices in Time would be its victim in public and critical perception. No longer were conflicts of ideology, the growing pains of nationhood, or the tensions between founding races and founding cultures of prime importance or concern" (xxx).

If Voices in Time had been published ten years earlier, then perhaps the novel could have been a success.  I  consider it a modernist work published too long after Canadian modernist literature had faded in popularity. 

Voices in Time is a novel about history, and about trying to make sense of not only the First and Second World Wars, but also the October Crisis of 1970. It is also a novel about the uncertainty of the future, the dangers of an overly bureaucratic state, as well as the dangers of disorder. MacLennan presents a binary of order and disorder within the state, which he never reconciles. Perhaps this is partly why I find the novel so compelling. He leaves the reader to decide which ideology is the correct one. 

Set in Canada in 2030, the novel opens with John WellFleet, one of the last remaining people to remember what life and civilization was like before the Great Fear, the term used to describe the destruction of civilization and of all the major cities by bombs. History has been suppressed in order to protect the people and ensure order, but John is forced to explore his past and the past of his family members when a young man uncovers some metal boxes with papers and videos tapes from the wreckage of an old apartment building. As John reconstructs the past, he shares with the reader the stories of Conrad Dehmel, a German during the Second World War, and Timothy, a TV host in 1970 during the October Crisis. 

Although the futuristic setting is not typical of Canadian literature, or of Hugh MacLennan's other works, Voices in Time is a masterpiece. It moved me almost as much as his most famous novel Two Solitudes did the first time I read it. The prose, like in all of MacLennan's writing, is beautiful. It spoke to me. I found myself underlining phrases here and there that I felt embodied truths and questions I have about today's world. Voices in Time embodies the uncertainties of yesterday, but also the uncertainties of today. It's also a tragic love story, which makes it doubly hard hitting. 

Value Village Book Finds

A new Value Village second hand shop went in not far from my home about a month ago, so I rode the bus out today and browsed their book section. I found seven books, including an Everyman's Library and few vintage New Canadian Library paperbacks.

My favourite find today was this expo67 guide book. It only cost me $1.50. I've been fascinated with the Montreal 1967 World Exposition since I was 15. I'm happy to be able to add it to my collection of expo67 and Canadian centennial memorabilia. 

I found two New Canadian Library editions. I already own Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches if a Little Town in another edition, but since I collect these vintage NCL editions, I was pleased to pick it up.  

I also found an NCL edition of Anna Brownell Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, a work which I was introduced to while taking a class in early Canadian literature last summer. 

Additionally, I picked up the Coles Notes for Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes, a Canadian classic which I've loved since high school. I don't really need the Coles Notes, but they're a neat collectors item for my Canadian Lit. collection. 

I was pleased to come across A Military History of Canada by Desmond Morton, a book which I've heard good things about. The synopsis indicates that it questions that idea of Canada as a peacekeeping nation. With our current involvements in the war against ISIS and in the Ukraine, I think this is a very timely book for me to read. 

Last of all, I picked up this 1950 Everyman's Library edition of Peer Gynt by Isben. 

Scotchman's Return and other Essays (Hugh MacLennan)

Ever since I read Two Solitudes for an independent English assignment in my last year of high school, I've loved Hugh MacLennan. While exploring Old Goat books, a bookshop that was new to me, I came across Scotchman's Return and other Essays. Normally, I would consider $15 too much to pay for a used book that I had never read, but I bought it anyway. Maybe I bought it because I'd scoured the shop and found nothing else which stuck out to me--it is so disappointing to go out intending to buy a book and come home empty handed--or maybe I just liked the golden-green cover and the feel of the pages. The 1960 publication date and that old book smell was also appealing.

I loved reading this book. It's light, personal and satisfying. MacLennan touches on everything from Canadian cuisine, the classical tradition is education, tennis, roses and the difficulty that Canadian authors who set their writing in Canada faced during the early and middle half of the 20th century.

This is a book that anyone can appreciate, but only a reader familiar with Canada can understand completely. Unfortunately, this book is out of print, so if you look for it you'll have to buy used.

I'm also quite pleased with the bookmark Old Goat Books gave me. I can never have enough bookmarks.