The theme of moral judgment that is implicit in Mordecai Richler's early novels is explicit in St. Urbain's Horseman. Unlike Noah Adler and Duddy Kravitz, Jake Hersh faces more than metaphorical conviction on figurative moral charges. He stands before judge and jury, family and friends, media and audience charged with indecent assault, possession of cannabis, and aiding and abetting sodomy. Significantly, readers are virtually excluded from the court proceedings: only on the last day of trial are they permitted unmediated access to the Old Bailey, and only at Jake's sentencing do they learn the specific charges laid against him. In contrast, readers are the silent jury to Jake's private inquiry into his life, an inner trial that unfolds in tandem with the official proceedings. Fragments of Jake's memory, knowledge, and imagination serve as documents and depositions admitted into evidence. Sifting through the testimony, readers are confounded by this defendant, who, as Arnold Davidson remarks, possess “discordant qualities—positive and negative—that, although relatively easy to identify, are hard to add up” (140). This potential deadlock, he adds, echoes that occasioned in Richler's earlier novels:

Certainly Noah should do what every literary portrait of the artist as a young man prescribes and bravely strike out to fulfill his own anticipated destiny. Yet, by so doing, he probably kills his mother. Obviously, Duddy is a pusherke. And just as obviously, he is more. […] But difficult as Duddy's case is, Jake's is still more so. Nevertheless, as even a cursory reading of the novel demonstrates, Jake must be judged. The problem […] is to do so justly, and that, in a nutshell, is Jake's problem too.

(141-42)

Before handing down a ruling on Jake's life, readers must determine what constitutes an infraction of the moral code of modern society. They seemingly get little direction from Richler himself: not only does he fail to include characters of high moral or conservative values to represent the norm against which Jake may easily be measured, but he allows his narrative voice to falter indefinitely between sympathy and censure. A close examination of the novel's narrative structure, however, reveals that St. Urbain's Horseman is didactic by design. In The Implied Reader (1975), Wolfgang Iser suggests that an author incites and controls his readers' responses through the manipulation of a variety of textual strategies. For instance, in Iser's view, a text may be designed so that the

reader is constantly forced to think in terms of alternatives […] to visualize the possibilities which [the characters] have not thought of. While he is working out these alternatives the scope of his own judgment expands, and he is constantly invited to test and weigh the insights he has arrived at. […] The esthetic appeal of such a technique consists in the fact that it allows a certain latitude for the individual character of the reader, but also compels specific reactions—often unobtrusively—without expressly formulating them. By […] keeping him at a variable distance from the events, the text gives him the illusion that he can judge the proceedings in accordance with his own point of view. To do this, he has only to be placed in a position that will provoke him to pass judgments.

(118)

The various textual strategies in St. Urbain's Horseman—the juxtaposition of the early scenes, the inclusion of journal extracts, the use of repetition, the manipulation of mirrors, and the creation of a controlling structure—quietly provoke judgment in specific ways. Even as readers are compelled to appraise Jake's dubious actions, they are shown that it is often difficult to define and defend a moral code by which to live in the modern world. Nevertheless, these textual strategies ultimately urge readers to acknowledge that, no matter what the circumstances, the task of distinguishing the good from the bad, the innocent from the guilty, is essentially a simple one.

As literary jury members, readers undergo a figurative screening process that tests their capacity for exercising fair judgment. Through the juxtaposition of the early scenes of the novel, readers are made privy to Jake's unvoiced pleas for a discriminating judge, are presented with a series of scenes that portray unfair judgments, and are tested for a propensity toward hasty, misinformed rulings. Jake, fearing that his voice will be lost in the contradictory testimony, silently pleads: “Listen, your lordship. They're twisting everything” (19). Conscious of the jury's power, he wills them away: “Your lordship, listen to me … tell the jury to go home” (23). As the circumstantial evidence against him accumulates, Jake asks that it be considered within his specific context: first, in light of his personal history—“your lordship, you have a scene from my early sex life” (34); second, in relation to his social environment—“Your lordship, look at it this way. There's a sexual revolution going on outside” (41). Jake's entreaties reveal his fear of being misunderstood, and consequently, misjudged. Readers are made aware both of their authority and of the need to lend a discriminating ear to the proceedings.

