The Village of Souls succeeds remarkably often in the difficult task of externalizing three separate spiritual struggles, all of them struggles with loneliness and love. Yet the plot which provides the framework for this spiritual drama is trite, and even melodramatic. A seventeenth-century voyageur, Bertrand Jornay, is beset by savage and treacherous Indians and half-breeds in the course of his efforts first to protect his white bride, a fille du roi named Lys, and later to accept an Indian wife, Anne, who is really a lost white girl…. As handled, however, [the scenes in the book] are not melodramatic in effect; nor, on the other hand, are they particularly memorable. Much more vivid are the lonely canoe trips through the primeval forest, which open and close the novel. On the opening trip, up river towards Lake Ontario, Bertrand forces himself to expose his loneliness and longing to Lys…. As each in turn gains spiritual dignity for the first time in his life, each successively realizes a loneliness as intense as the primeval countryside, though by then Lys is hopelessly separated from Bertrand. Scenes like [this] show Child's unusual talent for dramatizing emotions. (p. 29)

God's Sparrows achieves—though much less often—a similar success in dramatizing mental turbulence. It also contains the most effective scenes of the First World War in Canadian fiction. The War becomes the test for the intellectual conflict which opposes two family groups to each other. The Thatchers … question the moral implications of everything they do, whereas the Burnets … look for immediate action, and pleasure. Penuel Thatcher has married a Burnet and is living in the old Burnet mansion with two sons who are similarly at odds with one another…. With the notable exception of descriptions of the front line, the scenes which are not based on the inner torment of the Thatchers seem ephemeral. None of the Burnets on the other hand, is a solid character, and their adventures with the War and with women do nothing to strengthen them. Nor are the scenes in the Burnet mansion vivid, as they should be in a family novel…. The slight falling off in Child's second novel is the result of the comparative failure to visualize one of the two families solidly enough in the process of externalizing the central conflict of ideas. (pp. 29-30)

Child's collected poetry, Victorian House and Other Poems …, was hailed by Northrop Frye as one of the few volumes to give new merit to Canadian poetry in the fifties, but it … was not in either of the chief vogues of the times, the sensuous or the visionary. Since the Second World War, Child has made no attempt to follow the new custom among Canadian writers of adopting recent British or American techniques…. He showed no interest in coming to grips with social issues in a recognizably Canadian society…. And he ignored the renewed interest in Canadian nationalism…. (p. 31)

Neither of Child's novels of the forties resembles in type either of the earlier ones. One is a story of racial discrimination, the other an unusual mystery story. Both develop a theme of love, but on a more ethereal level than The Village of Souls…. [Day of Wrath] develops the conflict in a Jew of Hitler's Germany between principled devotion to Love and the sore temptation to hate. After losing both wife and daughter to the brutal regime, Simon Froben faces first the chance of killing the Nazi stormtrooper responsible, and later the challenge of rescuing a German orphan. Mr. Ames Against Time describes the struggle of a very common man, devoted to Love, against organized evil in the modern city. By practicing and reiterating this Love, Mr. Ames sets out to save his falsely condemned son by unmasking a gang murderer and persuading him to confess.

Both novels exploit Child's distinctive ability to externalize spiritual problems. In the crises noted in Day of Wrath, Simon Froben learns what true Love means, what he must and must not do. In Mr. Ames Against Time, the cowardly old Mr. Avery shows the depths of spiritual despondence both in his memory of having surrendered military secrets in the First World War and in his quavering fright at Mr. Ames' investigations. The themes are more uncommon than those in the earlier novel, but the scenes that portray them are less credible.

Victorian House, the main piece in Child's collected poems, is a narrative developed in reverie rather than dramatically…. The poem as a whole is melancholy and static rather than optimistic and energetic, as the novels are. The melancholy also dominates the lyrics which conclude the volume of poetry. Most of them are reflections on death, the last one returning to the theme of a Love large enough to forgive Judas.

