The Diviners

It is the source of some astonishment to me that Margaret Laurence, one of the finest and best-regarded authors of post-war Canada, remains relatively unknown to the UK reading public. The Apollo imprint is therefore doing a great service in republishing her ‘Manawaka’ loose series of books, written in England in the 1960s and early '70s.Manawaka recalls for Laurence the small prairie town in Manitoba of her upbringing. She lost her parents early and was brought up, problematically, by relatives. Laurence’s female protagonists are either trying to put distance between themselves and suburban life, or struggling with whether to go back. In the first, ‘Stone Angel’, the adamantine but elderly Hagar, confused and nearing her end, rages at the world even as she questions her own life-changing decisions. In ‘A Jest of God’, mousy teacher Rachel, assailed by “the daft sting of imagined embarrassments” and guilt-tripped by her manipulative, dependent mother, at last finds a way to come to terms with herself and her future place in the world. ‘The Fire-Dwellers’ introduces us to Rachel’s sister Stacey who, having managed to escape Manawaka and have a family, mines her supposed failings in her duties as wife and mother while aching for a bit of personal freedom and understanding at home. Late in her life, their school friend Vanessa lays out for us in ‘Bird in the House’ her home life as a girl growing into a young woman.In the final novel, ‘The Diviners’, Morag (another former classmate) grows up with kind-but-poor step-parents before fleeing Manawaka with her English professor. Years later, still in her forties (as Laurence was at the time of writing) and now a divorced writer with a teenage daughter, she spools back in filmic clips that show how her life has panned out. To my mind the book is a bit baggy, perhaps with some coarsening of tone to it, but still full of vitality and emotional honesty. By the end Laurence felt she’d said what she needed to, and wrote no further adult fiction.To Laurence’s detractors, primarily traditionalist Christians scandalised by her protagonists, her books were pornographic. This was especially the case with ‘The Diviners’ and, even though common sense and literary quality prevailed – the book won major awards – the criticism caused Laurence tremendous hurt. Now, two or three generations on, we can say that the Manawaka novels display a sensibility that feels up-to-date and relevant to our still-new century; nothing fusty here. Laurence writes sex well and the natural world even better. The books investigate love and marriage, parenthood and womanhood, ethnicity and colonialism, what freedom can or should look like for women, and what ‘home’ really means.If you read James King’s biography of Laurence, you can see how the series becomes increasingly shot through with aspects of her life. Morag is not Margaret of course, but their common history pokes through the narrative at regular intervals. In ‘The Diviners’, for instance, here’s a younger character talking of the idea of going ‘home’, followed by Morag’s response: “Maybe I’m afraid to go back, even if it’s not to the exact same place. I really hated the prairies when I lit out.” “I know. So did I. I felt that way about the town where I grew up. Then I found the whole town was inside my head, for as long as I live.”I have reviewed ‘The Fire-Dwellers’ (and King’s biography and ‘This Side Jordan’) separately. I recommend reading the Manawaka books in publication order; something you’ll notice is how successive protagonists slowly unbend, become a little more forgiving of themselves. Read ‘The Diviners’ last; for me it’s a four-star book, but taken as a whole Margaret Laurence’s oeuvre gets the full five.