Immediately following Jake's petitions, readers are presented with scenes—both past and present—that depict poor judgment based on a distorted context or on circumstantial evidence. That juxtaposition explicates Jake's silent fears and warns readers against making poor judgments. When, as a young man, Jake tries to go to New York, he is deemed undesirable by the border officials who either mistake him for Joey or do not believe, as Jake insists, that his friends had jokingly forged his name on numerous left-wing petitions (96). The night Jake meets his future wife, Nancy, he appraises her according to the reading material he finds in her apartment: “she could see him […] like a judge sifting through evidence. Two years detention for reading Vogue. Six months in solitary for Elle. The Ladies' Home Journal, off with her head. […] Enjoying herself she did not protest that she had sublet the flat” (48). When Jake's mother espies Nancy embracing Luke—Jake's best friend—she assumes that the two are having an affair. Nancy insists: “‘You are not to say a word to Jake. Do you understand?’ ‘Oh, I understand. Don't you worry.’ […] ‘Do you actually think Luke is my lover?’ ‘Who said a word?’” (70). Readers note that each misjudgment has the power to change Jake's life: the border official's mistake altered his destiny by sending him to London instead of New York; Jake's mistake could have thwarted the development of his relationship with Nancy; and the misunderstanding that causes Mrs. Hersh to brand her daughter-in-law a “whore” (55) could lead to problems between Jake and Nancy. Such scenes are designed to caution readers to consider all the evidence carefully before pronouncing judgment.

Readers immediately put this lesson into practice as their own tendency to convict Jake on the grounds of circumstantial or misleading evidence is repeatedly tested. Several early scenes in the novel function as prosecution testimony, attempting to implicate Jake in a variety of immoral acts. As the narrative unfolds, Jake's defense testimony dismisses the indictments. The temporal gap created by this arrangement of scenes tempts readers to make a premature conviction. In the opening chapter of the novel, readers encounter several pages of The Good Britons, a script the police found in Jake's bedroom. The script features Mary Poppins as a scantily clad, whip-bearing dominatrix, which, as far as the prosecutor is concerned, is proof positive of Jake's perversion. Because readers are unacquainted with Jake at this point, they may be inclined to agree. However, they later learn that Jake and Luke collaborated on The Good Britons in their early days together in London; they considered the script a parody and worked on it as a time-filler (163). Similarly, readers discover that there is nothing diabolic in the fact that Jake, “‘[n]o equestrian himself, keeps a saddle and a riding crop in a cupboard’” (14). The equipment belongs to his cousin Joey—the titular Horseman; Jake stores it, anticipating the day he will return the gear to its rightful owner (305). In fact, as Davidson remarks: “all this material evidence in the court case is ultimately explained, and what seems in the courtroom to demonstrate Jake's depravity really proves no such thing” (151).

That observation extends to inadmissible evidence. For instance, scandal seems to lurk behind Nancy's fear that an unspecified incident that occurred in the toilets at Harrod's might incriminate Jake. His assurances to Nancy only incite readers' curiosity: “‘They can't bring it up. It never made the charge sheet’” (37). And, once again, the truth proves innocuous, not appalling. Readers learn that Jake was merely a protesting bystander when his brother-in-law, Herky, overwhelmed by a professional admiration for Harrod's toilets, began to snap photographs. Jake explained his misinterpreted actions, which caused customers to deride the two as “‘[f]ilthy buggers,’” to the store's detectives (195). Finally, even evidence that seems to implicate Jake in crimes unrelated to the trial proves misleading. Mrs. Hersh raises questions in readers' minds when, after peeking into Jake's correspondence, she confronts him: “‘Does Nancy know that you send money every month to a woman in Israel?’ […] ‘Is the child yours?’” (77-78). Jake's answer—“‘Everybody wants to be cast in a Jacob Hersh production’” (78)—rings false. The truth, however, confirms his innocence of the implied charge of adultery; Chava and Zev were abandoned by Joey, and Jake sends them money in an attempt to atone for his cousin's sins (212). In these ways, the clever juxtaposition of scenes in the first section of the novel serves both to warn readers from and to tempt them toward hasty, foolish judgments grounded in incomplete or conjectural evidence and improper contexts. This design strategy unsettles readers in their role as jurors, alerting them to the potential abuses of their positions of power and trust, and warning them against convicting without a full appraisal of the evidence or a complete understanding of the context of the defendant's actions.

