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The Watch that Ends the Night
Hugh MacLennan
"The Watch That Ends the Night is a novel of affirmation … The vanity of human wishes, death itself, are part of the mystery to be loved … I would not trade MacLennan for a legion of beatniks or a whole flotilla-full of angry young men." Queen's Quarterly
It’s been 50 years since Hugh MacLennan, famed Canadian novelist, published The Watch that Ends the Night, arguably his best work and a central piece of both Canadian literature and the Canadian historical imagination.
Between 1951 and 1959, McLennan wrote to capture the tensions of his generation: those stuck between the faith of their fathers, the disillusionment and nihilism of their era, and a way forward. As Nick Mount recently wrote in a retrospective for The Walrus, The Watch That Ends the Night is an elegy- for MacLennan’s wife, who died before the book was published, for Canada, and for his generation. In the same breath, the novel is a death wish for the materialism and spiritual hollowness of the time. The Watch, Mount writes, depicts “a society that has lived through the Depression and the Second World War and come out materially comfortable and politically secure, but existentially bankrupt”.
The book follows the tumultuous story of George and Catherine Stewart, beginning on the day when George receives a phone call from Jerome, Catherine’s long presumed dead first husband. Together, the three of them struggle through Catherine’s serious illness, the trauma of Jerome’s time in numerous wars and concentration camps, the Great Depression, and the tensions of their own private triangle. In the end MacLennan finds “meaning at last through the old trick of renaming mortal chaos as divine mystery”, leading his novel from the streets of Montreal to quiet backwoods, and God. It is the first of many Canadian novels, Mount thinks, to affirm life over death, and has led the way for some of the foremost Canadian novelists, from Laurence to Shields.
The Watch That Ends the Night was the Canadian bestseller the summer it was published; it later won a Governor General’s Award. This year, McGill-Queen’s University Press has made this seminal book, along with Return of the Sphinx, available again in paperback.
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