Timothy Findley Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Bemrose

SOURCE: "Rural Roots," in MacLean's, Vol. 108, May, 1995, p. 66.

In the following, Bemrose assesses the plot and principal theme of The Piano Man's Daughter.

So often, Timothy Findley's fiction circles some central image, like a tribe dancing around a fire. In his 1977 novel, The Wars, it was horses: horses screaming under the artillery barrages of the First World War, or stampeding away from the madness of the trenches. Findley's 1993 novel, Headhunter, offered the image of its heroine, Lilah Kemp, the unforgettable street woman whose schizophrenia harbored an element of strange, life-nourishing sanity. And in his richly layered new novel, The Piano Man's Daughter, Findley conjures up the presence of a simple field in a southern Ontario farm. This field—like both the horses and Lilah Kemp—becomes a touchstone for what is sacred in Findley's vision: a buffer against a society that seems bent on destroying innocence and...
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