Nessie School of Languages

 The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

    Margaret Laurence?s The Diviners has
been considered by a large number of outstanding reviewers to be a great
masterpiece. As a matter of fact, it is one of the most remarkable novels ever
published in Canada, which has already won its golden place in the still not
very well-known history of Canadian literature. One of the reasons why these
always demanding literary analysts might have written so warmly about this
book, falls on the Canadian author?s skill to create, as eminent writer and
Laurence?s close friend, Margaret Atwood, points out in the afterword of the
novel, an unpolemical believable heroine, Morag Gunn, who will lead the whole
story through her own feelings of solitude and everlasting sufferings.

     Morag Gunn has to fight her own way to get
her place in society. She has to engage in a fierce battle against depressing
loneliness and an oppressing wrong marriage, too. She is misunderstood from the
very beginning. Yet, as the story goes on, she starts thinking back about her
past. The older she gets, the more she experiences a tenacious need to write.
It seemed as if it were the only way she could liberate herself from an
authoritarian husband, who accepted neither her talent nor her literary
passion, which gave her a bigger sense of oppression. She is a very imaginative
woman, and this quality is definitely going to help her to reconstruct her past
life as she longs for freeing herself from its subjugation, so as to understand
it better and, finally, turn over a new leaf. She was forced to rebel then
against her past, in which she had never 
known the meaning of happiness. What?s more, she decided that everybody
who had been near her since her sad childhood was to blame: her parents who had
died when she was five, her peculiar stepfather, her repressive husband, and
even her unreliable lover, none of whom 
had managed to give her a little happiness. Luckily, at the end, she can
achieve her own personal freedom, which is obviously the most precious treasure
for any human being.

    Laurence deals deeply with the
controversial relationship between love and solitude. Morag did need to be
alone to discover herself (we daresay, to be herself), but at the same time she
would have longed for having a bit of comprehension and love. It goes without
saying, that the writer?s style is very rich, since she combines brilliantly
some visionary conversations, the use of idioms and slangs, a great deal of
personal memories, and quite a few philosophical meditations. And as reviewer
Jeffrey Canton[1] states: ?The novel also incorporates the themes that
mattered most to her: racial and gender equality, the validity of the Canadian
literary experience and the importance of artistic expression in society?.
The fact that Morag Gunn?s fight against loneliness seems similar to the
writer?s own struggles in life, according to her biography and to the writer?s
own words[2], should be taken into
account, as it has influenced strongly the development of the story, and it
doubtlessly makes it seem more real.

MAIN ISSUE:
LONELINESS

    When the reader gets in touch with the
protagonist, heroine Morag Gunn, she is a 48-year-old writer, who lives on a
farm in an isolated Canadian prairie town, far away from everywhere. She is
already middle aged, she hasn?t still found her right place in life, though.
Actually, she is an independent woman, whose main aim is to find love, as the
lack of which has made her feel lonely and depressed for years. She has tried
several relations, but all of them have failed. It?s worth mentioning  that this loneliness of hers will eventually
become the key to overcome both all the arduous situations and her distressing
broken love affairs. This assertion may seem a bit disturbing though, since we
wonder: how can  loneliness and reclusion
help anybody? We hope we have found the right answer.

    Let?s take for granted that her aloneness
started from the very moment she was born, because living in a small place gave
her a strong sensation of imprisonment. To make matters worse, her parents died
when she was only 5 years old. The lost of her progenitors, which is obviously
painful for any child, will mean for her the beginning of a long personal path
full of sadness and emptiness. Almost without time of thinking, she had to
adapt to a new life style with her new stepparents, which was not easy at all,
as her stepfather was an eccentric man and his wife was very strange and never
wanted to leave the house. The resulting lonesome childhood of hers provided
her with a feeling of total incomprehension, and dramatically forced an endless
trip looking for something unknown for her, called love. She unceasingly felt
she was being kept apart from the open world, which she didn?t seem to belong
to. She also grew up with the feeling of not having anybody to rely on. She
even thought that the world didn?t want her, that?s why she had to start
fighting  against it with all her
strength.

