SOURCE: "Not With a Whimper: Hugh MacLennan's Voices in Time," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 20, No. 2, Autumn, 1981, pp. 279-92.

"If I have been prophetic in my earlier novels, it would not be pleasant if I were prophetic in this one," Hugh MacLennan commented [to Burt Heward in "Masterful Novel Protests Humanity's Ignorance," Citizen Ottawa, (27 September 1980)] of his latest novel, Voices in Time. Certainly if a mighty nuclear blast such as the one he describes taking place near the end of this century were indeed to shake the world down to a few hundred inhabitants, it would be horrendous. This explosion in Voices in Time is MacLennan's concept of what could conceivably be mankind's darkest hour.

Although he boldly sets his events in the years after this holocaust, his intention had nothing to do with futuristic science fiction: "I tried to avoid any semblance of science fiction," he wrote [in a letter to Cameron dated May 29, 1980]. "Critics will call the book 'Orwellian,' but I don't think it owes anything to Orwell, who died before the Hbomb" [letter from MacLennan to Cameron dated March 1, 1980]. If his interest did not lie in playing the clever game of imagining details of life in the aftermath, what is the point of this novel's setting?

MacLennan has been fascinated with explosions since December 1916. That month, his father was invalided home from service as a doctor in Shorncliff Hospital, a Canadian medical unit near Dover, to the great relief of his wife, his daughter, and his nine-year-old son. Less than an hour after the small family walked into the house MacLennan's mother had rented for the occasion, it blew up. MacLennan's father, thinking he smelled gas, had gone down into the basement to investigate—with a lighted match. Although no one was seriously injured in the explosion that resulted, the house was for some months uninhabitable. This event was nothing short of traumatic for the young MacLennan, who would later retell it in his first short story, "An Orange From Portugal." To him, it had meant that the coherent world of his childhood, about which he had already become anxious during his father's year overseas, was shattered. The family Christmas he had hoped to spend in their new house became instead a makeshift affair in a Halifax hotel.

This dramatic homecoming prepared the way for the effect of the famous Halifax explosion, which took place almost exactly one year later on 6 December 1917. Whatever general sense of a stable universe the boy had managed to reassemble during the year was annihilated in the largest man-made explosion before the atom bomb. MacLennan's own painstaking description of this event, first in an essay called, significantly, "Concussion," and then in his first published novel, Barometer Rising (1941), testifies to the major impact it had on him. But only partly. For the ten-year-old boy who wandered the streets of Halifax saw more than he ever recorded later of the bloody anguish of the explosion's victims. Earlier enthralled by the glamour of war heroics, he was then sickened. It was not difficult to guess at his state of mind two months later, one bitter February day in 1918, when sleighs hastily carried him off with his classmates to crouch behind the sheltering hills of the local golf course in anticipation of yet another explosion (which never actually occurred) while an ammunition ship lay ablaze in the Halifax New Ocean Terminal. In none of these three instances—his father's catastrophe in 1916, the Halifax blast of 1917, or the threatened explosion of 1918—was destruction planned. Human carelessness and irresponsibility had been the catalyst each time.

To a greater or lesser degree, MacLennan's personal struggle to understand the causes and consequences of these fearsome situations lies behind much of his fiction and a good number of his essays as well. Why, he has always wondered, has man been driven to invent and improve on things that explode and destroy? And, once man has invented the means to bigger and better blasts, why has he treated them with such carelessness and irresponsibility? Beyond that, what conceivable relationship could such "creations" bear to other creations such as works of art or, more generally, the very genesis of the known world itself?

