Hugh MacLennan's Best

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This book is a tribute from one of Canada’s finest editor-publishers
to one of the most accomplished and widely loved Canadian writers. “I
have approached its creation,” Gibson writes with appropriate
intimacy,“ as a friend of Hugh’s for more than twenty years . . .
and as a staunch admirer of his work in all its surprising variety.”
Hugh MacLennan’s Best aims to provide between its two covers a
sampling of the range of his work, including his fiction and specimens
of his multifaceted essays that are sometimes meditative, sometimes
descriptive, but always accessible and informative. Gibson introduces
each extract efficiently and succinctly.

Here, then, is a book that one opens with feelings of warm sympathy.
And it is certainly worthwhile, though I have to register a few twinges
of unease. Approximately half the space is given over to extracts from
all seven of MacLennan’s published novels. It could hardly be
otherwise, yet the resultant problem is obvious: to read these extracts
is a frustrating experience if one knows the complete texts—and I
assume that, if one doesn’t know them, these snippets can be equally
frustrating. If readers are sufficiently impressed to turn to the
complete novels, well and good; I fear, however, that many will treat
this anthology on the “Reader’s Digest Condensed Books”
principle—as a substitute.

Again, I sometimes get the sense that this selection creates the
impression of a rather bland MacLennan. It glosses over some of his
weaknesses, to be sure, but it also tends to miss his characteristic
strengths. There is, for example, not enough of the agonized MacLennan
here.

Still, this is almost certainly not Gibson’s fault. Rather, he set
himself an impossible task. I should therefore conclude by stressing a
positive. For MacLennan admirers, this book contains some hitherto
unpublished or practically inaccessible items, ranging from some pretty
terrible early poetry to a deeply moving tribute to Margaret Laurence
that was one of his last public statements. Such pieces make this book
of decidedly more than routine interest.