The Precipice (Hugh MacLennan)

If you've never read a Hugh MacLennan book, please do so now. Go out and buy this book or Two Solitudes, or Barometer Rising, or any of his novels. Even if you've never heard of MacLennan until now, don't put it off any longer. Today it occurred to me, as I closed the back cover of The Precipice, his third novel, that Hugh MacLennan is, without a doubt, my favourite author. 

The Precipice is a love story set during the Second World War. Lucy is Canadian from small-town Ontario, a setting that I am very familiar with as I've spent my entire life gazing out over Ontario cornfields and forests, and the Great Lakes are the closet I've ever come to the ocean. Steven enters Lucy's life when he, an American, comes to oversee bureaucratic changes to a porcelain bathroom fixture manufacturer that has been bought out by an American company. Lucy, who lives alone with her two sisters, soon finds herself falling in love with Steven. The novel follows her through the wartime years of her marriage. 

While the plot of this novel sounds like that of countless other novels of the era,  it's not. It is a novel about rejecting Canada and then returning. It's about the ups and downs of making a marriage last and about the differences between the two countries on either side of the 49 parallel. It's about coming to terms with the war, and with progress (which is portrayed as an American fixation), which has come to, as the novel illustrates, a precipice. 

One of the most poignant passages in this novel appears near the end. "Each day for years," writes MacLennan, "they measured out the distance they'd advanced.They were trained to believe there was nothing any of them had to do but keep on travelling in the same way. And then suddenly they were brought up short at the edge of a precipice which hadn't been marked on the map. There they were with all their vehicles and equipment, jostling and piling up on the front rank. For of course the ones behind didn't know the precipice was there and couldn't understand why the one's up front had stopped advancing. The pressure from behind kept increasing on the front ranks and they were all shouting so loudly nobody could hear anything"(336). This criticism of progress seems to be a theme of more than one of MacLennan's novels. In this novel, the theme is key to understanding everything. 

Although Elspeth Cameron, in the introduction to my edition, dishes out much criticism against this novel, charging that MacLennan "fumbles awkwardly and inconsistently to make sense of the human condition," and  MacLennan himself had his doubts about the quality of this novel, I love it.