In Barometer Rising MacLennan explored the implications of the Halifax explosion in human terms. Indeed, the explosion itself lies at the novel's heart, forming the pivot on which the plot line turns. He wrote the novel backwards, deciding first on the resolution that would follow his "catastrophe" (which he thought of in both senses—colloquially as trauma, and technically as the Greek term for the high point of his drama) and then working towards the story that would feed into it. The result, he was and still is convinced, was too superficial. Although from a technical standpoint the limitations of this method of writing forcefully shaped his material, he always felt that somehow the novel did not reflect the complexities of life. From a philosophical viewpoint, its conclusion seemed lightweight: "Probably what bothered me about the novel was the unavoidable necessity of making the explosion a deus ex machina. Also, the deliberate limitations I imposed on myself for the sake of the market" [MacLennan to George Barrett, October 20, 1941]. To use the Halifax explosion as a deus ex machina was simply too convenient. Although it effectively blasts the new world free of the old, it too neatly resolves the affairs of his characters: the villain, Colonel Wain, exposed in vice and destroyed; the child, Jean, left free of her adopted parents so that her real parents, recently reunited, might now claim her. This resolution was too deterministic—it suggested a purposeful God somewhere who had an interest in human life. It did not demonstrate to MacLennan's satisfaction that human choice might play a significant role in human events.

In Two Solitudes (1945), MacLennan continued his examination of this theme in a quite different way. Although he did not centre on any one explosion as he had in Barometer Rising, he thought of the collective explosions that constituted war as a major issue. His main concern at the time was Canada, but he consciously attempted to find in his specifically Canadian situation an analogy to international events. He struck that analogy in what he called Canada's "state of becoming." He had observed that in Canada, loyalty to the region or group frequently impeded the development of an allegiance to the nation as a whole. Optimistically, he thought that a true pan-Canadianism was about to emerge, and he considered that this trend away from petty allegiances to a wider loyalty had potential as a useful example of behaviour to war-torn Europe. "I see Canada as a bridge," he wrote to a friend as he was about to begin Two Solitudes, "a bridge with the ends unjoined. I don't believe there can be a synthesis until the ends are joined. I am trying to go ahead on the assumption that the failure of our people even to understand the necessity of joining the ends of the bridge is responsible not only for our own national schizophrenia [the French-English split], but breakdown as well. In that state of 'becoming' I seem to detect the possibility of a universality for a writer who attempts to write out of the Canadian scene" [MacLennan to Barrett, October 20, 1941]. If Canadians could overcome their group loyalties to "protect and touch, and greet each other," in the words of his epigraph from Rilke, if the two solitudes could manage love, then perhaps the various nationalisms in Europe that had led to war could be transposed into peaceful co-existence. In Two Solitudes, by contrasting Huntly McQueen, another power-hungry character like Colonel Wain, who is appropriately fascinated with technological and industrial "progress," with the creative writer Paul Tallard, whose very life represents the mutation of English and French divisiveness into a purposeful unity, MacLennan examined how destructive and constructive tendencies in human life related to each other in a moral framework.

That entire concept can be illustrated in one compact and striking image in the novel. Captain Yardley recalls being deep in contemplation while stranded in the tropics. Over the side of the drifting ship he sees

the fish gliding through ten fathoms of sunlit water below. Sharks and barracuda moved in their three-dimensional element, self-centred, beautiful, dangerous and completely aimless, coming out from a water-filled cavern hidden beneath the promontory and slipping under the ship's keel, fanning themselves for seconds under the rudder, then circling back into the cavern again … The memory of that hour had never left him. Self-centred, beautiful, dangerous and aimless: that was how they had been, and he could never forget it.

The moral implication of the juxtaposition of the predatory sharks and barracuda with the ship's keel and rudder is profound. Man as individual or as nation has the choice: he can act selfishly, randomly destroying whatever gets in his way, or he can purposefully steer his life on a productive course.

