Voices in Time by Hugh MacLennan

First published: 1980

Type of work: Historical realism

Time of work: 2039-2044, with flashbacks to the twentieth century

Locale: Germany and Montreal and the surrounding area

Principal Characters:

• John Wellfleet, the narrator, an aging survivor of the nuclear holocaust
• Timothy Wellfleet, Johns older cousin, a television journalist
• Conrad Dehmel, a historian, member of the Gestapo, and then professor of history in the United States and Canada
• Andre Gervais, a young contemporary of John who finds the documents on which the narrative is based

The Novel

The novel begins with John Wellfleet, a resident of an old people’s compound, receiving a telephone call from a young man, Andre Gervais. The year is 2039, fifty years after a nuclear holocaust, known as the Destructions, has ended civilization, leaving only a few survivors. Gervais has discovered an old box in the ruins of Montreal. The box is full of papers and tapes of the Wellfleet family. Although Gervais knows that the repressive government, known as the Bureaucracy, would prohibit such an act, he wants John to come to the city to look at the box. When John recovers from the shock of finding records of a past long since dead and gone, he agrees to reconstruct the family history. That history, as told through John, or narrated directly from the journals, letters, and tapes of members of the family, constitutes Hugh MacLennan’s novel.

The first story that John reconstructs is that of Timothy Wellfleet, a well-known television journalist during the 1960’s. His speciality is exposing fools and liars. He prides himself on being aware of current events, but he misses the whole point of the Front de Liberation de Quebec (FLQ) movement while preoccupied with the Vietnam War. In 1970, the eminent historian Conrad Dehmel goes on Timothy’s program in order to explain the dangers inherent in the FLQ and the October Crisis of 1970, precipitated by the kidnaping of two public figures. Timothy has, however, obtained some information from a student radical to the effect that Conrad was once a Nazi Party member and a member of the Gestapo. Seizing the opportunity for sensationalism, Timothy accuses Conrad of these associations in the middle of the show. Conrad stalks off the set and is soon afterward assassinated by a man whose entire family has been wiped out in a Nazi death camp.

Timothy does not find out until after the show that his stepmother was married to Conrad. He also finds out later that Conrad joined the Gestapo to save the lives of his Jewish fiancee and her father, a distinguished psychiatrist. Conrad was also a member of the group plotting to kill Adolf Hitler. In the end, all of his covert efforts against the Nazis resulted in failure. His Jewish fiancee and her father were killed in a concentration camp, and Conrad himself narrowly escaped death in Belsen. The information that Conrad was a Nazi and Gestapo member came from a document stolen by a student radical from Conrad’s university office. This information hid the terrible and heroic reality of Conrad’s life, and its publication is responsible for the death of an innocent man and the ruin of the life of the only woman whom Timothy has ever really loved—his stepmother.

The reader learns all this from the central and longest section of the novel. This section combines the account of Conrad’s life with the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis following Germany’s defeat and ruin in World War I. Conrad’s own father was a high-ranking naval officer whose patriotism and desire for revenge for defeat in the war made him an eager servant of renewed German militarism.

Conrad himself becomes the director of the Historical Institute in Berlin, replacing the dismissed Jewish director under whom he had returned to work after completing his research in London. Although revolted by Nazism, he determines to stay within the system and undermine it as best he can. His father, later revolted by Nazi excesses, also joins the plot against Hitler. He, too, along with Conrad’s mother and thousands of other innocent people, is murdered when that plot fails. A few months later, with the Wehrmacht fighting to the bitter end, Germany goes down to defeat, leaving half of Europe in ruins.

The last two sections of the novel wrap up the loose ends. John briefly narrates the story of Conrad’s career after he leaves Germany and comes to teach in a university in the United States and then in Canada. Timothy’s career as a sensational television journalist has so alienated him from the other members of his family that he does not hear that his stepmother has married Conrad. The false exposure of Conrad and his assassination finish Timothy’s career. In an attempt to atone for his actions, Timothy helps Conrad’s widow collect the documents relating to the dead man and the rest of the Wellfleet family. All these documents make up the collection found in the Montreal ruins on which John Wellfleet’s narrative is based.

