Praying for Rain: Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage

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.

The ECW Canadian Fiction Studies series aims to provide succinct
biographical and critical information as well as more detailed
interpretive readings of important and frequently taught Canadian novels
for the assistance and stimulation of students and teachers at the
high-school and college levels.

Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage is an ideal candidate for
the series. A complex and intriguing work, it deconstructs the story of
Noah told in Genesis and simultaneously provides an alternative story of
the Flood. What both students and teachers presumably need are practical
hints on the reading and understanding of myth, and some helpful
indications of how to acclimatize themselves to Findley’s richly
varied tone.

Donna Pennee begins well in assembling information about previous
critical responses to the book. Unfortunately, when she comes to the
text itself, she confines herself for the most part to simplified moral
(i.e., “politically correct”) judgments on the characters and their
actions. This, I would have thought, is precisely what contemporary
readers can provide all too readily for themselves. What they need
instead is help on how to read myth (and how to respond to parody of
existing myth) as well as guidance on the way an experienced approach to
such a text will differ from that to more conventional fiction.

Conspicuously absent is any extended discussion of the complexity and
quality of the writing, of how Findley controls response to his
narrative (in other words, of what makes the difference between a work
of literature and a moral tract). Moreover, this is a text in which the
deadly serious is communicated through effects that are often
surprisingly playful. A sense of exhilaration is achieved through the
sheer inventiveness of the writing. Pennee has virtually nothing to say
on this. It is also a pity, I think, that she deliberately avoids
discussion of “other literary intertexts for the novel,” since
Findley’s is an unabashedly literary book, and this background is
precisely what young readers will probably lack.

The bibliography is useful, but an opportunity has been sadly missed in
the text itself.