In his third novel, The Precipice (1948), MacLennan's approach to the problem lay in two new directions: first, in a comparison of Canada to the United States; second, in the application of Freudian psychology to the issue. Probably drawing on J.B. Brebner's astute observation of the cultural lag between Canada and the United States in The North American Triangle, MacLennan speculated, "I think that Canada has been, is, and may be in the future, more fortunate than the United States … For it seems that nothing but catastrophe can check the furious progress of Americans into a still more bleak and dangerous desert of technology than they have reached now. The very vastness of the apparatus their genius has created stands over them now like a strange and terrible master. Every man, as Sophocles said years ago, loves what he has made himself. Canadians have as yet fallen in love with no such Frankenstein. And, as a result of this, our future is more clearly in our own hands" ["On Discovering Who We Are," in Cross Country]. In his title, The Precipice, drawn from the biblical parable of the Gaderene swine who mindlessly rushed in droves over a precipice to their deaths, MacLennan located the external result of the dark side of human ingenuity in the technological "advances" made in America and in the parasitical field of advertising designed to manipulate the public to accept technology's goals as their own. There is a lesson in that tragic nation of sharks and barracuda, he demonstrates. His indictment of the America lifestyle emerges in a brief image, reminiscent of Yardley's speculations in Two Solitudes, in which he compares New York to "a giant aquarium teeming with ancient and invisible life: raw, terrible, humorous, brave and infinitely various." Canadians, by virtue of the time lag of forty or fifty years, have the opportunity to take the lesson to heart and direct their nation's fate more purposefully. And from a Freudian point of view, the male need to devise weapons that kill and destroy on a grander and grander scale is a displacement of the sexual drive. As Bruce Fraser confesses about his war experience, "Battles of all kinds are a colossal sensuality … the moment the height of the danger passes you feel with an incredible intensity."

Appropriately, the novel ends with the world-rending explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—testaments to fine technological "progress" but also, ironically, to the incredible moral "retardation" of the United States. Facing his nation's irrational drive to destruction forces the novel's protagonist, Stephen Lassiter, to face the same impulses in himself. Pulling back just in time at the edge of the precipice, he can make a new start.

In his next novel, Each Man's Son (1951), MacLennan turned the kaleidoscope of his enduring interest in man's pursuit of power to reveal a new emphasis. He picked up the doctor character from Barometer Rising and placed him centre stage; he drew back from a consideration of American technology and advertising to look instead at raw physical power in the form of a prizefighter, Archie MacNeil.

As was made amply clear not only in his novel but also in a couple of essays he wrote shortly after he finished Each Man's Son—"Power and Love" and "A Layman Looks at Medical Men"—doctors had become symbolic to him in a highly idiosyncratic way. Just as Angus Murray in Barometer Rising stands for the healers in war and is sharply opposed to the megalomaniac Colonel Wain, who revels in the power to destroy, Dr. Ainslie represents MacLennan's idea of the highest human example of power used purposefully with love. Whereas Dr. Murray is a minor character, a somewhat ineffectual, rootless man slipping into alcoholism, Dr. Ainslie is presented as a powerful and stable character, central to his community, with wide visions of a further stage to his career which will enlist his talents even more effectively for the benefit of mankind. His conflicts are not those of Dr. Murray, whose debates with Colonel Wain seem to need a resolution from outside himself in the form of the Halifax explosion. Ainslie's conflicts are imagined as internal: he undergoes a crisis of conscience and guilt that his powers have not always been tempered with sufficient love. The resolution of that conflict in Ainslie was seminal in MacLennan's developing analysis of the problems he addressed. Ainslie cannot reason his way to a solution; he feels or intuits it. His resurgence of faith is also linked to the natural world:

A world without purpose, without meaning, without intelligence; dependent upon nothing, out of nothing, within nothing; moving into an eternity which itself was nothing. With a slow movement, as if coming out of a deep sleep, Ainslie sat up and looked at the sky. With longing for continuance brimming in his blood, he had looked ahead on his days and seen total emptiness. He had reached his core. And there he had stopped. He got to his feet and looked down at the brook. In that moment he made the discovery that he was ready to go on with life.

MacLennan thus demonstrated the importance of the lessons of organic growth and continuity lying all around us in nature. Ainslie's vocation is felt through contact with nature in an experience that might be called "mystic."

