My Five-Star Bookshelf, Part Fifteen

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

This extraordinary meta-fictional novel is one of my very favourite books ever. I adore this text! If I ever taught literature, I would teach this book; if I could think of a way to use it to teach either grammar or editing, I would teach this book. It is exquisite in its concept and execution, and I know I will read it again and again before I die.

The Diviners is the pinnacle text of Laurence's Manawaka books. It is the narrative of Morag Gunn, a writer who is attempting to tell an important story. When she is young, Morag is adopted and raised by parents scorned by the "good" people of Manawaka. She does, however, have a fleeting friendship with Jules Tonnerre, a Métis boy. As a young woman, Morag works as a local reporter; reporting on a fire drives her away from Manawaka and into university, where she falls in love with and eventually marries a professor. After several stultifying years as the wife of an academic, Morag leaves to follow her own art — and her own heart. This storyline is developed through extended flashbacks; in the present tense of the story, Morag is fighting with her own daughter, Piquette, who is becoming a young woman herself and wants to understand her family history. The resolution is not necessarily happy but represents the potential for new understanding, new beginnings.

There are so many issues in this novel: class and poverty, Canadian racism and biases, personal histories and mythologies, early feminism, an exploration of intellectualism, the artist's need for isolation and outsider status, the possibility of renewal... The writing is sharp and insightful, and the characters are rich and fascinating. The novel is also absolutely Canadian, rooted deeply in the land and place. This is literary writing at its best, inclusively so: it is high brow and conceptual while simultaneously critiquing these positions. Brilliant, just brilliant.

I cannot recommend this novel enough, yet I have met many people who haven't read it, people whose only exposure to Margaret Laurence is The Stone Angel (not one of my favourites but still a great book). The Diviners is also notorious in Canadian literature as a book that is routinely censored in Canadian high-school classrooms (especially in Ontario); as a result of its being censored, The Diviners is rumoured to be the reason Laurence stopped writing: it was her last novel. (The truth of this rumour is considerably more complicated, though, as biographies of Laurence have since revealed.)

If you want a book with the sweep of a family saga, the rough beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and a deeply personal revelation of various forms of freedom, The Diviners can't miss. I truly hope you will read and enjoy it.