Introducing Timothy Findley's The Wars: A Reader's Guide

Marjorie Retzleff teaches English at Champlain Regional College in
Lennoxville, Quebec.

This volume has the format of other books in ECW’s Canadian Fiction
Studies series: a chronology of the author’s career, a review of the
novel’s importance, a survey of criticism, a reading of the text, and
a bibliography. However, unlike earlier books in the series, notably
those by George Woodcock, this book is poorly written and inadequately
edited.

York has adopted a very loose, informal, and repetitious style,
reminiscent of classroom lectures or graduate seminars—a style that
transfers awkwardly to the printed page and suggests a rush job to meet
a deadline. Evidence of poor editing is everywhere: sloppy diction,
which results in the tautology “sexual gender”; an unbalanced
structure, which devotes ten pages (in “You Begin at the Archives”)
to making a point about the role of the researcher/narrator (repeating
it ad nauseam), and only five pages (in “Male and Female”) to
discussing sexuality in the novel (omitting important scenes like Robert
with the prostitute and Robert masturbating); and an awkward style,
which creates clumsy passages such as “we find Findley already
studying the relationship between society’s insistence that males be
warriors and international aggression.”

All of this acts as a deterrent to any reader who seeks to be
“guided” through The Wars, for despite a good deal of useful
information (particularly the annotated bibliography and the section on
“Structure and Style”), the book is hard reading. Nor does the happy
absence of critical jargon overcome the other problems. The fact that
York’s book is 25 percent longer than similar guides by Woodcock
suggests that had she cut out an equivalent amount of verbiage and
repetition, she too might have produced a lively, clear, and readable
work. However, York should not receive all the blame: ECW Press could
have and should have sharpened its editorial pencils and used them.