In contrast to Dr. Ainslie, the boxer Archie MacNeil applies his powers destructively. Where Ainslie heals, MacNeil pounds and pummels his way to the top and, in turn, is pounded and pummelled into a declining phase of his career. He is punished for his marked neglect of his wife and son by losing them: his wife through his own final explosion of physical violence; his son, with great moral significance, to none other than Dr. Ainslie, who will adopt him.

In The Watch That Ends the Night, MacLennan moved his examination of the use and misuse of power onto a much more sophisticated plane. In his earlier fiction he had located the constructive and destructive tendencies in separate characters: the former he portrayed as heroes, the latter as villains. Now he saw that both impulses exist in each individual, and he set about presenting characters who demonstrated this fact.

This dramatic insight was probably the result of his deep consideration of the whole question in an essay entitled "Joseph Haydn and Captain Bligh" that he wrote in 1953 during the early stages of his novel. In this essay, he attempted to resolve the apparent paradox that the same society could spawn both these men: "As Haydn represents the spiritual grandeur of the eighteenth-century imagination, Bligh represents its irresponsibility." In his essay, MacLennan turns from Haydn to consider more recent "geniuses." For a time, he speculates, scientists like Einstein have been the "creative men" of the modern world—until Hiroshima, that is. Seeing the consequences of their inventions, their genius became "beclouded," just as Haydn's might have been had he concerned himself with the dark underside of his own culture. Just as he had done in his essays "Power and Love" and "A Layman Looks at Medical Men," MacLennan turned to medicine as the most recent field of "genius." Not surprisingly, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who denied his own not inconsiderable talent for music to give his healing services to thousands, stands as an example of "the highest aspirations of our social conscience." Because of this gradual incorporation of social conscience into the lives of all citizens, MacLennan concluded "the twentieth century is better than the eighteenth." And he looked forward to an even better future: "after this age of transition, the shadow of Captain Bligh [will have] been removed from the whole world."

This essay, with its theory of an evolutionary development away from a society split between destroyers like Captain Bligh and creators like Haydn, towards one in which responsibility for the evil in the world is accepted by all men, marks a crucial stage in MacLennan's treatment of power and reflected accurately the means by which he would demonstrate it in his next novel. In The Watch That Ends the Night, the central character, George Stewart, is flanked by a man and a woman each of whom possesses to a dramatic degree both creative and destructive powers. Jerome Martell, whose surname means "hammer," is as aggressive and powerful as Archie MacNeil the boxer. He is a warrior whose natural element is the battlefield of the Spanish civil war. Yet, like Dr. Ainslie, he is also capable of tremendous healing powers as a doctor—powers, in fact, that go beyond simple medical skills. Catherine, almost conversely, has undeniable creative strength, not only in her obvious talents as an artist, but also in her fierce love of life itself and the positive energy she draws on to stay alive despite her fatal illness. But in Catherine, too, is the power to destroy, to hold men dependent on her so that she can sap their strength; she is partly the "spiritual vampire," as Robertson Davies once observed [in "MacLennan's Rising Sun," Saturday Night (28 March 1959)]. It is the recognition of this duality in the two people most important to him that helps to trigger George's profound and final insight: in him, too, and in Everyman the same forces are at war. As he comments: "There it was, the ancient marriage of good and evil, the goodness of this day and the compulsive evil people must see and know, but the sky dominated in the end. Pale and shining, it told me that our sins can be forgiven."

In an image reminiscent both of Captain Yardley's speculations about the sharks and the ship's rudder in Two Solitudes, and of Dr. Ainslie's descent to the "total emptiness" at his "core," George describes his own encounter with the destructive impulses deep inside himself and the inner urge for order and purpose that counters it. When the strain of Catherine's illness is finally too much for him to bear, he thinks, "Could I … believe that this struggle had any value in itself?"

