Like Faulkner, who enabled his readers to experience the rural South in his novels of Yoknapatawpha County, Laurence has bestowed a kind of immortality on the small Canadian prairie town. Manawaka is not just a town from which one escapes as soon as possible; it has a further part to play in the lives of its emigrés. It cleaves to them just as its image stayed with Margaret Laurence in her years in England, a microcosm of her native country. (p. 95)

In The Stone Angel, the first novel of the Manawaka series, Hagar sees the world much as Sartre describes it in Nausea: "every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by choice." In The Diviners, as in all the novels that have followed The Stone Angel, we see a more corrigible world. We have the impression of Laurence opening doors...