One design strategy urges readers to pay particular attention to the context of Jake's behavior; others reveal how difficult it is to factor in the modern context without losing sight of traditional moral values. The careful orchestration of the novel's early scenes seems to give way to a bewildering jumble of testimony and evidence. However, as the trials unfold, readers distinguish patterns amid the clutter and recapitulation. Two design strategies encompass two different, though connected, areas of Jake's life: the social and the private. The inclusion of journal extracts details Jake's absurd social context whereas the repetition of various scenes and statements evokes Jake's inner life. The narrative is littered with press clippings from some of the more than three dozen newspapers and magazines cited in the novel.¹ Notably, readers, as jurors, are properly shielded from the press surrounding Jake's trial: “Nancy had ripped out the story with his photograph on the back page” (12). However, the media circus operates as witness for the defense by mimicking Jake's sense of bombardment by the ludicrous, pathetic, and often grotesque world within which he attempts to define his moral values. By classifying the various exhibits, a pattern emerges: each of the press clippings is relevant to Jake's life. Some of them taunt his insecurities. The black humor in the headlines mocks his irrational guilt for his happiness in the midst of human misery: “CHIN UP! THE POLIO GIRL CAN COOK” (12), “THE CRIPPLED BOY WHO WANTS TO BACK BRITAIN” (31), and “WHILE YOU'RE EATING YOUR DINNER TONIGHT, 417 PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM STARVATION” (311).² Jake's fear of dying of cancer is fueled by “SURGERY: How Not to Die of Cancer” (19) and “MONTHLY TESTS FOR CANCER” (281). Headlines such as “MIXED MARRIAGES STINK” (177) and “‘HAPPY’ MARRIAGES MAY BE JUST DULL” (259) mock Jake's comfortable relationship with Nancy.

Two of the clippings have a more particular relevance, urging readers to compare Jake's actions to those of his friends, Duddy Kravitz and Harry Stein. By doing so, they observe the vast distance between Jake and his friends on the moral-ethical spectrum. The article “INSTANT REDUCING PILLS CONTAIN TAPEWORM” (139) details the scandal that makes Duddy rich. The press clipping “HITCHCOCK FILM IDEA BEHIND BID TO KILL STARLET” (304) describes Harry's vendetta against an actress who scorned him. Although Jake is not a model of virtue, his actions never equal Duddy and Harry's blatant disregard for life in the name of profit or revenge. Other extracts provide a social context for Jake's trial at the Old Bailey. Spread throughout the narrative are headlines or references to articles about sex that provide a context for Jake's position as a defendant against charges of sexual misconduct. Esquire prints an article entitled “Is Your Kid Brother a Homosexual?” (85), Saturday Night magazine features “FRENCH CANADIAN ATTITUDES TO SEX” (40), and Mayfair magazine includes “‘Quest’, a survey on the sex life of single girls in London today” (61), while yet another issue boasts: “THE NUDEST NATHALIE DELON. SUSAN STRASBERG STRIPS. SCRUMPTIOUS SALLY'S ALLEY IS A SENSUAL PLACE TO BE” (59). Jake's indecent pinch is a minor offense in comparison to the actions of Paul Crane who, standing trial for rape, boasts of his many sexual affairs in an Express piece entitled “MY LIFE AND LOVES: By Air Canada Steward on Sex Charge” (58). Those press clippings recall Jake's appeal to Justice Beal to note that a sexual revolution is taking place outside the courtroom walls. Although readers are urged to consider the context of all evidence before passing judgment, the press extracts warn readers against allowing the absurdity and immorality of the modern social context to override their moral and rational deliberations. The second category of press clippings balances the first: on one hand, readers are tempted by the headlines to qualify Jake's behavior by comparing it to the actions occurring in his society; but, on the other hand, readers must note that Jake's penchant for measuring his happiness against the scale of human misery that is spelled out in the newspapers is ludicrous. Indeed, just as it is irrational for Jake to feel guilty for his happy and comfortable lifestyle because there is misery in the world, so too is it irrational for him to expect to be exonerated for his crimes simply because there are greater offenders in society. Readers must, then, establish their own middle ground and decide to what extent the modern social context should be allowed to qualify private morality.³