    She got married to a man who managed to
live detached from social codes and conventions. It may have been a way of
starting again, but it didn?t work either. The end of her marriage, not so long
after, left her, once again, discouraged and cheerless. She badly needed to
find the key to a better future, which allowed her to bury old clouds. Her main
difficulty had always been understanding people?s behaviour, as she felt she
belonged to nobody and to nowhere. It goes without saying that it?s always hard
to understand others but some people find it even more difficult to be
understood. And that is sometimes impossible to bear, at least it was almost
unbearable to our heroine. Not even did her lover, Jules Tonnerre, understand
her a bit, and their constant quarrels let her always depressed, as we will see
in the next paragraph[3], in which she
shows she did need him but, at the same time, could no longer put up with the
situation:

    Morag
and Jules have another scotch. she reaches her hand across the table and puts
it very lightly on his hand. He does not move. He neither withdraws nor
responds. she does not know, herself, why she has done this. she is not making
a play. She wants only to touch him,
someone from a long long way back, someone related to her in ways she cannot
define and feels no need of defining.

     She was wondering what to do next. And the
crucial moment comes, when she did recognize what she needed most was to be
alone. This time, surprisingly, the feeling of solitude was going to help her,
as she longed for it  as much as for the
love of her closest relatives. Thus, in time, the aloneness that had saddened
her for years becomes something dear. She does devote completely to writing,
which is undoubtedly a good way of being alone. She creates her own fictional
world, which lets her be happy for a while. All in a sudden, the combination of
writing and solitude becomes the medicine she had been longing for.

    Again and again, she had been forced to
test her strength against the tormenting world, and finally she achieves the
kind of life she was always determined to get, that?s why she is considered by
some reviewers[4] as a symbol of
courage and endurance. Furthermore, she succeeds with her final decision to go
back to the countryside, to rural Canada, where she will soon have to face a
new challenge: helping and understanding 
the daughter, she had had with her lover, who she had always loved so
much, and let her have her own life. In a way, it seemed as though history was
going to repeat itself.  She starts and
finishes feeling alone, even though this final sensation of loneliness is pretty
different from the one she suffered during almost all her life. Loneliness had
become an important part of herself, and it seemed to have the key to the door
of happiness.

3

MY REVIEW

    I would like to start my personal review
with quite a proper statement, which an anonymous careful reader wrote about
this highly successful novel in a literary website[5]: ?If you grew up with your mother and a
distant father, then this book is an absolute must?. The Diviners deals mainly with the dilemma of
solitude. It shows us how easy it is to feel alone and how difficult social
relationships can become, specially for women. Above all, the main problem
falls on accepting who you are, in order to be strong enough to lead your own
way in life. In my view, it is a novel that wants to show us that everybody has
to admit its own past, if we do want to experience a happy present. It does
give life to characters which are complex and interesting, who appear so
lifelike, as their own lives take unexpected twists and turns, that they build
a realistic and captivating story.

    This epic novel is definitely an
autobiography. Margaret Laurence uses lots of idioms and slangs, and she
addresses particularly to the young, the female and the Canadian. It is telling
us that women are asking for a different place in society, and that there?s
little left from those pioneer females, whose lives were empty and entirely devoted
to either their husband?s or male relatives? wishes. As another female reader
from Canada, who comments Laurence?s women characters, states: ?I loved the way she chose women who were
unlike each other, but all of whom had contact with each other in some way. One
was a main character in one book and a minor character in another book?.

    As far as heroine Morag is concerned, she
was created as a mirror, where everybody could see reflected all the hardships
the women of the pioneer age had to suffer. Morag Gunn seems not to have any
birthrights. Thus, she spends most part of her troublesome life trying to find
her own identity. If we want to be poetic, we?ve read that she searched in the
river of history which was always dangerously moving, because identity is both
present and past. If she succeeded, all the Canadian women could do, as
well.  

    Just to finish with this short review, I
must say this is the first time[6] I get in contact
with a book written by a Canadian writer and, indeed, the experience has been
worth. This time I had to read this book because it was a compulsory reading
for a university subject.  I am keen on
saying that I am interested in this kind of literature, which shows a strong
regional flavour. I hope there will be a time when Canadian writers won?t have
to struggle their own way to be recognized in the always demanding literary
world.

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