Book Analysis: The Diviners
RIVER OF N OW AND THEN
Margaret Laurence's Narratives
Barbara Hehner
ДН
LHE DIVINERS, Margaret Laurence's most recent novel, is overflowing with ideas about life, about life in Canada, and about life in Canada as experienced by a woman. Laurence has been quoted as saying, "Now the wheel seems to have come full circle — these five books [the Manawaka fiction] all interweave and fit together."
1
The extent to which The Diviners is made to interweave with the earlier books is, in fact, almost irritating. The Tonnerre family, members of which have appeared in The Stone Angel, The Fire Dwellers, and A Bird in the House, play a major, and thematically defensible, role in the present book. But why include Julie Kaslik (sister of Nick, Rachel's lover in A
Jest of God) and her husband Buckle Fennick (Mac's tormented friend in The
Fire-Dwellers), when our interest in them is derived from the earlier books, and not from anything they do in The Diviners? And it is a jolt to read that Stacey
Cameron and Vanessa MacLeod, Morag's contemporaries, play together, since they have not previously seemed to exist on the same imaginative plane: Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers is a fully realized fictional creation, while Vanessa, of the short story collection, A Bird in the House, is more an effective narrative device than a memorable character.
Not only characters, but obsessive images familiar to Laurence's readers recur in The Diviners: the disemboweled gopher, which Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers, like Morag, saw as a child; the grotesquely fat woman imprisoned by her bulk
(Hagar, of course, Buckle's mother in The Fire-Dwellers, and now Prin) ; the burning shack that trapped Piquette Tonnerre and her children, which Laurence has described twice before; and the greatest catastrophe Manawaka ever experi enced, the departure of the Cameron Highlanders for Dieppe, mentioned in all
Laurence's Canadian fiction.
Laurence has been quoted as saying that she will
Margaret Laurence's Narratives
Barbara Hehner
ДН
LHE DIVINERS, Margaret Laurence's most recent novel, is overflowing with ideas about life, about life in Canada, and about life in Canada as experienced by a woman. Laurence has been quoted as saying, "Now the wheel seems to have come full circle — these five books [the Manawaka fiction] all interweave and fit together."
1
The extent to which The Diviners is made to interweave with the earlier books is, in fact, almost irritating. The Tonnerre family, members of which have appeared in The Stone Angel, The Fire Dwellers, and A Bird in the House, play a major, and thematically defensible, role in the present book. But why include Julie Kaslik (sister of Nick, Rachel's lover in A
Jest of God) and her husband Buckle Fennick (Mac's tormented friend in The
Fire-Dwellers), when our interest in them is derived from the earlier books, and not from anything they do in The Diviners? And it is a jolt to read that Stacey
Cameron and Vanessa MacLeod, Morag's contemporaries, play together, since they have not previously seemed to exist on the same imaginative plane: Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers is a fully realized fictional creation, while Vanessa, of the short story collection, A Bird in the House, is more an effective narrative device than a memorable character.
Not only characters, but obsessive images familiar to Laurence's readers recur in The Diviners: the disemboweled gopher, which Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers, like Morag, saw as a child; the grotesquely fat woman imprisoned by her bulk
(Hagar, of course, Buckle's mother in The Fire-Dwellers, and now Prin) ; the burning shack that trapped Piquette Tonnerre and her children, which Laurence has described twice before; and the greatest catastrophe Manawaka ever experi enced, the departure of the Cameron Highlanders for Dieppe, mentioned in all
Laurence's Canadian fiction.
Laurence has been quoted as saying that she will