Rachel teaches school in her hometown and goes home every night to her mother's house. She has only a few friends and rarely goes out. But one summer she has an experience at a church, and then an affair with an old classmate which challenge her to question her life. ( )

Entertaining!: After reading "The Diviners" by Margaret Laurence, I found "A Jest of God" more entertaining and true-to-life. The female protagonist Rachel was more believable and down to earth. The plot of homosexuality was realistic and daring.

Rachel Cameron is trapped. At 34, she lives with her widowed mother in the Manitoba town of Manawaka, in the same house in which she was raised. She has never married, she has never had a sexual experience, and she has never really opened up to another human being. Rachel's mother controls Rachel with disapproval veiled as love, and Rachel's most constant refrain is "I'm sorry." During the day, Rachel teaches grade two, and is probably more attached to her students than is healthy.

Laurence wrote a series of books set in Manawaka, each dealing with different characters. Her most famous book is probably The Stone Angel, which I read when I was in my last year of high school - and hated. To be fair, I was 18, and The Stone Angel is about a woman in her 80s, so identification with the main character was minimal. I also think that I had not yet learned to appreciate Laurence's style.

A Jest of God is not an epic, but a small, quiet book. The reader is pulled into Rachel's everyday life, and experieces her frustration. To break up the monotony of her life, Rachel begins to date Nick, a man who grew up on the opposite end of Manawaka. Finally Rachel experiences an adult relationship, and learns to open herself to another person. Her growth as a character is the focus of A Jest of God, and as the book is told in first-person, the reader gets a very believable account of a woman's emotional journey.

I found this book in a used bookstore for $1, and it has sat on my shelves for over a year. It has succeeded it changing my opinion of Laurence, and I will certainly seek out more of her works in the future. As for The Stone Angel, well, it just might warrant a reread - something I never thought I would do! ( )

Excruciating. This novel is narrated by repressed thirty-something schoolteacher Rachel, living in Manawaka with her ailing, manipulative mother. Rachel is the first-person "unreliable narrator" in similar vein to the narrator of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Hopelessly shy and self-obsessed, Rachel is still a virgin, dreaming of love and cursing her mother's constant harping on "what other people will think", even though she herself is haunted by exactly the same concerns. When she meets Nick, it's clear to the reader, but unfortunately not to Rachel, what he's up to, and the outcome is inevitable. But Rachel does grow and learns by the end of the novel, and sets out on a new journey -- though I for one was not convinced she had really broken free from her old ways.

The novel was originally titled A Jest of God, and was filmed by Paul Newman as Rachel, Rachel (with Joanne Woodward in the title role). Surely Laurence must have been infuriated by the tacky cover and blurb of the (bookmooched) film tie-in paperback edition that I read. If I'd been reading it in public, I'd have felt obliged to wrap it in brown paper. "The powerful novel of a woman enmeshed in dangerous passion" it claims. "Rachel had waited a long time for love ... In the midst of a long hot summer she met Nick. He sensed her desperation -- and the sensuality that pulsed through her..." Aargh. This doesn't remotely reflect the subtlety and psychological anguish of the book.

Though some of the period details in A Jest Of God seem hopelessly dated, its endearing heroine transcends time and place. At 34, dutiful schoolteacher Rachel Cameron slowly and belatedly develops an awareness of her own power, sexuality and worth. Laurence skillfully explores this deeply personal journey that many women, and more than a few men, will recognise and enjoy. ( )