Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan

First published: 1941

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: December 2, 1917, to December 10, 1917

Locale: Halifax and Nova Scotia, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Neil Macrae, a former officer in a Nova Scotia regiment in France, who has now returned as a civilian to Halifax
• Penelope (Penny) Wain, a ship designer, a cousin of Neil who is in love with him
• Colonel Geoffrey Wain, Neil’s uncle and former guardian, the commander of Neil’s regiment, a wharf owner, and Penny’s father
• Angus Murray, a former medical officer to the regiment
• Alex Mackenzie, a former corporal in the regiment who is now foreman of Wain’s wharf

The Novel

The main subject of Hugh MacLennan’s novel is the return of Neil Macrae from France to Halifax in order to clear his name. His uncle, Colonel Geoffrey Wain, had ordered an ill-planned advance on the Germans; Wain tried to blame the resulting debacle on Neil, ordering his arrest and court-martial for cowardice. When a shell hit the dugout in which he was being held prisoner, Neil was reported missing, believed killed. It is revealed, however, that he was picked up, badly wounded and amnesiac, and sent to the hospital. His rescuers believed him to be a private in the British North Country regiment that had relieved the Canadians. He gradually recovered his memory but retained his British identity until he returned to Canada.

This is the situation when the novel opens, and MacLennan leads gradually into his theme by not naming the shabby man wandering through the streets of Halifax in search of the man who can clear him. The reader learns only later who the wanderer is and how he got there, through flashbacks, one of the main narrative techniques of the novel.

Probably influenced by the classical ideals of unity of time, place, and action, MacLennan has limited the action of his novel to eight days, between December 2, 1917, and December 10, 1917, to one place, Halifax, and to the action of Neil returning to claim his good name. The classical aspect is reinforced by the name of the heroine, Penelope (usually called Penny). Neil is the Odysseus figure returning from his travels to unite with Penelope, with whom he has long been in love and who has borne his daughter. Neil does not know about the child, however, since he embarked for France shortly after spending a night with Penny at a hotel.

Neil is searching for Alex Mackenzie, the corporal whom he had sent back to headquarters with a message that would have cleared him of the charge of cowardice. Penny catches a glimpse of Neil on a streetcar and, although she fails to catch up with this man whom she believed dead, she is convinced of his identity and tells her father, Colonel Wain. Wain is back in Halifax because he has been suspected of incompetence. He is now a transport officer, which allows him to carry on his lucrative wharfing business. He is also scheming to get back to France in a higher command position.

Wain has long hated Neil because his beloved sister died giving birth to him and because Neil is completely opposite to Wain in temperament. Whereas Wain is controlled, conservative, and calculating, Neil is impulsive, generous, and quixotic. When informed by Penny that Neil is back in Halifax, Wain realizes that he is in danger of being exposed as a failure and determines to get Neil out of the country. He tries to enlist his former medical officer, Angus Murray, to help him, for he knows that Murray is in love with Penny and should be eager to get rid of this embarrassing intruder.

Like everyone else, Murray had believed that Neil was responsible for the failure of the attack ordered by Colonel Wain, but he now begins to suspect that Wain wants Neil out of the way for stronger reasons than the mere embarrassment that his nephew’s return would cause him. He decides not to prejudge the issue and meets Neil when the latter finally visits Penny at the Wain family home. Neil and Murray go to see Alex Mackenzie who, although he is employed by Wain, agrees to reveal the truth about how his colonel panicked at the failure of the attack he so badly planned.

At this point the deus ex machina steps in and resolves many of the difficulties of the characters. The busy harbor of Halifax, gathering place of the huge convoys destined for Europe, has never been far from the focus of the developing story. It takes center stage when the French munitions vessel Mont Blanc, inbound to await escort, collides with an outward bound Norwegian freighter. The Mont Blanc catches fire and explodes.

Here history intersects with the private lives of the characters. The 1917 Halifax explosion which killed about eighteen hundred people, injured thousands more, and destroyed the northern part of the city, dramatically changes the lives of the characters of this novel. Colonel Wain is killed in bed with his typist. Also killed are the foster parents of Jean, the two-year-old daughter of Penny and Neil. Alex Mackenzie is mortally hurt. Murray’s hand is injured, but he organizes a temporary hospital and begins to operate on some of the many others hurt in the explosion. Among his patients is Penny, whose eye has been damaged. Neil is uninjured; indeed, the explosion blasts away the malaise he has felt since returning from Europe, and he performs heroic feats of rescue and organization in the shattered city.