Whereas the inclusion of media excerpts provides evidence of an absurd modern world, the design strategy of repetition reveals the inner workings of Jake's mind. Combining memory, imagination, and history, Jake's private ruminations center on the Holocaust and depict his growing preoccupation with his failure to act against its injustice and the consequent creation of the Horseman fantasy.⁴ Jake admits that he is exhilarated by the trial “because at last the issues had been joined. […] After years of waiting somebody had at last come to ask him, Jacob Hersh, husband, father, son, house owner, investor, sybarite, film fantasy spinner, for an accounting” (76-77, [257]).⁵ Jake, convinced that his happiness is undeserved, repeatedly victimizes himself with his guilt-ridden imagination: “in Jake's Jewish nightmare, they come. Into his house. The extermination officers seeking out the Jew vermin. Ben is […] heaved out of the window. […] Molly [is …] flung against the brick fireplace. Sammy is dispatched with a pistol” (65). Variations of that nightmare recur throughout the narrative. When cavorting with his family, “he would all at once be riddled with anxiety. Why am I being allowed to enjoy myself? […] Jake would scrutinize the surrounding woods for advancing Nazi troops. Search the grass for poisonous snakes. Rake the skies for falling planets” (252). During an evening out with Nancy, “he would suddenly, unexpectedly, clamor for the bill. Gas leak. […] GAS LEAK! […] Sammy and Molly. Sprawled lifeless on their beds” (255). Jake's guilt extends beyond the Nazi death camps; he awaits a host of “injustice collectors”: “concentration camp survivors. The emaciated millions of India. The starvelings of Africa. […] The thalidomide babies, the paraplegics. The insulted, the injured” (76-77, [257]). However, it is the repeated images conveyed by war-crimes testimony that echo tellingly throughout the narrative. Eva Taube notes that a “series of overlapping images intermittently flash through the narrative like camera shots repeated and relocated in various contexts in the novel, images of human beings reduced to impotent victims. The repetition functions emotively to heighten the shock, and intellectually, through the sheer restatement, to induce a mood of brooding and thoughtful contemplation” (183). Jake repeatedly recalls portions of actual transcripts of postwar investigations: children recording their names in their own blood on the barracks walls; women forced to drink from latrine water; and bodies beaten, gnawed by rats, or thrown into pits of seething human fat (64-55, 147, 225-26). He is particularly haunted by the ominous exchange between an officer of the court and a witness: “‘Mengele cannot have been there all the time.’ ‘In my opinion, always. Night and day’” (65, 147, 225, 226, 309). Wilfred Cude describes those dull unchanging phrases as “the devil's own measure, timing tick, tock, tick, the relentless beat of damnation, counting against Mengele on the metronome of hell” (53).

Ofelia Cohn-Sfetcu observes that, although Jake is able to pass hard judgments, he “is unable to act accordingly. And it is this very incapacity that obliges him to use Joey as his self-justifying image […] to have him perform acts he himself should perform” (33). As Jake reflects on the injustices of the world, his cousin's challenge—spoken many years ago in Montreal—echoes in his ears: “‘What are you going to do about it?’” (113, [114], 217, 309, [381]). The repetition of this rally cry taunts Jake's inability to act on his professed hatreds.⁶ In response, Jake fashions, from the memories of his cousin, a doppelgänger that embodies his desire to enact revenge for the horrors of the Holocaust.⁷ By repeatedly summoning visions of the Horseman—embellishing a little each time—Jake creates the avenger he needs to temper the guilt and fear that threatens to overwhelm him. In a sense, Jake writes, directs, films, edits, and privately screens this fantasy action-adventure movie. As he replays it in his imagination, the Horseman reaches epic proportions in Jake's life. In his mind's eye, Jake often sees Joey “cantering on a magnificent Pleven stallion. Galloping, thundering. Planning fresh campaigns, more daring maneuvers” (36, [217], 257). Jake is convinced that Joey is stalking Mengele. He repeatedly envisions the Horseman straining to find the “unmarked road in the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López, on the Paraná River” (11, 36). Later, he embellishes the scene: “Neighing, the stallion rears, obliging the Horseman to dig his stirrups in. Eventually he slows. Still in the highlands, emerging from the dense forest to scan the scrub below, he strains to find the unmarked road that winds into the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López” (147, [380]).

