The late Desmond Pacey's single-paragraph dismissal of the fiction of Philip Child … in the Second Edition of the Literary History of Canada remains unchanged from its appearance in the original edition. No one can quarrel with its contention that Child's "skill as a novelist is not quite commensurate with the splendour of his ideals," that "he tends to be too didactic in his fiction" and shows himself "unwilling to rely upon indirection and implication." The trouble with the judgment is that it ignores an entire aspect of Child's fiction of considerable interest to students of the affective and psychological aspects of Canadian literature. (p. 41)

My purpose in this article is neither revisionist nor rehabilitative. I seek only to point out the presence and significance of certain themes running throughout Child's novels and to demonstrate the degree to which the works' preoccupation with such matters as guilt and suffering, psychic fragmentation and sexual disturbance, provides a literary experience that does not always buttress the Christian humanist message of the books. The optimism and rationalism of Christian humanism is in fact bypassed in favour of a painful reconciliation of warring elements through the symbolic devices of dreams. Child's is a fiction replete with the stuff of dreams, and by exploration attempts to chart a nighttime of confusion, horror and attempted restoration of calm which lies below the daytime serenity of the novels' overt messages.

There are many ways in which guilt shapes the characters and their dilemmas in Child's fiction. (pp. 41-2)

The world in [Mr. Ames Against Time] is one of radical corruption. Even though Sol Mower remains a brute of Hitlerian will-to-power, all the major characters enmesh themselves in guilt over his richly-deserved murder. Mr. Ames, we are assured frequently, eventually triumphs through a Ghandilike force of personal righteousness; though he is old, frail and poor, his faith in Faith enables him to win through to the truth in a fallen world. Yet that faith, whatever its efficacy, clearly has little basis for existence in view of the facts of this guilt-ridden world.

Guilt permeates Child's best works, Village of Souls and God's Sparrows, too…. Daniel Thatcher, in the latter book, is burdened with sufficient guilt over an accident involving his sister to run away from home; and Jornay, in the former, is so overcome by the knowledge of his cruelty toward one of the women in his life as to accompany a missionary on his travels. Both are members of fictional worlds reflecting in a less obsessive manner the guiltiness of Mr. Ames. But to recall these other novels gives rise to the question: Can one rid these characters of their body of guilt?

Though Pacey has described the ideology of Child's fiction as that of Christian humanism, the frailty of that belief (even if it actually exists in the novels) becomes manifest once we consider the means by which guilt can be purged. For the author deals with a post-Christian world in which neither religious liturgies nor private prayers serve any longer as modes of purgation. A culture's attempts to come to grips with this problem lie at the very roots of Western literature…. Child's characters have to make do according to the tenets of secular humanism for their means of release…. [These] secularist rituals may derive their real punch from their resemblances to the religious ones they have displaced, though they are not presented in that fashion. Thus Smoke, after delivering his confession to a newspaper reporter, finds a burning building and saves a child from it, perishing in the attempt. Lys in Village of Souls expiates her former arrogance by tending smallpox-ridden Indians; John Wentworth in Blow Wind, Come Wrack atones for a period of academic ease by getting himself involved in counter-spy activities that result in his torture and near-death…. [A] typical pattern in Child's fiction is to move from a motif of suffering-as-expiation-for-crimes-and-guilt to a practice of … suffering-for-its-own-sake…. (pp. 42-3)

[We see] in the novels a pattern of widespread guilt; attempts to expiate it lead to gestures either pathetic (the boy in God's Sparrows trying to run off with the gypsies), desperate (running into a burning building in Mr. Ames) or schoolboy-heroic (becoming a counterspy in Blow Wind). My object is not to ridicule the gestures, but to indicate the might of the forces producing those gestures, as well as the absence of any more convincing or sophisticated ritual by which guilt might be purged and the spirit restored to health. Even where the gesture is genuinely heroic (the rescue in Day of Wrath, the nursing of the sick in Village of Souls), it appears to be performed as much to soothe a needlessly angry conscience as to affirm life in the midst of death. We are, it seems, in the presence of great powers indeed, which shiver the individual with extraordinary ease.

God's Sparrows offers a classic instance of literary form conveying a theme more striking and profound than what the overt message states…. [The] work offers an uneasy synthesis of family chronicle and war novel. As the hero, Daniel Burnet Thatcher, grows up and goes to war the family material devolves into a series of obituary notices and time-outs while the battle machinery gobbles up everything else in sight. The conclusion focusses upon the near-dead, shattered body of the hero…. (pp. 44-5)

A family-based culture marked by tenderness and gentility … has been turned into an irrelevant sideshow by a culture now bent on self-destruction. As the recruiter's speech showed, that culture has come to accept violence and suffering as a moral means test. But the strains of a culture torn to pieces by its contradictory impules—Upper Canadian civilization and its discontents—are best exemplified in the splits apparent in the hero and in the patterns of psychic division occurring among the other characters of the novel. (p. 45)

There is always something very tiresome in writing about the gaps in a hero's psyche. After all, what culture worthy of the name has ever produced men so complete in themselves as to feel perfectly at home in this world? Why single out these novels for special attention; why notice one person muttering to himself in an insane asylum full of them? My justification is that the incidence in Child's novels of torn seekers of better selves is almost universal. It isn't merely a case of St. Augustine's universal restlessness that can find no peace until it rests in God, but a case of widespread sundering and deprivation. (p. 47)

[The symbolic vocabulary of psychic displacement] produces to an extreme degree in God's Sparrows what can be found in milder forms in the other novels. In the same way, the ever-present theme of sexual disturbance will be best observed through a close examination of Village of Souls.