The Halifax explosion does not change the direction of the novel; rather, it acts as a catalyst. Murray regains his confidence as a doctor; Neil is reunited with Penny, and the way is clear for them to take back their daughter, Jean.

The Characters

As happens frequently in MacLennan’s fiction, the characters take on symbolic roles. Neil’s function as Odysseus is underscored at the end of the novel when he says to Penny: “Wise Penelope! That’s what Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don’t think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew that the words would sound too small.” This is not the only classical parallel. Neil is like those heroes who are sent off by a father or an uncle on a dangerous mission likely to cause death. Miraculously, the hero escapes and, like Perseus with the Gorgon’s head, returns to confound the tyrannical elder. In this case, fate forestalls the hero. The crisis following the explosion causes Neil to shake off the last effects of his wound and shellshock. He loses interest in destroying Colonel Wain’s reputation and does not even trouble to get from the mortally injured Alex Mackenzie the affidavit that would clear his name. Angus Murray does this for him.

The heroine, Penny Wain, is a woman whose life is changed by the war as much as is Neil’s. Although destructive and disruptive, the war does give Penny a chance to use her talents to become a naval architect. She achieves the distinction of having her design for a submarine chaser accepted by the British Admiralty.

Angus Murray acts as the confidant to the other characters and as a link between them. The belief that Penny might marry him cures for a time his melancholia and alcoholism, which had been caused in part by the early death of his first wife as well as by the horrors of war. The return of Neil puts an end to that happiness, although being forced to operate after the explosion, for the first time since leaving France, restores his pride and self-confidence.

All the characters in the novel are measured against Colonel Wain, who stands for everything in Canada’s colonial past that should be rejected. In the Wains’ family history is encapsulated the history of the nation. The founder of the Wain line in Canada was a sergeant who fought with Major General James Wolfe at Quebec. His grandson founded the family fortunes by privateering in the War of 1812. With the proceeds, he had started a trade with the West Indies. Through the generations, the Wain men had inherited and improved the business and grown to be part of the mercantile and capitalist elite of Halifax. Nevertheless, Colonel Wain takes it for granted that the English mattered and the Canadians did not. He believes Canada to be unredeemably provincial and cannot wait to get back to Europe. Men such as Wain help chain Canada to the past and hold back the rising tide of national identity. His ideas are second-rate and his morality corrupt, as is seen in his indulgent and cruel affair with his typist. His death in a mean house in the North End symbolizes the decay of that influence in the nation.

The minor characters of the novel represent various aspects of Nova Scotian life, from the primitive and loyal former fisherman Alex Mackenzie to the fussy and stuffy daughter of the Loyalists, Maria Wain, Penny’s aunt. It should be added that another character in the novel is Halifax itself, which is quite lovingly detailed. (MacLennan has called the town the hero of Barometer Rising.) To an extent, this sense of place compensates for the lack of complexity in the other characters. They are defined more by their symbolic roles and physical characteristics (the white streak in Penny’s hair, Neil’s limp, Wain’s set face) than they are by their actions and interactions. The love scenes between Neil and Penny, for example, seem as trite as those in magazine fiction.

Critical Context

Barometer Rising was Hugh MacLennan’s first published novel. It was written during the darkest days of a second world war, before the United States entered, in which Canada was playing a more vital and independent role than she did in the first. Paradoxically, then, the Halifax explosion that devastated the city helped the barometer of nationhood rise toward fair. Edmund Wilson’s summing up of the novel is therefore singularly apt. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that Barometer Rising should not merely be accepted, as it is, as a landmark in Canadian writing but also, as an artistic success, [it should] be regarded as one of [Canada’s] authentic classics.” Although the novel did not win one of the coveted Governor General’s Literary Awards, as did several of MacLennan’s later works, it was a good omen of what was to come and remains among the two or three most successful that he has written.

Bibliography

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

Goetsch, Paul, ed. Hugh MacLennan: Critical Views of Canadian Writers Series, 1973.

Wilson, Edmund. O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture, 1965.