In Timothy Findley's novel The Wars, Robert Ross, soon after arriving in Europe, finds himself leading a line of horses through thick green fog. The foul smell of the air puzzles him, but Poole, his batman, detects the odour of chlorine that has soaked into the ground. The smell was unnerving—as if some presence were lurking in the fog like a dragon in a story. Poole was quite correct; the ground was saturated with gas. Chlorine and phosgene were currently both in use. Mustard gas...

We no longer believe that some subjects are more appropriate for literary treatment than others: nowadays, every human activity, no matter how banal or disgusting, offers itself as legitimate material for the imagination to work on and turn into art…. There seem to be some subjects, however, which have a built-in intransigence to literary treatment because their historical reality, overwhelmingly banal, perhaps, or overwhelmingly disgusting, surpasses anything that the creative imagination can make o...

[Brevity] is disastrous in the hands of Timothy Findley. In fact understatement of a very slick and ineffective sort is chronically recurrent in The Wars…. The story is well told, the scenes follow each other with sure logic, and, with one or two exceptions, the thematic interest arises naturally from the events instead of being forced. The stylistic slickness of which I complained consists mainly of the frequent use of telegraphic one-liners (which one reviewer has associated—I think wrongly&...

Timothy Findley's "The Wars" is … elegantly written and structured and well aware of what can't be said about important human experiences. (Like other Canadian writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies and Marian Engel, Mr. Findley seems closer and more responsive to natural mystery than his peers south of the border.) (p. 14) The book has flaws, certainly. Its rather poetic prose sometimes turns overripe. Its climactic moment—when Ross disobeys orders, sho...