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RIVER OF NOW AND THEN: MARGARET LAURENCE'S THE DIVINERS
Susan J. Warwick
Reviewed by Alan Thomas
Volume 22 Number 4
Another attractively designed and written monograph in the ECW Press series, this guide takes on one of the most celebrated works in recent Canadian fiction. Students of all ages have clasped The Diviners (and a predecessor, The Stone Angel) to them as if scripture. Morag Gunn's search for her identity speaks particularly to the young, the female and the Canadian, but it has evidently been recognized as their own story by many other readers. Symbolically, the water for which the diviners search is the river of history, always dangerously in movement, yet once entered always there as an expression of identity through past and present, a river that flows both ways. The loose, wide quality of the novel has brought it some denigration but this is an effect of a method which exploits memory. Susan Warwick is alert to such questions of style, structure and narrative method. The compass of the study obliges her to narrow her discussion of criticism into brief summary, but throughout her own critique she recognizes the achieved high quality of the novel. She serves particularly well, in a short history of the Métis, the political side of a work which registers the natural alliance of women, as Laurence sees them, with more marginalized figures of Canadian society. Students will find this slim book a firm support in articulating ideas. Alan Thomas teaches literature at Scarborough College, University of Toronto, in Toronto, Ontario
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