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Letters in Canada 1974 FICTION A multitude of fiction is now with us each year. To talk of surfeit would be ungrateful, short-memoried, and, a worse anxietyI perhaps premature. There is not yet any real risk of drowning out the unusual voice or the striking perception, for the crowds around such rarer phenomena are at most a hum of numbers and, with a lucky chance, a useful frame and ground both. It is curious, though, how each year's crop of books runs to families or groups. Last year there was a substantial number of encounters with historical and psychic trauma cast into the shape of a regret for a vanished and increasingly inaccessible, perhaps unachieved, past. The extinction of the Beothuks in Newfoundland, the suppression of the West after Riel - this suggests at least the sweep of the preoccupation. This year the past reached for seems more largely personal. Though first novels must surface constantly, they do so in surprisingly higher proportion just now. Similarly with landscape: regional fiction is seldom absent, but in such large numbers, to have so many idylls, from the sentimental all the way to the gothic fantasy, points to something of a consensus, coincidental for the individual but a family of likeness in the result. The first grouping offered, however, to back off from the favour of critical generalities, is more by way of a personal one, though grounded on the signal distinction of the books in question. Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (McClelland and Stewart, 382, $8.95) provides a substantial shift in the positioning and in the movement of major figures as against the line of exploration developed out of the The Stone Angel on. The sense of an abiding prairie rootedness, which persisted even in the lushness of a British Columbia forest, is honed out. The choice of a fully articulated creative protagonist in Morag Gunn permits the kind of sharpness of percipience to which previous Laurence heroines had no proper claim. There is a sophistication of emotional responsiveness here, too, that not even Hagar Shipley could assert: her angel had blind, staring eyes of stone. But there is also a price for the intellectual power of the central consciousness - something akin to burning out those about her, perhaps consuming herself too much as well. Adele Wiseman's heroine in The Crackpot (McClelland and Stewart, 300, $10.00) is almost the polar remove from the self-scrutiny of a Morag. As in her previous novel, The FICTION 305 Sacrifice, the tissue is that of myth, though cast here in the gentler form of Hoda's enduring innocence, never quite the simple-mindedness it hovers near. Abraham fell into a tragic recapitulation of his biblical role, thus the horror of his 'sacrifice': Hoda also recapitulates, in her case the bizarre marriage of her blind and crippled parents. The result is a strange triumph the reader can subscribe to and set against the downturn of the generations surrounding it pervasively. Alice Munro's Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (McGrawHill Ryerson, 246, $7.95) is not the continuous narrative of a novel. But the collection of stories achieves a coherent unity through the impress of the sensibility communicated through the individual narratives. The imaginative territory of Munro's previous stories is made a passage into urban encounters. There is a corresponding broadening range of situations , emotional and psychic, accepted for scrutiny and assessment. Each is tested in clear terms and yet with a sense of the field in which they must occur, so that none is ever simply transfixed or labelled. The title of the collection, and of the lead-in story to it, is symptomatic of the impulse working through many of the protagonists as they explore their accumulated memories. But the resolutions are not ever quite so assertively easy, whether to express or apprehend. The forces of Clark Blaise's title to his collection - Triballustice (Doubleday, 224, $6.95) - is similarly resonant. Narrators shift and vary in identity, as they do in Munro, but the constancy, the family ghost, runs through them all - the outcast from the tribe who must search out the varieties of justice available or...

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