Fiction

298 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY II. FICTION J. R. MAcGrLLIVRAY Canadian fiction in 1941 was not remarkably different from the work of other years which has been examined in these surveys. There were two first novels of distinction, better in several ways than the books of more practised writers; but even these gratifying signs of new imaginative life have appeared with almost every springtime, yet the field of Canadian fiction has remained a region of great theoretical richness with only a few corners cultivated. There has been a new chapter added to the vast novel of Jalna by Miss de la Roche, more historical fiction about French Canada, assorted romances designed for the len-ding-libraries, and the usual crop of detective stories, frontier tales, and books for children. The number of works published and the distribution among types has been about the same as in the past, though this has been an off-year for our national favourite, heroic tales of the R.C.M.P. It is pleasant to observe, however, that the two first ·novels, Barometer Rising, by Hugh MacLennan, and As for Me and My House, by Sinclair Ross, reveal a fresh and critical interest in Canadian society, which has not been common in the past. These younger writers give us further reason to hope (we already have the work of Mr Callaghan and others) that the .. long-prevailing romantic idyllicism of our fiction may at last be giving way to a more general awareness of the imaginative .possibilities of the immediate and the actual. Novelists in other countries have been aware of these possibilities for rather a long time. Barometer Rising is a novel of Halifax at the time of the disaster in 1917. The principal time-sequence extends over little more than a week. Within these narrow limits the author has worked out his fictional pattern, and has given us a convincing and lively picture of Halifax both in her ordinary war-time functioning as the eastern wharf of Canada and in her terrible experience of December 6} 1917, when the explosion of the munition ~hip Mont Blanc almost blew the whole city off the map. The fictional pattern is simple but not very exciting, partly because it depends entirely upon a remote and doubtful event of the past. Neil Macrae, long missing in France and presumed dead, returns to Halifax shabby and shell-shocked to dear his name from vague slanders of disobedience and cowe1rdice under fire, circulated by . his uncle, foster-father, and former regimental superior, Colonel LETTERS IN CANADA: 1941 299 Wain. The colonel's version of the affair is that his nephew disobeyed orders at a critical moment in an attack, ruined the operation and his uncle's military career, and escaped court-martial only by his presumed death. The other account is that the orders were silly and self-contradictory, and could not have been carried out by anyone. Around these two persons and their quarrel the characters of the novel are disposed. There is the solid, prosperous, and not unpleasant family of the Wains in all its ramifications, .a little too solid, however, for Penelope \Vain who had been in love with her cousin Neil, and had borne him a child of whose existence neither he nor the Wains had been told. There is also Dr Angus Murray, formerly of Colonel Wain's regiment, another shabby outcast, trying manfully to deaden his sharp distaste for war, army officers and Halifax society, with whiskey, but recovering 'Other ambitions when there is a chance to help Neil, like himself, a son of Cape Breton. He acts as ·investigator and counsel for the defence, prepares his evidence, and is about to settle the score with the colonel when the Mont Blanc blows up, shattering the city, and hoisting most of the plot higher than the ship's anchor. When I first heard of this book I wondered how a novelist could possibly lead up to an explosion so unexpected and catastrophic as this. The answer is, of course, that Mr MacLennan does not lead up to it, but uses it magnificently as an ending when it does occur. In fact...