At first I couldn't … My subconscious rose … the greedy, lustful, infantile subconscious, indiscriminate and uncritical discoverer of truths, half-truths and chimeras which are obscene fusions of foetal truths, this source of hate, love, murder and salvation, of poetry and destruction, the Everything in Everyman, how quickly, if it sways him, can it obliterate the character a man has spent a lifetime creating! Then a man discovers in dismay that what he believed to be his identity is no more than a tiny canoe at the mercy of an ocean. Shark-filled, plankton-filled, refractor of light, terrible and mysterious …

… And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

… And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: let there be light: and there was light.

Christian ethics had always hovered close to MacLennan's treatment of this theme: now they were explicit. In a letter [dated March 21, 1959] to his friend and editor at Macmillan's, John Gray, he described the experience of writing the novel, which he at first titled "Requiem," as a "revelation." "In absolute humility I felt that the Lord touched me at the end of this novel and I was only thankful I didn't quite break under the final strain," he confessed.

For a man who had come to believe that the great war was within, that to control the destructive impulses and channel energy into creative or at least purposeful outlets was the challenge facing Everyman, the era of the sixties appeared to be an unaccountable moral lapse of civilization. The student revolution, the sexual revolution, the musical revolution—all seemed like the most primitive self-seeking and destructive behaviour. MacLennan soon termed it a "psychic crisis" and set about understanding it as best he could for purposes of his next novel. That novel he would name Return of the Sphinx, for it seemed to him that the old Oedipus legend applied to what he saw. Relying heavily on a book called Sex in History by G. Rattray Taylor, he considered the psychic crisis to be evidence of a "matrist" era arising in reaction to the "patrist" phase that had culminated in two world wars. As Taylor defined it, a matrist era displayed open rebellion against authority in any form, sought personal comfort and decadence and eschewed discipline in any form. To MacLennan, this seemed to go far in explaining what otherwise must have seemed inexplicable to one who in "Joseph Haydn and Captain Bligh" had outlined the steady moral progress of the Western world. Now he seized on Taylor's theory that such progress was cyclic, not linear. Such theories melded well with his own. To tame the primitive drive to violence, man needed self-discipline; he must sacrifice personal gratification for the sake of others. If the whole era were undergoing an undisciplined phase, explosions and destructive violence were predictable.

MacLennan's depiction of the explosive violence in Quebec appeared to anticipate the October 1970 FLQ crisis, although Return of the Sphinx was really based on the political rhetoric and sporadic bombing incidents that had marked the sixties. The October Crisis, however, shocked and frightened MacLennan and provoked him to continue to probe the causes of human destruction. In an article in November commissioned by the Toronto Telegram, he reviewed his two "Quebec" novels—Two Solitudes and Return of the Sphinx—in an attempt to understand the political crisis that had just occurred. With what by now was an ingrained reaction to disruptive violence, he described recent events in Quebec as but one surface manifestation of what he termed "the mid-20th century volcano" ["Quebec Crisis Bares the Agony of Youth," Telegram (21 November 1970)]. The notion of a powerful potential explosion lying underneath apparent events just waiting to be triggered would eventually find its way into his next novel.

Voices in Time, which was not to appear for another eleven years, was to be his most penetrating analysis of the theme that had intrigued him from his youth. To understand more fully the answers to those enduring questions about the use and abuse of power, he turned to the theories of the New Biologists who at that time were applying evolutionary data to a study of modern man's behaviour.

Reading Robert Ardrey's books African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative evoked a passionate response from MacLennan. "When Keats first looked into Homer," he wrote off to Ardrey, "he could not possibly have felt more like Cortes than I do after looking into you. Everything has conspired to make the reading of your work the most exciting reading I ever did in my whole life" [MacLennan to Robert Ardrey, May 4, 1969]. Ardrey had theorized that man's nature was dual: as he put it, "The command to love is as deeply buried in our nature as the command to hate." Basing this theory on the emergence in prehistory of australopithicus africanus, a flesh-eating ape that used the antelope bone to kill its prey, but was also capable of self-sacrifice in the interests of survival of the species, Ardrey had postulated that the genes of modern man reflected this same double impulse. The urge to kill (and to create the weapons to do so) and an altruistic impulse both were man's genetic inheritance.