Sexuality becomes a painful burden in the world of Village of Souls, a strange phenomenon in a novel whose message is embodied in a process of sexual selection…. Jornay's acceptance of Canadian realities shows itself through his union with the Indian woman in preference to the French woman he first wed. (p. 48)

In view of the usual clear-cut distinction between light and dark heroines, and with the light one in this case associated with a morbid, decadent sexuality, the reader would expect to find Lys' rival linked with the forces of life and fertility. However, this isn't the case. We have seen that Anne's cruelty is evident from an early stage. In her wilderness she embodies the monstrous aspects of the wilderness which the novel frequently mentions. Her first sexual experience with Jornay is a rough, brutal one which she provokes. Jornay's final reconciliation with Anne happens after she has Christianized herself and grown closer to Lys, so that she too goes off to Indian villages to nurse smallpox victims. Thus Anne and Jornay, once Lys and her spirit have departed, form a kind of prototypical Canadian couple, able both to embrace and transcend the savagery of their environment. Jornay's final vision is one of man's insignificance amid the wild grandeur of nature. (p. 50)

Obviously, sexuality remains a mysterious power that can become socialized only with difficulty, by the sort of compromises Anne must make in her bows toward Christianity…. [Nature] is either purged into a vast indifference (the novel's conclusion) or made palatable by an idealized experience of mystical union with it…. [The] characters in God's Sparrows thrive best on a regime of renunciation.

Thus Daniel Thatcher, after an incomplete encounter with an inoffensive prostitute, stumbles out of her room declaring: "'Women! God Almighty, how I loathe them.' He felt as though he had been dragged through ordure." Shortly afterward, he receives a telegram informing him of his mother's death. Of course, Daniel loses his first girl to his brother and best shows his love for Beatrice within an atmosphere of impending death. So also the love between Simon and Anna in Day of Wrath ultimately causes her death, while sexual rivalries implicate Mike Ames in the murder of Mower. Finally, John Wentworth of Blow Wind allows himself to admit his love for lone only after he has discovered that she, too, is a counterspy and that they must brave danger together. (pp. 50-1)

Granted then that sexuality appears largely as a destructive force, something often appearing within a context of violence and death, the paradox remains that to embrace suffering and death purges guilt and legitimizes sex….

[Guilt] is a pervasive force throughout Child's fiction, and the rituals by which it may be purged are many. One of its principal sources remains the very existence of sexuality, with its unruly kicks against the goods of civilization and its associations with the demonic…. This inability to accommodate themselves to their sexual natures provides one of the forces producing the frequent splits within Child's characters. It produces as well the neccessity for having a number of figures, each of whom carries a detached portion of the hero's psyche. In short, the novels are replete with centrifugal forces, with unmediated energies threatening to tear apart the works' moral coherences. What pulls these forces into some sort of compatibility? That, in art as in life, comes about through dreams and visions which provide symbolic re-enactments of the real events of the novel…. (p. 51)

Dreams play an important role in all of Philip Child's fiction, foreshadowing disasters or providing flashbacks, granting both hope and despair in the many-tongued speech of symbolism. Even meditative, near-dream-like states of consciousness provide havens of peace and self-recollection during stressful periods. However the role of dreams in the two best novels is a structural one. Not only do the dreams advance the perceptions of the characters, but they bring into a temporary reconciliation the warring themes of the works. The clearest example of this occurs in God's Sparrows….

Daniel Thatcher's major dream … represents the closest the character will come to grasping that psychic wholeness that has eluded him….

[In] the dream Daniel reclaims himself through asserting kinship/twinship with his cousin [Quentin] during a court martial. In a way he has already done this, since partway through the dream his own consciousness merges for a while with Quentin's. However abrupt this switch may be, its dream-logic reveals a significant step by Daniel in his own healing, a process that will culminate in the claiming of kinship and the vision of life's process of disintegration/reintegration. (p. 52)

The difficulty holds that the novel … remains split between dream and waking. However exhilarating the look at the vale of soul-making, however much the novel's characters may choose to position their moves for personal integration within "inner" psychic processes, the fact remains that a realistic novel—this novel—possesses an ineradicable commitment to the "outer" processes of society and politics. Our final look at Daniel Thatcher shows him a shattered wreck barely preserved from being hurled alive into a common grave…. The ending of God's Sparrows demonstrates the extent to which the world of dreams and the unconscious helps to knit together the splintered hero, but shows as well the fissures between that world and the everyday one which the novel cannot bridge. (p. 53)

It is in Village of Souls, with its world where the divisions between dream and reality have been blurred, that Child proves best able to provide a convincing … calming of the storms of guilt, psychic disintegration and sexual terror which afflict his characters. The success of the integration process in that novel provides us with a heightened awareness of the unbridled horrors existing elsewhere. This helps to explain the didacticism, the flat declarations of hope and rejoicing that spot the novels. They exist, not as beauty spots over an unacknowledged fear, but as charms against a clear and present sense of danger. The cruel and monstrous shapes of frustration, which reveal the wrong people falling in love and the right people under a steamroller, never quite fade away from the novels, however intense their subjection to happy (or at least hopeful) endings. This psychic savagery makes them still interesting to read and of some significance in tracing in [Canadian] culture the assaults of modernism upon the certitudes of traditional systems of belief. In Child's fiction, those beliefs are still there to be asserted, though they cannot be integrated fully with the tangled, more subversive realities of the stories. The clashing systems can only be accommodated in dreams. But we wake to pain. (p. 55)

Dennis Duffy, "Memory=Pain: The Haunted World of Philip Child's Fiction," in Canadian Literature, No. 84, Spring, 1980, pp. 41-56.