Yet, for every mental screening of the Horseman fantasy, Jake is forced to acknowledge another strike against his absent cousin from the growing list of prosecution witnesses who accuse the man of brutality, thievery, lying, polygamy, extortion and blackmail, drug smuggling and trafficking. Although most of the evidence against Joey—like the evidence for him—is circumstantial or hearsay, it provides grounds for a reasonable doubt that readers are likely to concede long before Jake does. In the final pages of the novel, however, Jake recognizes that, like Aaron, he worships a false god. He asks himself: “[w]hat if the Horseman was a distorting mirror and we each took the self-justifying image we required of him?” (382). Thus, the design strategy of repetition gives readers access to Jake's private fears and the means by which he deals with them; it underscores the importance of weighing all evidence equally in the attempt to reach the truth and develops a key aspect of Jake's—indeed, of modern society's—moral dilemma: how can one fashion a moral conscience in a post-Holocaust world? The fact that Jake eventually learns to evaluate and to adjust his perspective of the Horseman suggests to readers that the process of gathering and weighing evidence, factoring in social, personal, and historical contexts, arriving at a judgment on the basis of these deliberations, and acting upon it, is not as impossible a task as it may seem. In fact, another narrative device, mirroring, indicates that although the line between moral and immoral behavior can be a fine one, it is unmistakably drawn.

Harry, like Joey, is a distorting mirror—a real-life doppelgänger who is the epitome of Jake's bad qualities taken to an extreme. Zailig Pollock observes: “over and over again we see aspects of Jake reflected in Harry in an ugly, distorted manner. Things which in Jake seem neurotic, selfish, foolish, but basically likable, become completely repulsive in Harry” (100). Significantly, the incident that led to the criminal charges laid against the two was a result of Harry impersonating Jake to lure a girl to the Hampstead house. The link between the two men is made through the design strategy of mirrors, which reveals that Jake and Harry perform similar actions.⁸ Both Jake and Harry take petty vengeance on people whom they resent. Jake acts against a neighbor: “pretending to water the dahlia bed on his side of the fence, he directed a spray of murdering lime solution through the fence at Old Lady Dry Cunt's rhododendrons. […] He'd teach her to write snotty notes about the noise his brash American children make in the garden” (22). The unwatched flower bed is mirrored in the unattended Silver Cloud Rolls Royce Harry spots late one night: “[d]rifting past, ostensibly without purpose, Harry opened the knife in his mac pocket and ran it the length of the Rolls, walking on some distance before wheeling around to slash the body paint on the other side” (62). Similarly, both Jake and Harry intrude upon the private lives of others. Jake, when invited for dinner at the home of the Ormsby-Fletchers, snoops through their bathroom, scrutinizing the contents of the medicine chest and looking through the laundry hamper to find “Pamela's smalls. Intricately laced black panties, no more than a peekaboo web. A spidery black bra, almost a filigree. You naughty thing, he thought” (153). Harry mirrors Jake's actions, rooting through the drawers of the house while Jake and Nancy are away: “It was a giggle, coming across Nancy's love letters in Jake's bottom desk drawer. (‘I never did that before, darling, not with any other man […].’) Oh, wasn't she the grand duchess! […] Such transcendental thoughts! Such high-flown sentiments! As if she wasn't made like all the others, with the answer between her legs” (340).

