This is really more like 3.5 stars for me, but I suppose it does belong a notch above my other 3 star ratings, so it will have to be a 4. After reading and loving The Stone Angel, I decided to try and read all of the Manawaka Series of books and, although The Diviners is the last in the series, it was the next I was able to get, so it was the next I read. I think that it is mainly in comparison to The Stone Angel that this book left me a little cold.
I've been trying to figure out why I wasn't as impressed by this book, especially since it has a feeling of the epic, of a long and complicated journey, and I think in the end my complaint is that I didn't connect to the narrative on a personal or deeper level. This is especially odd since the character of Morag Gunn is a novelist and spends time explaining the complicated craft of writing literature, of trying to write a story on more than one level, so there must be something here I'm just not getting, because I'm certain the author took pains to put it in. I don't know much of Margaret Laurence's personal history, but even the author blurb shows that she has inserted much of her personal history into the character of Morag: born in a prairie town; orphaned young; wrote for the local newspaper; escaped to the University of Winnipeg; got married; moved away (Morag to Toronto, Laurence to Africa); got divorced; moved to the west coast; finally settled on a small farm in rural Ontario; enjoying success as an author along the way. Every time Morag mirrored what I knew about Margaret Laurence's history, I felt a bit taken out of the story, as though I had seen a little flag that said: these parts are true.
As writing a novel is a bit of alchemy I don't really understand, I liked these self-reflective bits on the process:
I used to think that words could do anything. Magic. Sorcery. Even miracle. But no, only occasionally.
And:
Probably no one could catch the river's colour, even with paints, much less words. A daft profession. Wordsmith. Liar, more likely. Weaving fabrications. Yet, with typical ambiguity, convinced that fiction was truer than fact. Or that fact was in fact fiction.
I also liked the introspective bits about who we are and what little we show of our true selves. It's true that we can no more imagine, or really want to know, the inner-workings of anyone else's mind, any more than we can help being shocked by seeing a teacher at the grocery store when we're little kids:
Whatever is happening to Pique is not what I think is happening, whatever that may be. What happened to me wasn't what anyone else thought was happening, and maybe not even what I thought was happening at the time. A popular misconception is that we can't change the past - everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.And:
The hurts unwittingly inflicted upon Pique by her mother, by circumstances - Morag had agonised over these often enough, almost as though, if she imagined them sufficiently, they would prove to have been unreal after all. But they were not unreal. Yet Pique was not assigning any blame - that was not what it was all about. And Pique's journey, although at this point it may feel to her unique, was not unique. Morag reached out and took Pique's hand, holding it lightly.
And I like this bit because not only did I also for some reason switch from calling my mother "Mum" to "Ma" when I was teen, but so has one of my own girls. Like my own Ma, I find it more amusing than distancing:
This Ma bit is new. It is as though Pique, at fifteen, has now decided that Mum sounds too childish and Mother possibly, too formal. The word in some way is a proclamation of independence, a statement of the fact that the distance between them, in terms of equality, is diminishing, and the relationship must soon become that of two adults. On balance, Morag is glad. But it will take some inner adjustment.
I liked the bits where Margaret Laurence references Susannah Moodie and Roughing It In The Bush because it's good to get the references. I still don't know if it makes me want to read the books of Moodie's sister, Catherine Parr Traill, though.
I appreciated how The Diviners took ideas from The Stone Angel full circle-- especially how it was discovered that the plaid pin from John Shipley was traded to Lazarus Tonnerre for a knife, then traded to Christie Logan for a pack of cigarettes, the knife given to Morag. Knowing that Pique would eventually be in possession of both the pin and the knife closes the circle on all of the families, uniting the Scots with the Métis and mocking the last of the small town's prejudices. I can also imagine how brave it was for Laurence to write about a strong woman who decided to have a baby without a husband, at a time when even the maternity nurses in the hospital told her she was lucky to be allowed to have her baby there. I understand Margaret Laurence received death threats over this fact and I salute her grit and honesty for writing it. Perhaps it was the experience of watching someone fighting a battle long won that prevented me from becoming fully invested. Perhaps, like old Royland, I had simply lost the powers to divine on this one.