John’s story is concluded by Gervais, the young man who found the documents. His book completed, John leaves the old people’s compound and moves to the small town near Montreal where Gervais lives. He brings with him a collection of records that he salvaged from the devastation—records of Scarlatti, Bach, Handel, and Mozart as well as some jazz and rock. A friend of Gervais manages to repair the machine on which they can be played and the young people enter a world of musical experience previously closed to them. Gervais does not like the rock records, but he says that listening to them makes it easier to understand why Timothy Wellfleet was the man he was. The book that tells the story of the Wellfleet family is passed around among Gervais’ friends, as they know that the Bureaucracy would not allow its general circulation. Within ten years, Gervais predicts, it could be published and widely read. Gervais finally records that, soon afterward, John dies peacefully.

The Characters

The reader of Voices in Time finds out comparatively little about the constructor of the narrative, John Wellfleet. He acts as the bridge between the generations, as a man who recalls what Montreal and the rest of the world was like before the Destructions, and as a kind of conscience for the guilt and responsibility of the generation who finally brought about the end of civilization and the death of billions of human beings.

The central figure is Conrad Dehmel, named after Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness (1902), and Richard Dehmel, the German Romantic poet. Conrad Dehmel combines the tragic fate of German Romanticism, which could be said to lie behind both Nazism and militarism, and man’s inherent capacity for evil. His ill-fated love for a Jewish woman and his desire to work for the downfall of Hitler involve him in a web of deceit and destruction from which there is no escape except through the purgatory of Belsen. He is forced to acknowledge that intelligent and rational men are the last to recognize the bared teeth of the human ape, which is why Hitler’s rise to power was not prevented by the educated elite of Germany. Under torture, he reveals the whereabouts of his fiancee and her father, a betrayal that haunts him for the rest of his life. This is the reason he consents to go on television with Timothy, for he recognizes the same forces at work in the FLQ and the October Crisis of 1970. Not long before he is assassinated, Conrad notes that the storm signals of crisis indicate that the world might soon go out of control again, because no age has been secure from the psychopath with power. Men are screaming for freedom without realizing that freedom without discipline is a return to slavery.

The exemplar of this kind of cry for freedom is Timothy Wellfleet, apostle of the permissive society of the 1960’s. Not surprisingly, this voice of the electronic age cannot write coherently, as his letters and diaries show. His self-centered ravings reflect the style of a writer such as Norman Mailer, whose work represents for MacLennan a betrayal of the discipline of art. Yet Timothy wields enormous power through his ability to manipulate the responses of his audiences via television. He has power without any responsibility.

Andre Gervais represents the inheritors; he is a member of the young generation that has been left a world in ruins. They are trying to emerge from the repression of the Bureaucracy to rebuild the ruins not only of cities and towns but also of civilization itself. He and his friends seek to know about a past that has been almost totally annihilated.

Women play a comparatively small part in the novel. There is Hanna Erlich, the strong Jewish woman whom Conrad loves and who persuades him that it is necessary to stand up against Nazi tyranny. Esther Starr, another strong woman, Timothy’s lover and his executive producer, tries unsuccessfully to restrain his excesses on television. Finally, Stephanie, who is Conrad’s wife, John’s mother, and for a time Timothy’s stepmother, a warm, generous woman, is ultimately powerless to prevent the web of destruction from closing around the men she loves. This imbalance of the sexes represents MacLennan’s belief that the period in which the novel is mainly set was dominated by boy-men intent on imposing their fantasies of ever larger explosions on the world. Women seem powerless to prevent this suicidal play.

Bibliography

Cameron, Elspeth. Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life, 1981.

Goetsch, Paul, ed. Hugh MacLennan, 1973.

Mathews, Robin. “The Night That Ends the Debauch,” in Books in Canada. IX (August/September, 1980), p. 4.