One of the best novels I've read in a long time. I've had this book on my shelf since roughly 1981, and figured I'd read it ... until I finally did in 2015! I think I bought it for a university class, so I made the assumption that i'd scanned it, did the basics, and had been unimpressed. Wrong--I am very impressed with a very involving set of characters and a complex plot that involves world history but also a futuristic view of the world. I even think I found a line that Bruce Cockburn might have paraphrased in a song (involving a finger pointing at eternity). This is a beautifully written book that shows the darkest and the brightest sides of humanity. ( )

I feel terrible about not liking Voices in Time. Seriously. I do like Hugh MacLennan -- he wrote one of my favourite books of all time (Barometer Rising). But I did not get along with this one at all, and that distresses me greatly.

When I started out, I read the back cover, which seemed promising. The story was to feature a "good German" in WW2 Germany and a Canadian celebrity who comes to prominence during the FLQ crisis of 1970, and of course the connections between their stories would be explored. "Two societies perched on the brink of destruction. Two men linked in time by fate." I love this stuff, especially the WW2 these days, and the FLQ crisis is one of those events I am always struck by when it comes up in fiction.

Then I started reading. Apparently the whole "two men linked in time by fate" thing, instead of being presented in the conventional manner of alternating chunks of narration, had a frame story of an elderly man named John Wellfleet, who is related to both of these men, going through their papers. Now this would not normally be a problem, except in this case John Wellfleet lived in some bizarre dystopia that was not adequately fleshed out at the beginning. I had way too many questions about it. Apparently Montreal was destroyed, and these papers were found in the ruins of a downtown building? What is this Destruction that allegedly took place? How about the Great Fear? A Bureaucracy somehow managed to rise from the ruins and rebuild society (three of them, actually)? How are the younger members of this rebuilding society able to pull together and start trying to harness hydroelectric energy, but they need the concept of television explained to them? They can use a telephone but have never heard of encyclopedias?

Theoretically, all of these questions would be answered in due course, and of course this was written in 1980 and may not have predicted the advent of personal computers, but the technological aspects really bugged me and I was not getting answers fast enough.

In addition, the writing style was difficult for me to get on with. Because the papers that Wellfleet is going through are not really well organized (as he says), the narrative is a mixture of summarizing by Wellfleet and direct quoting from the papers. The mishmash of voices was a bit too chaotic for me and may have worked better if the summarizing and direct quoting had been separated with white space and/or section breaks. The writing itself also tended to overwriting in places, with some of the dialogue sounding unnatural and the descriptions irritating me as description sometimes does. Also I personally do not need graphic descriptions of rape, especially when the victim is retelling the incident in first person.

After I decided to abandon this book I looked it up elsewhere online and found a page that summarized it as "dense and experimental." Had I known from the outset that it was experimental, would I have stuck with it longer? Perhaps, perhaps not. But I must confess I am extremely reluctant to try again. ( )

Engrossing read, an trip through 1970 Quebec and Germany through the war years, delicately linked by the two main characters. Hugh is my favourite Canadian author because he's so perceptive of the human and Canadian condition and this is a great reason to read him. ( )

First published in 1980, by the award winning Canadian novelist.
"In the year 2030 A.D. an old man, John Wellfleet, looks back and remembers the destruction of civilization in the 1980's and the events that led to it.
As he does, two amazing stories emerge: that of his older cousin Timothy Wellfleet, a Montreal broadcasting personality, and the extraordinary life of his stepfather Conrad Dehmel. Opportunistic and outspoken, Timothy Wellfleet becomes a media celebrity during the 1970 Quebec crisis. The story of Dehmel's childhood during the first world war in Germany is a poignant and touching portrait of a family seldom seen from this point of view. Just what it meant to be a "good German" during the madness of the Hitler era is vividly depicted as Dehmel struggles to pursue an honorable course and to save his Jewish fiance and her family. He is aided by the legendary Admiral Canaris whose love for Germany is exceeded only by his hate for the Nazis who are destroying his country.
Hugh Maclennan masterfully juxtaposes German society of the Hitler era, contemporary Canadian society in the late 1970s, and the perspective of an old man looking back on the conditions that led to world destruction." - jacket notes
This is Hugh Maclennan's 7th novel, and much acclaimed, although I believe that Two Solitudes and Barometer Rising are the better works and have had a greater influence on Canadian literature. ( )