Voices in Time (Hugh MacLeenan)

First of all, I really love this edition of Voices in Time. I'm glad that I was able to order not only this book, but two more of Hugh MacLennan's novels in these editions. Secondly, I loved the book.

Based on the reviews that I've read, and on the Introduction to this edition, Voices in Time is considered, by many, as MacLennan's worst novel. At the time of its publication in 1980, it was not well received.

As Micheal Gnarowski writes in the Introduction, "a major shift was taking place in Canadian writing and Voices in Time would be its victim in public and critical perception. No longer were conflicts of ideology, the growing pains of nationhood, or the tensions between founding races and founding cultures of prime importance or concern" (xxx).

If Voices in Time had been published ten years earlier, then perhaps the novel could have been a success.  I  consider it a modernist work published too long after Canadian modernist literature had faded in popularity. 

Voices in Time is a novel about history, and about trying to make sense of not only the First and Second World Wars, but also the October Crisis of 1970. It is also a novel about the uncertainty of the future, the dangers of an overly bureaucratic state, as well as the dangers of disorder. MacLennan presents a binary of order and disorder within the state, which he never reconciles. Perhaps this is partly why I find the novel so compelling. He leaves the reader to decide which ideology is the correct one. 

Set in Canada in 2030, the novel opens with John WellFleet, one of the last remaining people to remember what life and civilization was like before the Great Fear, the term used to describe the destruction of civilization and of all the major cities by bombs. History has been suppressed in order to protect the people and ensure order, but John is forced to explore his past and the past of his family members when a young man uncovers some metal boxes with papers and videos tapes from the wreckage of an old apartment building. As John reconstructs the past, he shares with the reader the stories of Conrad Dehmel, a German during the Second World War, and Timothy, a TV host in 1970 during the October Crisis. 

Although the futuristic setting is not typical of Canadian literature, or of Hugh MacLennan's other works, Voices in Time is a masterpiece. It moved me almost as much as his most famous novel Two Solitudes did the first time I read it. The prose, like in all of MacLennan's writing, is beautiful. It spoke to me. I found myself underlining phrases here and there that I felt embodied truths and questions I have about today's world. Voices in Time embodies the uncertainties of yesterday, but also the uncertainties of today. It's also a tragic love story, which makes it doubly hard hitting.