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LEITERS IN CANADA 1972 We welcome to this issue of 'Letters in Canada' Professor Laurent Mailhot , who takes charge of the section entitled 'Thedtre,' and Professor Jacques Blais, who reviews works in the category 'Poesie,' succeeding Professor Jean-Louis Major, whose annual surveys have enhanced these pages for the past four years. Professor Donald V. Wade has found himself obliged, because of heavy university administrative duties, to withdraw as reviewer of religious books, and we are pleased that Professor W.G. Oxtoby has consented to replace him in this important and multi-faceted portfolio. Two other reviewers have left us after many years of distinguished service to 'Letters in Canada': Professor Robin S. Harris, in charge of 'Education,' and Mr Tony Emery, of 'Art.' Important books in these two areas will henceforth be reviewed individually in the 'Humanities ' section. (n.M.H.) FICTION The landscape of Canadian fiction is getting ampler and fuller. It is nO longer a question of searching out and cultivating a few home growths these become more abundant and almost luxuriant. If that quasi-canonical issue of our identity is a really hidden doubt about spiritual geography, then evidence is accumulating on that quickly: the past in historical reconstruction , variously apocalyptical hints of what is to happen or is happening , and much documentation at levels of imaginative apprehension from personal obsession to public advice. It may not all finally achieve that long desired trick of getting us up by our native bootstraps but it will not be for lack of contenders. For the interested reader there is comfort in having his own fictional world the rule, so that he can be free to make in it his own choice of exceptions and qualities. And with the safety of plenty, there can be the luxury of the larger view. This can emerge directly out of the fiction itself in the perspective of pattern and quest it offers as its true substance. And in some of the most striking novels of this past year this has been the ultimate burden, to reveal their own patterning as ground and extension. Robertson Davies's UTQ, Volume XLll, Number 4, Summer 1973 344 LETTERS IN CANADA The Manticore (Macmillan, 280, $7.95) carries over its first pattern from its temporal and thematic predecessor, fifth Business. It interlocks as another view taken of the destruction of the Canadian hero-tycoon whose death by drowning, pebble in mouth, brings on crisis for the narrators of each of the two novels. Up to the point of Boy Staunton's death and in its most immediate repercussions, we had the witness of 'the fifth business.' Here the scholar-hagiographer is replaced by the dead man's psychically crippled son, David. And we recapitulate and advance under the rubrics of a new set of myths appropriate to this particular defendant, pleading his own disease and its cures. He travels from the securities of his own landscape - the world he has manufactured through the forces of central Canadian status and the technolOgies of his legal craftsmanship - back into the removes of his mind. In the theatre of this mind, the scenario is deftly constructed for him by his Jungian analyst - at least to the point where his self-inllicted sense of Justice reveals its backside to him. Free of the personally obsessed past he can at last approach the nakedness of a larger myth. In a mountain cave the mechanics of a salvation worked out in the Swiss valley are mere prop and preparation. We come back to a hagiography at the end, then, but a far more ancient and terrifying ancestral one. The terror and loose bowels are all the more effective in their capping off and summing up what in many ways is a comic - if darkly so, full of trolls - history of David's life and his father's. The same involvement of wit and dark lIashes operates in the three short theatrical pieces of Davies's Hunting Stuart (New Press, 276, $8.95). There are in each of them central figures who cross the thin lines that supposedly keep history from encroachment upon by legend. The ultimate subsumption is myth when the figure...

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