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Hugh MacLennan 21 For in many ways MacLennan's "old­fashioned" novels are fighting the theological battles of the nineteenth century. His heroes repudiate the doctrines of Calvinism but cannot free themselves from its psychological legacy of guilt; they deny the reality of God in the world, and then desperately search for alternative "religions" to console their emptiness and anxiety. But all humanist solutions — social, political, materialistic, even personal relationships — ultimately fail them and they must eventually find a spiritual Absolute to give their lives meaning and purpose. This general pattern is developed in progressive stages — and growing disillusionment — through MacLennan's seven published novels. 2. Barometer Rising After two amateurish and unpublished novels, "So All Their Praises" and "A Man Should Rejoice," MacLennan abandoned international settings to accept his wife's advice to write about his homeland. Recalling Barometer Rising, MacLennan explained what his philosophy as a rare Canadian novelist had to be in 1939: [I]t seemed to me that for some years to come the Canadian novelist would have to pay a great deal of attention to the background in which he set his stories. He must describe, and if necessary define, the social values which dominate the Canadian scene, and do so in such a way as to make them appear interesting and important to foreigners. Whether he liked it or not,he must for a time be something of a geographer, an historian and a sociologist, to weave a certain amount of geography, history and sociology into his novels. Unless he did this his stories would be set in a vacuum. He could not, as British and American writers do, take his background values for granted, for the simple reason that the reading public had no notion what they were. He must therefore do more than write dramas, he must also design and equipthe stage on which they were to be played. (7T52) As Elspeth Cameron points out, the key phrase is "whether he liked it or not," but MacLennan "made a virtue of necessity" and became a "nationalist" author (Life 148). BarometerRising (1941), therefore, is more than a wartime love story; it is an exemplum of Canada's maturation as a country during World War I and a prophecy of her future as the keystone in a great North Atlantic arch uniting the best of the old and new worlds, Britain and the United States. Unfortunately,the didactic content of the stage directions often threatens to destroy the drama of this thinly­veiled "national allegory" (Woodcock, Introducing 87). The hero, Neil Macrae, represents a young Canada, betrayed by colonial powers in a destructive war, but returning home to establish his honour and independence as a leader in the new world order. Wounded, victimized, and humiliated by "the old men who were content to let it [Canada] continue 22 Faith and Fiction second­rate indefinitely, looting its wealth while they talked about its infinite opportunities" (BR 323), Neil, in returning to Canada, is "identifying himself with the still­hidden forces which were doomed to shape humanity" in the future (BR 324). In a nationalistic outpouring, "modelled on John of Gaunt's patriotic speech from Richard II" (E. Cameron, Life 144), Neil celebrates post­ colonial Canada: [T]his anomalous land, this sprawling waste of timber and rock and water where the only living sounds were the footfalls of animals or the fantastic laughter of a loon, this empty tract of primordial silences and winds and erosions and shifting colours, this bead­like string of crude towns and cities tied by nothing but railway tracks, this nation undiscovered by the rest of the world and unknown to itself, these people neither American nor English, nor even sure what they wanted to be, this unborn mightiness, this question­ mark, this future for himself, and for God knew how many millions of mankind! (BR 120) Militantly opposed to him is his uncle Geoffrey Wain, "the descendent of military colonists who had remained essentially a colonist himself, never really believing that anything above the second rate could exist in Canada, a man who had not thought it necessary to lick the boots of the English but had merely taken it for granted that they mattered and Canadians didn't" (BR 310). Significantly, the Wain family is also a leading representative of Canadian Calvinism. Respectable churchgoers, snobbish and materialistic, they are symbolized by their "ancestral establishment" which "patterned most of them and held them down" and represents "an incubus" to the...

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