Although these mirrors are designed to draw Jake and Harry into close association, still other mirrors prove that the two are worlds apart in terms of their motivation and the scope of their actions. Telephone calls form part of both Jake and Harry's repertoire of mischievous and selfish pranks. When, early in their relationship, Nancy dates another man, Jake's jealousy overwhelms him and he telephones to interrupt the sexual encounter he fears is taking place. Nancy's date answered the phone, “[l]istened, blanched. And hung up. ‘Don't let it worry you,’ Nancy said. ‘It's a local pervert. He usually gives me a tinkle at this hour’” (182). Jake's embarrassing obsession is mirrored, with great distortion, in Harry's telephone calls. He harasses an innocently condescending actress by badgering her with obscene phone calls (187). He once phoned a bomb threat into a boat show at Olympia, explaining in a Latin accent that it was “a protest against the government's Cuban policy” (300). He pulls the same trick when Jake flies to Cannes, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Paris (297). Although Jake acts to avoid losing someone he loves, Harry lashes out against what he cannot have—an actress who does not offer respect, people who can afford yachts, and Jake who will not repay Joey's “loan.” Jake's desperation endears him to Nancy; the outcome of his prank is marriage plans. Harry's phone pranks have serious, wide-reaching consequences. He brags about the reaction to his boat show prank: “‘They took it seriously, you know. Old Khrushchev waving his shoe at the U.N. Castro in New York, raising hell. They didn't take any chances. Police cars. Fire trucks. The lot” (300).

The attitudes that Jake and Harry appear to share prove to be grounded in two different philosophies. Both men feel that they have missed out on something that the people around them have enjoyed. Jake feels that his generation was “[a]lways the wrong age. Ever observers, never participants” (75). Harry expresses a similar discontent: “Yes, yes indeed, everybody else, everywhere else, was getting his. […] Harry, born too late” (59). The difference lies in the things they want. Jake wants a moment in his life when he is forced to set his allegiances, to fight for something he believes in: he laments that his generation had lived through “the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the holocaust, Hiroshima, the Israeli War of Independence, McCarthyism, Korea […] Vietnam and the drug culture, with impunity” (75). Harry, in contrast, wants a crack at “[g]irls with the longest legs imaginable, lubricant girls, rolling nylons on like condoms. Girls snuggling into bras and rising from the bath, towel ready to drop” (59). When each gets the wished for—albeit modified—opportunity, it is Jake who is able to act. He sees the trial as his moment to act, and he believes that he did not behave badly, that he remained a friend to Harry (378). In contrast, when Jake takes Harry to a party, “Harry, once thrust on the girls he longed for, could not stitch together a coherent sentence. He was either gratuitously coarse without any redeeming wit or stunned into silence. Finally, Jake rescued him” (313).

Pollock concludes that, through the design strategy of mirrors, “Richler is telling us that the seeds of everything Harry has become are already present in Jake” (100). However, as well as suggesting how similar the two characters' actions and opinions may be, these mirrors stress that the differences between Jake and Harry are instantly recognizable. Furthermore, readers recognize that Harry's upbringing and environment may help explain his behavior, but it can never excuse it. So, although they stand side by side in the prisoner's dock in Number One Courtroom at the Old Bailey, Justice Beal clearly sees the distance between their moral characters. He chastises Jake for what he terms his folly in forming an association with Harry: “‘You have been a confounded fool, Hersh’” (369). Then he berates Harry: “‘You are a humbug, Stein, and a troublemaker of the most reprehensible sort. […] you are a menace, a persistent public menace’” (370). Jake is fined; Harry is jailed. The design strategy of mirrors reassures readers by illustrating that although there is often a fine line between the essentially good and the essentially bad, it is not impossible to draw.⁹

As the narrative unfolds, readers are led to see that despite the fact that one must be conscious of the social, personal, and historical contexts of all actions, defining and acting on one's moral position is not, in Richler's view, an overwhelming task. The overall structure of the novel suggests that for all the chaos and absurdity of Jake's public and private contexts, his own path to self-knowledge is a deliberate and systematic journey. The complicated, often disjointed, flashbacks, which range from Jake's recollections of his recent escapades in London to his memories of youth and adolescence in Montreal, are bridled by the design strategies that control the overall structure of the novel. Jake believes that the trial neatly pulls the episodes of his life into relation: “Jake's past […] assumed nifty contours. A meaningful symmetry. The Horseman, Doktor Mengele, Harry, Ingrid, all frog-marching him to where he was to stand so incongruously, stupefied and inadequate, on trial in Courtroom Number One at the Old Bailey” (56). The controlling structure allows readers to perceive, as Jake does, the “nifty contours,” meaningful symmetry, and sense of progression toward an ultimate judgment. A sense of definite progression is achieved by the closing lines of each of the novel's four sections. Like an attorney attempting to build a case from fragments of testimony, evidence, and documents, Jake draws conclusions from his disjointed flashbacks.

