The Diviners

It caused a fair amount of controversy upon its initial release due to language and frank depictions of a woman actually enjoying sex, but Margaret Laurence's novel stands as one of modern Canadian literature's seminal works. Author Morag Gunn looks back on her life thus far and in so doing Laurence explores the ways we recall, and occaionally twist, our past; the myriad ways the new generation follows in the footsteps of the old (Gunn's daughter truly is a chip of the old block); and the evolution of the artist through adversity. She also touches on issues of racism, classism, and the small town "values" which stifle more than liberate. Laurence takes Thomas Wolfe's epitaph, "You can't go home again" and gives it new meaning for as her show more protagonist ruminates on the past you realize that she has in fact been taking her home with her wherever she goes. show less

The Diviners is the last novel in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, set in and around a fictional Canadian town. All four novels feature strong, smart female protagonists, chafing under the constraints society places on them (circa 1970 and earlier). In this novel, Morag Gunn is a 47-year-old writer with a young adult daughter, Pique, who recently set off to make her way across Canada on her own. While Morag frets about Pique’s welfare while trying to get work done, she also reflects on her past through a series of “snapshot” and “memorybank movie” flashbacks.

Morag’s parents died when she was very young, and she was taken in by Christie Logan and his wife, Prin. They treated Morag as their own child; it was a loving show more home environment if a somewhat impoverished one. Christie was the town scavenger / garbage collector, and the family’s socioeconomic status led to Morag being somewhat of an outsider among her classmates. Morag befriended Jules Tonnerre, who was also an outcast due to his Métis heritage (a mix of indigenous people and European settlers). Eventually Morag, suffocating in the small town environment, left for university, married, and published her first novel, but the bond between Morag and Jules remained strong. The plot threads come together beautifully as the narrative of the past catches up to the present.

I loved everything about this novel. The characters are beautifully drawn; I felt I knew Morag and was moved by her relationships with Pique, Jules, and Christie, especially during pivotal events in their lives. Laurence connects this novel to the previous books in the Manawaka cycle through references to characters or events, and while it’s not essential to read the earlier novels first, doing so enhances the reading experience. Near the end of The Diviners, Laurence makes a powerful emotional connection back to The Stone Angel’s Hagar Shipley that was absolutely perfect, and that’s when I knew for sure I was reading a 5-star book.

Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka novels are true classics -- highly recommended. show less

[The Diviners] is the story of Margaret Gunn who grows up in a small town on the Canada prairie, raised by friends of her father after her parents die when she is five. The people who raise her are Christie and Prin. Christie is the town scavenger, i.e. garbage man, and is looked down upon. He is also deeply scarred from his WWI experience. Prin is eating herself into an early grave. The town in small in thinking and backwards until you get to know the characters. Morag, though, must escape and finds her way through the world as a writer. Before she leaves, she meets Jules Tonnerre, a mixed race boy, who she falls in love with. He will come and go in her life throughout the novel. Morag later has a child, Pique, and their travels and show more relationship form another portion of the book.

This book isn't linear. It's told through a series of brief flashbacks labeled "memorybank movies" in the text. It's an exploration of memory as well as life through Morag's experience. Somehow it all flows together perfectly, though, and you barely realize the different shifts in time - they just work. I really, really loved this book. The characters were so alive to me and I did not want the book to end. I read another of Laurence's books, [The Stone Angel], recently and it was also excellent. This, though, was more complex and I felt a bit more maturely written. I highly recommend reading some [[Margaret Laurence]]. show less

In Margaret Laurence’s final novel most of her characters are searching; searchers for home, family or creativity, water or scavenging in town dumps. The Diviners; the final novel in Laurence’s Manawaka sequence (though I still have to read number three and the collection of stories) is though a novel of outsiders.

At about 400 pages, I thought twice about reading this, as I am trying not to pick anything too big as I race toward the end of my A Century of Books. I had wanted to read this so long, I decided it didn’t really matter – I should read what I wanted to. So very glad I did, I loved every bit of this novel, not a fast read, but a thoroughly absorbing one, beautifully written it proved a real treat spending time with this show more book. An epic novel, which is already considered a classic of Canadian literature. Strangely, the novel has also been banned several times by school boards for blasphemy. I find that absurd.

