Like Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium", Jane Rule's The Young In One Another's Arms is concerned with the problem of aging, but whereas the poem proclaimed the possibility of transcending life and all its mortal limitations through the creation of lasting works of art, the novel takes the position that the old have a useful though not necessarily conventional role to perform in a world that is threatened increasingly by modern social, technological and political ills. In this world it is not age that is the issue, although the aged can provide experience and direction for the young, but rather it is one's attitude to one's fellow man and one's concern about finding alternatives to the prevailing malaise that are important. Rule takes the position that old and young must live life with all its multiple and variable qualities as best as circumstances allow, adapting and coping, even finding new patterns when necessary; in other words, the individual must make an art of life. (p. 153)

In addition to the universal question of mortality, Rule deals with some very contemporary issues in the novel, particularly that of modern progress. Like several other Canadian novels, The Young In One Another's Arms portrays the ills of technological society creeping into this country from the south. These ills are represented by a network of highways that weave menacingly through Ruth's life, past (revealed through memory) and present. There is, of course, the highway that destroys the Vancouver home, but there are also the highways Hal works on that destroy the British Columbia forests and ultimately him, the highway on which Ruth's daughter is killed while hitchhiking, and the highway that destroys the redwood valley of Ruth's youth in the American West and takes her father in a bulldozer accident. Ruth sees the highway as a destructive river that uproots people and casts them aside, leaving a debris of dead and wounded along its shore. She ran from the highway as a young girl, finding a substitute family in Clara and Hal, and she does so in middle age, as she joins the young on Galiano where the red of the arbutus reminds her of the redwoods of her youth. Galiano is linked to the mainland not by a highway but by a ferry. (p. 154)

If the novel poses the problem of surviving in the modern world, it is also about the possibility of such survival, for ultimately it celebrates the ability of individuals to turn the negative into the positive and to survive. As in earlier Rule fiction this is effected through human relationships, and very unconventional ones at that. Ruth is an old-timer at the art of survival (her face bears signs of age far greater than is commensurate with her fifty-odd years; the others see her as a rock, something solid and dependable), and it is she who keeps the group together on Galiano. She learned early that one must search, adapt and compromise in order to achieve the things that are sustaining in this life: warmth, friendship and love. (pp. 154-55)

There are several fine qualities to this novel, one of the finest being Rule's style which is mature and sure, often lyrical and beautiful. The development of the character of Ruth Wheeler, largely internal, as she moves from near defeat to affirmation, is convincing and strong. One of Rule's real strengths is in her handling of human relationships, particularly female ones, an area being explored by many contemporary women writers. The mother-daughter bonds formed between Ruth and Clara and Ruth and Claire, the problematical lesbian relationship of Gladys and Mavis, and the four-generational relationships of Clara, Ruth, Gladys and Ruthie (Gladys' baby) suggest new possibilities in the subject matter of the novel. However, its strengths are also its weaknesses in that the men in the novel are often less convincing as characters than the women; in fact, there is a tendency (though not entirely pervasive) to present men as destroyers and women as builders, a disturbing generalization. Another weakness of the novel is the facile philosophy underlying it. Ruth and her "family" see the world in easy, dichotomous we-they terms, "we" epitomizing an oasis of love precariously surviving in the "they" world of insensitivity and destruction. Presumably the reader is supposed to sympathize with "we", yet in the end Rule does not convince us of why we should. Is love enough? Is escape to an island and communal living a satisfying solution to the social problems raised in the novel? Do not the members of the commune, when all is said and done, look as smug and self-congratulatory as Hal riding his grader? There is also the irony, never acknowledged by the commune, that it is supported by the very system it rejects…. However, the novel is worthy of attention for the qualities already mentioned, for its honest attempt to deal with issues and questions that are very much part of our time, and for its place in the development of an important contemporary writer, Jane Rule. (p. 155)