The final lines of the first section confirm readers' suspicions that Jake is preoccupied not with the happenings at the Old Bailey, but with his inner tribunal. He reads from Samuel Johnson's Diary: “‘When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of the body and disturbances of the mind very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults and exercise many deficiencies’” (78). That quotation signals the end of opening remarks and the beginning of the true trial. The closing lines of the following three sections underscore the significance of the Horseman to Jake's private life. By capping each set of recollections with an observation about his relationship with Joey, Jake recognizes his dependence on the Horseman. Section two ends with the observation that “[w]ithout realizing it, Jake had become Cousin Joey's advocate” (144). The third section closes with Jake's recognition that Joey “had become his moral editor. [… H]e tried above all to please the Horseman. For somewhere he was watching, judging. Once Cousin Joey's advocate, he was now his acolyte” (258). The final section of the novel suggests that Jake finds a median position between becoming the Horseman and letting him die in his mind's eye: “Once in his attic aerie, he retrieved the Horseman's journal from the cupboard, found the page where he had written ‘died July 20, 1967, in an air crash,’ crossed it out, and wrote in over it, ‘presumed dead.’ Then he returned to bed, and fell into a deep sleep, holding Nancy to him” (384). Jake overcomes his blindness and sees how his life has been dominated by the Horseman and, through the trial at the Old Bailey, relinquishes his dependence on him. He discovers that “his private destiny is not to seek revenge, but to reaffirm his commitment to moral values infinitely fragile, yet viable: justice, conscience, honour, dignity, accountability” (Taube 186).

The progression suggested by the part divisions is tempered by the circular narration. The novel begins in medias res and moves full circle, “presenting over the last four chapters the circumstances that engendered the frantic situation introduced at the first” (Cude 66). Framing devices emphasize that circularity. The narrative opens with Jake waking in the middle of the night and climbing to his attic aerie and closes with him descending from the aerie and going back to sleep. Metaphorically, the interim development takes place in the attic aerie, that symbol of Jake's troubled mind. His private deliberations keep pace with the proceedings at the Old Bailey. He climbs to the aerie on the evening of the first day of trial and descends after both Justice Beal's and his own verdicts are rendered. The circular format is significant on several levels. First, it symbolizes Jake's recapitulating state of mind and his inability to proceed in his life until he has resolved the tensions between his past and his present. Taube notes that the “spiritual quest incorporates a circular structure […] implying the cyclical rhythm of eternal search” (184). Scrutinizing his life, Jake recognizes this circular pattern. For instance, he sees a connection between himself and his son. “Circles completed, he thought” (13), upon realizing that he once mocked his parents' accent the same way his son mocks his. He also recognizes his father's actions in his own. As his father had when he was young, Jake loads up his car with treats and goes to meet his family at the summer cottage, thinking: “You know what life is, Yankel? Tell me, you're so smart. A circle. A little kikeleh” (314). Obviously, the circular pattern is evident to readers only when the novel is complete. In that respect, the novel's structure mimics a trial situation: the jury is closest to its fullest possible awareness of the truth only at the conclusion of the proceedings; and only after the defense and the prosecution summarize their cases in their closing remarks is the jury free to deliberate the verdict.

When Jake tells Nancy about the criminal charges that have been laid against him, he prefaces his account with an analogy: “‘When I was at university, we used to play something we called the Values Game. We set ourselves moral dilemmas’” (346). For example, he explains, you ask yourself and one another whether or not you would risk your life in an attempt to save a drowning stranger: “‘[t]here is nobody else on the bridge. So if you choose to walk away and pretend you haven't seen him, nobody will know but you. What do you do?’” (347). Earlier, when Nancy had protested Jake's involvement with Harry, he had defended his actions with a similar metaphor: “‘Harry's a street accident and I just happen to be a witness. What should I do, flee without handing in my name?’” (306). Jake's questions—What do you do? What should I do?—are, for him, no longer hypothetical. For the first time in his life, his moral predicament is actual and he must act on his convictions: “the trial, by giving Jake the opportunity to act, for which he has been waiting all his life, gives him the opportunity to define himself as well” (Pollock 93). As jurors, readers are playing the Values Game, attempting to decide what they would do given Jake's predicament. The other verdicts are in: Justice Beal pronounces Jake guilty of indecent assault but does not sentence him to jail; Jake finds himself guilty of inaction and agrees to direct Luke's latest script, in essence placing himself on parole.