Manawaka is the fictional prairie town that first appeared in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. The Diviners is the story of Morag Gunn, a fiercely independent writer, her difficult relationships with her Métis lover Jules Tonnerre, and her daughter Pique. As we first meet Morag, she is a forty-seven-year old woman, living near a river. Her eighteen-year-old daughter has gone away for a while and she is worrying about her, watching the river – trying to get her mind back to her work. Here, Morag is alone but has friends close by – neighbours who pop in frequently. Old Royland, the water diviner is one.

“No boats today. Yes, one. Royland was out, fishing for muskie, seventy-four years old this year, Royland. Eyesight terrible, but he was too stubborn to wear glasses. A marvel that he could go on working. Of course, his work did not depend upon eyesight. Some other kind of sight. A water diviner. Morag always felt she was about to learn something of great significance from him, something which would explain everything. But things remained mysterious, his work, her own, the generations, the river.”

The story moves back and forth between Morag’s present – where she struggles with her work and her relationship with her daughter, and the past as she grows up more and more desperate to escape the town of Manawaka.

Morag Gunn wasn’t born in Manawaka – her parents died when she was just five years old – and she goes to live in Manawaka with an army friend of her father’s and his wife – who agree to take the orphaned child in. Christy Logan and his wife Prin (short for Princess) are an odd choice as guardians for such a young child. Morag has never lived in town before – it all seems very strange – and she has never met Christy and Prin before she is taken there by a neighbour. Christy is the town scavenger – he spends his days at the nuisance grounds (the town tip) he gets rid of the things people don’t want – a keeper of secrets, and a finder of things. His wife Prin is an enormously large woman, who stays mainly in the house.

“‘She’ll be alright Christie,’ the Big Fat Woman says. ‘She gotta get used to us. Leave her be, now’
‘I was only trying, for God’s sake, woman,’ sounding mad.
‘You want to see your room, Morag?’ the woman says.
She nods. They mount the stairs, the woman going very slow because fat. The room is hers, this one? A thin bed, a green dresser, a window with a (oh – ripped, shame on them) lace curtain. A little room. You might be safe in a place like that, if it was really yours. If they meant it.”

Christy and Prin are kind people – and though Morag is often slightly ashamed of them – in the way children are when their adults are so obviously different to other children’s – she becomes used to them. Christy is a good teller of tales – stories that Morag carries with her – she is both fascinated and repelled by his life at the nuisance grounds (I shall forever now, think of a rubbish dump as the nuisance grounds). However, as Morag grows up – she becomes more and more dissatisfied with life in Manawaka, knowing that when the time is right, she will break away.

Morag is made tough by this strange life in the prairie town. It is here in Manawaka though as a teenager that Morag first meets Jules Tonnerre, (nickname Skinner), Jules and his family are outsiders, Métis living on the outskirts of town, they are subject to all the usual prejudices. While Jules is away at the war, Morag a junior reporter on the town newspaper is sent to report on the fire at the Tonnerre home, where Jules’ sister and her children are killed. It is a scene that will haunt them both over the coming years.

Morag does leave Manakawa – she goes to college where she meets new friends and lovers, marries the wrong man and longs for a child. One day, she meets up with Jules again, though their relationship is never destined to be conventional, she takes the chance to break away one more time.

Laurence’s characters are wonderfully memorable – her storytelling is rich and poignantly written. My first novel of the month will be one that is hard to beat. I don’t think it matters that I am reading these books slightly out of order, but I am looking forward to reading The Fire Dwellers even more now. show less

What I liked about this book: the way Laurence wove in Morag’s memories as mini-movies, as well as stories told by Christie, songs by Jules and Pique, and even interludes from Catherine Parr Traill. I liked too that Morag was a strong and determined character who made her own way as best she could.

What I didn’t like in this book: the relationship between Morag and Brooke. The student/teacher relationship was skeevy because of the power imbalance inherent in the relationship, and Brooke himself was repulsive in how he tried to get Morag to behave in a “ladylike” way and at the same time infantilized her. Also the sex scenes.

What was OK about this book: I liked the idea of including songs by Jules and Pique, but the songs show more themselves sounded a bit too much like they were written by the same person, which they probably were. show less

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence is considered a classic of Canadian Literature, winning the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1974. The main character of the story is Morag Gunn, an independent novelist and single mother who grew up in the small town of Manawaka, Manitoba. She has a difficult relationship with her daughter Pique and the father of Pique, a Metis named Jules Tonnerre and is struggling with her writing as well.

