March 7, 2025
A Jest of God, by Margaret Laurence
Of all the books in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, A Jest of God is the one that made the faintest impression on me, resonating mostly because Rachel, its protagonist, was Stacey Cameron’s elder sister. Stacey from The Fire Dwellers, the Laurence book that meant the most to me, I think, because of its preoccupation with the domestic and the kind of female life I understood. Stacey is a wife, a mother, which gives her a kind of legitimacy Rachel even acknowledges in A Jest of God, in comparison with her own experience—she still lives with her mother in Manawaka, didn’t complete university, teaches Grade 2 in the very classroom she’d attended as a child. Much like Hagar in The Stone Angel (which I reread recently, and failed to love), Rachel lives invisibly, a small and quiet life that is making her crazy. It’s the kind of life that, like that of an elderly woman, I would have scarcely acknowledged as a younger reader. It occurs to me that Laurence writes the gradients of female experience that I was too far away to see at the time, the way I’d thought of Hagar Shipley and Morag Gunn as just two old broads, never mind that there are forty years and a whole lot more between them. The way that I never saw Rachel at all.
Rachel is an easier person to share a stream of consciousness than Hagar was. She has similar pride and fear of being vulnerable, but it not quite so unwavering about it. Her hard shell is not her most defining feature. She’s also 60 years younger and still knows what’s what, a little bit savvy, a little bit willing to strike out and try. During the summer in which the novel takes place, she starts seeing an old classmate whose back in town for the season, and allows herself to fall into a fantasy of a future for them as a couple. He takes her out into the countryside and lays down a blanket so they can have sex without worrying about thistles and brambles, which might be the most care any man has ever shown Rachel ever. Although it’s not doing to end well, the reader realizes. That Nick Kazlik is never going to be driving Rachel Cameron’s getaway car, that she’s going to have to find a way to change her life on her own—and she does. The ending of this book (and there’s a whole lot more going on, particularly the biblical allegory that’s inaccessible to me) is really a triumph. I’m grateful for the chance to return to this one again.