Everything had conspired to make MacLennan receptive to this theory. He had already depicted this double impulse in the three main characters of The Watch That Ends the Night; he had used psychological theory as a base on which to construct Return of the Sphinx in order to show how a whole era can fall prey to the destructive urges in man and ignore complementary altruistic action. Beyond that, he had been working on his nonfiction study Rivers of Canada for republication, and his imagination had been gripped by the notion of vast eons of geological time which the history of Canada's rivers suggested.

All these influences converged to deepen the religious faith he had experienced has he completed The Watch That Ends the Night. Now, specifically, his idea of "God" was intimately linked with evolution: "The God I believe in," he told members of the Canadian Club in Vancouver in May 1968, "… is the God who manifests Himself in evolution, in all living creatures." God, in other words, was revealed in that impulse to self-sacrifice that characterized the species. As he wrote in his Telegram article, underneath all known events were "causes so mysterious that I am convinced they are lodged in the evolutionary process itself. What some New Biologists have called 'the Keeper of the Kinds' permits no species to threaten the survival of all species, including itself."

To set his story Voices in Time in a future setting was neither unprecedented nor surprising for MacLennan. In a pair of short experimental pieces in the fifties, he had already used a futuristic milieu to make satirical comments on the cold war. And both settings hinged on an explosion—the blowing up of the moon as a "necessary" episode in the space race between Russia and the West. But, as MacLennan once commented of Field Marshall Haig's behaviour in World War I: "it seems to me far more important to discover how such a man could act like that than to orbit a hunk of metal around the sun" [MacLennan to Gray, January 4, 1959]. In both essays, ["The Finding of the Way" and "Remembrance Day: 2010"], his criticism of man's ingenious technology is scathing. His futuristic setting in Voices in Time was also in keeping with his recently heightened awareness of prehistory in the New Biology and in his own revisions of Rivers of Canada. This awareness gave him a sense of perspective that he wanted to reflect in his novel, a feeling that, as he put it, "Time to me now is like an expanding universe." As he himself concluded, this was a perspective gained by virtue of his age: to see time this way, he commented [in Conversations with Canadian Novelists, 1973], "is something … one perhaps has to be older to do."

Voices in Time concentrates on a full and complex dramatization of how and why an explosion that almost wipes out all species, including mankind, could occur. This novel offers MacLennan's deepest probing of man's nature yet. In it he attempts to answer the questions he had posed from the start—questions which always centred on explosions.

Certainly the most explosive character in the novel is Timothy Wellfleet. A carryover from the characters in Return of the Sphinx, Timothy is a creature of the sixties, caught in a matrist era and loving every minute. Timothy is a man who lives for the present, in the present, without thought for others or for the consequences of his actions. Through him, MacLennan attacks the media in the same way that he had attacked advertising in The Precipice. To MacLennan, the methods of modern media provided a perfect example of the misuse of power: "For nearly a decade," he had remarked in his Telegram article, "TV screens have been inviting the most inflammatory irresponsibles to sound off and for entertainment purposes have given full exposure to anyone who wants to shock or propagandize … However, the murder of truth, as always, leads to the murder of people." Timothy, whose TV news program is called "This is Now"—a phrase gleaned from something a woman had said to him during orgasm—is one of those "inflammatory irresponsibles" whose deliberate distortion of truth through sophisticated media techniques leads to the murder of a man who (unknown to him) is his stepfather, Conrad Dehmel.

