The Butterfly Plague

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

In a recent interview, Mr. Findley observed that: “It is not that I am intrigued by violence; it is that I see iteverywhere ... I cannot get away. That is my field as a writer.” Violence is certainly his field in The Butterfly Plague, a revised version of a novel which Findley first published in 1969. Dissatisfied with his original performance — “the first edition simply wasn’t good enough ... [I] simply wrote it too soon” — the author has pruned an overburdened work, and so concentrates the reader’s attention on violence and its inevitable presence in the pattern of human life.

On the level of plot, the novel is sufficiently bizarre; it concerns an infestation of butterflies in southern California on the eve of World War II. Its principal characters include a homosexual, hemophiliac film director; his pregnant sister, newly returned from a mysterious sojourn in Nazi Germany; and a transvestite bastard whose search for his unknown mother culminates in her death. In terms of theme, however, Findley’s apparently bizarre concatenation of characters and events is richly and fully justified. The return of the butterflies in the course of their annual migration is an event eagerly awaited; but this year the delicate and beautiful insects bring horror on their fragile wings. An excursion to view them turns into a bloody panic. Similarly, everything which is familiar and loved in this novel becomes a source of fear.

As the characters struggle to make sense of their lives — in the belief that “misery and despair are caused by people ... who will not accept, and who will not cope with reality as it is” — they come to see that “you die when you can’t be real.” What thereader comes to see is that death is not only the alternative to being real; it is also the price one must pay to become real. This grim paradox lies at the heart of The Butterfly Plague. As D.H. Lawrence once observed: “the soul of man is a dark, vast forest with wild life in it.” Timothy Findley’s novel, as revised, stands as a successful and extended commentary on the truth of Lawrence’s remark.