Finally, readers must respond to Jake. The design strategies have led them to understand both the enormity of the task—not only of establishing a code of moral values but also of situating a particular character, a fictional life, within it—and the relative ease with which it can be accomplished. When faced with the defendants, it is enough for Justice Beal to call Jake a fool and Harry a menace and to penalize each accordingly. When Luke asks Jake what he believes in, it is enough for Jake to say “‘I believe in theirs and ours. Dr. Johnson, yes. Dr. Leary, no’” (251). And, in the last analysis, readers too may simply respond guilty or not guilty, yes or no to Jake Hersh, to Harry Stein, and to St. Urbain's Horseman. But the experience of the text has shown readers that this simple rendering of a verdict must be supported by the weight of conviction. And that conviction must be grounded in a personal code of moral values that is by no means easy to achieve.

Notes

1. Several of these periodicals have names that emphasize the theme of judgment: the Standard, the Observer, the Chronicle, the Times, Look, and the Mirror.

2. Jake's responses to these headlines are contradictory. He laughs at the crippled boy (31) but sweeps the Times from the table when reading about world starvation (312).

3. In each of his major novels, Richler invites readers to compare the main protagonists' behavior to the failures of their communities: recall the comparison between Noah and such failures as Schloime, Max, and Wolf; or between Duddy and Macpherson, Cuckoo, and Friar. Readers are asked if success within this context is success enough to satisfy their own moral codes.

4. Jake's obsession with the unresolved injustices of the Holocaust is revealed in his attic aerie—a symbol of his mind—which is filled both with paraphernalia depicting Nazi terrorism, and with the journals and the equestrian equipment of the Horseman who, Jake imagines, stalks the earth to wreak vengeance.

5. Here and throughout, page references enclosed in square brackets indicate that the quotation, though not exact, is repeated here with variation, often minute variation.

6. When he bumps into a middle-aged lady in Germany, he apologizes “instead of following through with his shoulder and stamping on her. Hatred was a discipline. He would have to train harder, that's all” (218).

7. Joey's function as a doppelgänger is emphasized by the fact that Jake is often mistaken for Joey because they share the same initials. Furthermore, Jake can never catch up to his cousin and when, finally, he no longer needs him, he learns of his death.

8. Jake calls Harry by his Yiddish name, Hershel, which is also a version of his own last name, thus confirming his role as doppelgänger. The similarity in names echoes that between Jake and Joey Hersh—the other doppelgänger relationship.

9. Recall Moey Hanover's twisted truths: years ago his grandfather assured him that if a man holds a sword out of a third floor window and flying past comes another man, and he stabs him, the swordsman is not necessarily guilty of murder. This “enabled Moey to grasp at an early age that truth was a many-splendored thing: it had nuances” (246). He uses these nuances to pardon his transgressions, technically sidestepping the precise definition of adultery. He may of course be fooling himself and his wife; however, he does not fool readers. Yes, the truth has nuances, but some lies are glaring.

Works Cited

Cohn-Sfetcu, Ofelia. “Of Self, Temporal Cubism, and Metaphor: Mordecai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman.” International Fiction Review 3:1 (1976): 30-34.

Cude, Wilfred. “The Golem as Metaphor for Art: The Monster Takes Meaning in St. Urbain's Horseman.” Journal of Canadian Studies 12:2 (1977): 50-69.

Davidson, Arnold. Mordecai Richler. New York: Ungar, 1983.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.

Pollock, Zailig. “The Trial of Jake Hersh.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 22 (1978): 93-106.

Richler, Mordecai. St. Urbain's Horseman. 1971. rpt. Manchester: Panther Books, 1973.

Taube, Eva. Rvw. of St. Urbain's Horseman, by Mordecai Richter. Canadian Literature 96 (Spring 1983): 182-87.