Dehmel, a German survivor of a concentration camp, is the victim of a whole era in which the destructive impulses of men have been elicited and organized by Hitler. Hanna Erlich, Dehmel's Jewish girlfriend, observes once, "Hitler talks directly to the volcano underneath the rules." Dehmel has already had ample opportunity to observe such behaviour in his own father—another megalomaniac colonel like Wain, a "boy-man" who has "played" as a naval officer in World War I. Like MacLennan, Dehmel's idealization of things military has been reversed into horror. Dehmel, then, is a more complex character than Timothy, in that he has actually felt and acted upon both impulses. His initial attraction to war enables him later to pose as a Gestapo officer so that he can help Hanna and her father escape from Germany; but his essentially purposeful mission is trapped in "the collapsing vaults of history."

Taken together, Dehmel's experience of two world wars and Timothy's of the "psychic crisis" of the sixties represent the decline and fall of the Western world as it moves towards its own destruction. The genetic impulse to destroy (and to create the weapons to do so) culminates in the Destructions in which a "computer balls-up" triggers a nuclear explosion that almost destroys the world. Almost. MacLennan dramatizes the "keeper of the kinds" in operation: "Something profound and mysterious, something blessed and almighty in the genes of humanity, has created a taboo against these [nuclear] bombs … They invented what were called 'clean bombs,' which had a destructive power less than that of the nuclears but nevertheless tremendous." Dehmel comments on one occasion, "the creative energy of the universe will … interfere with human ingenuity."

The novel's central character, however, is neither Timothy nor Dehmel, but Timothy's older cousin, John Wellfleet. He has survived the Destructions and, somewhat like MacLennan himself, looks back over that "expanding universe" of time, to make sense of the voices from the past. A young man called André Gervais, born after the great nuclear blast, has come to the old man with a couple of metal boxes which have been uprooted from the wreckage.

In these boxes marked "Wellfleet" are shards of his family history that his mother has saved—letters, tapes, diaries, even a videotape of Timothy's October 1970 television show. These are the "voices in time" which John Wellfleet must arrange into an intelligible chronicle. His purpose in doing so is to provide young André Gervais and his friends with a demonstration of the danger man poses to himself as these young people set about constructing a new society. His methods of doing so are those of the artist himself, which is to say, they are creative.

By interweaving the separate stories that arise from the materials in the boxes, old John Wellfleet gains profound insight into mankind and achieves a perspective on life which enables him to see the broad patterns in human behaviour. Formerly caught in an egocentric consideration of the troubles he himself has known, he can ultimately see that Dehmel has suffered more than he himself ever has, he can understand and even forgive Timothy's loathe-some, irresponsible behaviour. Even the Destructions, he comes to appreciate, were "so impersonal that there was no more malice in them than in a combined earthquake and volcanic explosion on a global scale."

MacLennan's novel is a profound paradigm of the human condition. Man's creative abilities are juxtaposed with the ingenuity that seems, at first glance, to be the same thing. They could not, MacLennan demonstrates, be more different. The purposeful drive represented by André Gervais to build a new civilization and by John Wellfleet, whose jagged and powerful tale will stand as a moral guide to such builders, is at the opposite extreme from the aimless ingenuity of the "boy-men" who play at war, the technological experts who build and misuse mass media equipment, or the inventors of computers and nuclear bombs. This is the way the world ends, MacLennan asserts in a parody of the one major twentieth-century poet with whom he consistently disagreed, not with a whimper but with a bloody, great bang. In an image that reverberates from his previous work, and now drew force from the New Biology, those bent on destruction in October 1970, a mere prelude to the Destructions themselves, move in for the kill like sharks and barracuda: "Unseen and with precision—my God, and with such beautiful haughtiness—they had moved out of the Great Barrier Reef of unidentified humanity to plant the bomb, to seize the hostages, then had faded back unseen into the Barrier Reef from which they were hurling their ultimatums like conquerers."

The sense of "mysterious" and "unseen" forces behind human action in Voices in Time bears testimony both to that "God of evolution" MacLennan had come to believe in and to the strangely hypnotic compulsion to turn Godgiven gifts to destructive purposes which is the deeply rooted heart of darkness in Everyman.