Canada’s other Margaret

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 26

Canada’s other Margaret

The Stone Angel. By Margaret Laurence. Virago, 1987. 272 pp. $14.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Reginald Berry) Having issued all of Margaret Atwood’s fiction, Virago has now begun to launch the works of Canada’s other Margaret — Margaret Laurence. When she died last year, prematurely at 61, Laurence had not written any fiction for more than a decade, but the five books of the Manawaka series had already assured her stature as the modern Canadian classic writer. “The Stone Angel” is the first of the Manawaka books, fictions which are named after the town Laurence created to resemble her home town of Neepawa, Manitoba. Each of the five books can be read independently from the others, but all the main characters have their origin in this small prairie town.

The town is part of the history they can’t shuck off, no matter where they travel and no matter how their lives are altered in other contexts. The main character in “The Stone Angel,” Hagar Shipley, as we first see her, is an old woman in her son’s house in

Vancouver, but the tug of memory keeps dragging her back to Neepawa and what happened there. We see this in a series of flashbacks which alternate with the narrative present of her last few weeks of life.

Laurence’s great skill allows her to create the flashbacks out of the natural associations of Hagar’s present life; there are none of the usual hackneyed remembrances of the bestseller here. As the novel progresses, so does the depth and distance of Hagar’s memory, so that her journey back into the repressed events of the past becomes a voyage of courageous confrontation. What Hagar confronts is first of all her relationship with her domineering Scots father and the Calvinist cultural baggage he brought to Canada and made. Hagar cany

through the rest of her life. Subsequently she reassesses . her rebellious marriage to a rough-edged man below her station, and then confronts the failure of the marriage and her relationship to her two sons. As the memories progress deeper into her past, Hagar’s psychological quest for her own nature becomes powerfully affecting. At the same time, Hagar, aged 90, indomitably continues the struggle to take charge of her life in the present. Weighed down by the physical afflictions of age and furiously rejecting the son’s solution of a depressing Home for the Aged, Hagar, in an act which is both foolish and courageous, runs away. This, her last rebellion, leads her to the heart of her troubled and repressed past, and also frees her from it. With a lesser writer, the novel

might have ended there, rather like the end of a long course of psychoanalysis. But Laurence goes on to show how Hagar reintegrates herself into a community of women and, not in the least depressingly, how she approaches her death.

As a character in her fiction, Hagar Shipley is probably Laurence’s greatest creation because she is so humanly complex — she seems to contain all the polarities of human conduct in the family context. That

character is increased by the subtle richness of Laurence’s prose. She knew intimately, from observing her own family; how people like Hagar talk. And to this she added a narrative style which borrows from the cadences of the Bible and the images Of English poetry. Altogether the character and the novel are a superb achievement. "The Stone Angel” has long been a classic text for Canadian readers; now it may find the large international audience it has deserved since its initial publication in 1964.