Front Lines: The Fiction of Timothy Findley

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince
George.

This detailed, well-researched, and closely argued study examines, in
chronological order, Timothy Findley’s novels and stories. The thesis
of the book is laid out succinctly in the author’s introduction:
“Findley has, on one occasion, been spoken of as a writer who has
produced ‘two war novels’ . . . The present study will, I hope,
fully revise that view of Findley’s work, revealing his six novels and
various short stories as a cohesive body of work—an interlocking
system of war fictions.” War, York claims, is a text with its own
distinctive structures. These structures are most clearly seen in
military combat, but they can be found (and become metaphorical) in
domestic situations, conflicts between the sexes, and interclass
friction. York convincingly shows that each of these variations of the
war text can be found in Findley’s novels. Her approach mixes thematic
criticism with feminist literary theory and structuralism.

A first book on an important author is a difficult thing to write and
to review because there are no points of comparison, and any conclusions
about a still active writer must be tentative. Luckily for us, and for
Findley, York has written a fine book that is worthy of its subject. It
complements Findley’s own Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer’s
Workbook, which surveys the author’s career from his own perspective.