The novel opens with Morag finding that her eighteen year old daughter has left home then while brooding over that she thinks back over her own life, her traumatic childhood, her difficult relationships and her struggles to assert herself. This self-reflective portrait not only portrayed Morag’s life but show more also with it’s exploration of several generations, races and classes painted a vivid picture of the Canadian immigrant experience.

When originally published The Diviners was considered quite controversial with it’s depiction of a woman who chose to leave her marriage and conceive a child out of wedlock. Also the interracial relationship between Morag and Jules caused more than a few raised eyebrows. I believe the author was striving to show how mixed culturally and racially Canadian heritage can be.

I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed this book. Although published in the 1970s, its feminist themes still ring true today. I will long remember Morag Gunn, the flawed, conflicted yet strong main character who takes the reader on such an emotional journey. The author’s writing totally engaged me with it’s honest and intimate manner of delivering such a complex story. show less

I don't reread many books but I have a few Canadian classics that I have read at least twice. A few years ago I reread The Stone Angel and so I was primed to give this book another go when I saw it for sale in the lovely used book store in Onanole Manitoba, Poor Michaels.

Morag Gunn is a succesful writer living in a small rural area in Ontario. She grew up in Manawaka in Manitoba where she lived with Christie and Prin Logan who were no relation to her but who agreed to raise her when her own parents died of polio. Christie was the town garbage man and he was a veteran of the First World War. He had served with Morag's father and he credited her father with saving his life. Prin, his wife, was morbidly obese even when Morag came to live show more with them. There was not much money in the household and Morag was poorly dressed when she started school. Naturally she was the butt of many jokes and remained an outsider all the time she lived in Manawaka. In her class was a Metis boy, Jules Tonnerre, who was also an outsider. His family lived in shacks in the river valley and his father provided for Jules and his siblings by hunting and trapping. Perhaps it was inevitable that Morag and Jules would be drawn to each other but World War II intervened with Jules going off to fight. After the war Morag had saved enough money to go to college where she met, fell in love with and married one of her professors. Brooke Skelton takes a job in Toronto and Morag becomes a stay at home wife while trying to launch a writing career. She manages to write one book which is accepted for publication, something which drives a wedge between Morag and Brooke. Morag would like to have children but Brooke always says it is not the right time. Then Morag meets Jules on a street, invites him back to her and Brooke's apartment and Brooke is rude to Jules. Morag realizes she has to leave Brooke and goes off with Jules who she stays with for a few weeks before moving to Vancouver. Morag and Jules have sex and Morag tells Jules she doesn't want to take any precautions. After she gets to Vancouver Morag realizes she is pregnant. When her daughter is born she names her Piquette after Jules' sister who died during WWII when the Tonnerre shack caught on fire. Morag lets Jules know about Pique's birth but she raises Pique by herself. Morag starts to become more well-known as a writer and after some years she moves to England with, of course, Pique. Jules came to Vancouver once and stayed for a while with Morag so he has met Pique but, in reality, Pique does not have a father figure. When Morag has moved back to Canada and there could be an opportunity for a relationship it never happens until Pique leaves home at age 18. Then she tracks down Jules who supports himself by singing and playing guitar in small coffee shops. Pique is also a musician and Jules shares with her some of his own songs that tell about his family's history. In this way Pique becomes acquainted with her paternal heritage and she continues to explore that. Morag knows that she has to let Pique go her way as she had to do herself. At the end of the book Morag goes to look at the river which seems to flow both ways. "Look ahead into the past; and back into the future, until the silence."

Ten years separated the writing of The Stone Angel from the writing of The Diviners. They were also written on different continents. Laurence was living in England when she wrote The Stone Angel but she was back in Canada by the time The Diviners was written. I think there are significant differences between the two books. For one thing, The Stone Angel had Biblical underpinnings but I couldn't really detect anything like that in The Diviners. For another, the central character in The Diviners is a middle-aged woman with a still young daughter but Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel was 90 years old and her surviving son is also quite old. Many people have called The Diviners Laurence's outstanding achievement. It certainly is a mature work and has become an exemplar of Laurence's ability as a writer. show less