With such an emphasis on introspection, the characters who linger in the readers' memory are those who ruminate. In The Village of Souls, lengthy loneliness has left Bertrand Jornay in a turmoil of conflicting urges. On the one hand he has gained human dignity by himself in the forests, and so for him hell is absence of inner privacy. On the other hand the ambition of his love is the meeting of two souls, his and his woman's and so he also feels that hell is something inescapable within himself…. The moral struggle between right and wrong is convincing in Child's novels, particularly at a personal level. (pp. 31-2)

Child's success is limited, however, even in the most memorable characters, and the minor characters succeed even less completely. Although his sombre thinkers can be vivid in static scenes, they show no convincing development…. Nor are Child's personages necessarily made more remarkable by the peculiar traits which the author stresses. Bertrand is repeatedly said to be motivated by pride in his ancestry, but this attitude affects neither his actions nor the plot. Pen Thatcher's idiosyncracies lack credibility because Child finds it difficult to make convincing the larger moral issues with which they are linked. In fact, the considerations of right and wrong stemming from the First World War in God's Sparrows never emerge from abstraction. (p. 32)

As with characters, so with plot; Child can create vivid scenes of static interplay between brooding men and women. Individual vignettes are often haunting. The day-long canoe trip through burnt-out forest in The Village of Souls, as Jornay watches Lys die, crystallizes admirably their spiritual crises. The dead land has the atmosphere of another-world, the jealous Anne threatens the hope for harmony in the canoe, and the prospect of a much-needed cache at the end of the burnt stretch suggests a faint hope…. Scenes like these are necessary to dramatize the inner agony of [his characters]…. In contrast, the larger challenge of building a conflict and an atmosphere which would serve a whole novel always baffled Child. Even in his best novels the plots lack at times credibility. The trite discovery of Anne's white ancestry makes The Village of Souls seem fantastic; so does the vision of judgment at the end of the generally realistic God's Sparrows. Nor is Child always successful even in scenes of smaller scope. Crowd scenes are often vague…. The memorable moments in these novels, and they are many, come in scenes with a few characters thinking in isolation from society—in a canoe, a clearing, a room.

A rare objectivity, which always dominates Child's point of view, helps to crystallize these scenes of small scope. It provides a realism which contrasts sharply with some of the fantastic general plotting…. Another result is that evil seems real in these novels. Child draws convincing bad men, from the treacherous Titange of [The Village of Souls] to the Nazi stormtrooper and the young gangsters of the last novels. Hate is real too. (pp. 33-4)

The control of emotions which this objectivity produces also characterizes the style in both the novels and the poems. Cool rather than impassioned, it provides a useful perspective for the scenes of brooding characters. It runs smoothly enough for storytelling, although it lacks the customary loose flow of easy narration. For moments of emotional intensity, however, it adds little to the mood. Perhaps for this reason Child's lyric poems seem somewhat pallid. Only emotions demanding understatement really benefit from the style, like the reaction to the battlefront in God's Sparrows….

The unity in outlook is provided not so much by the objective point-of-view or by the style, however, as by themes. Ideals are what interest the central characters, and the struggle to understand and preserve ideals consumes most of their energy. Loneliness and the search for love are the motivating urges…. God's Sparrows, which stands a little apart from the rest in theme, stresses the moral issues of heroism in war and in doubt about war, particularly when theories are carried to extremes. The resultant attitudes towards war make the novel tighter in structure than most war novels are, or most family novels. Child's last two novels return to the theme of love. In them a larger, more ethereal love … provides a closer unity, although a more abstract one. Extravagance of theme, not disunity, is their difficulty. And in Victorian House the recurring idea of a love to encompass even Judas provides the one distinction in the overriding nostalgia of the poem.

Child tells us that only love breaks down the hell of individual isolation and so makes the individual truly human. The extreme isolation of Bertrand, Lys, and Anne as they paddle through the primeval forest reinforces the even more thorough isolation of each of their souls. Love is the only humanizing outlet…. Privacy, night and self are the most unbearable things in life, and love is the one alternative, a love that is built on faith. And so faith is described as the prerequisite for membership in the human race. In this perspective, the Nazi treatment of Jews in Day of Wrath becomes a study in inhumanity due to lack of love, and Simon Froben's near tragedy is that he will be corrupted too. Mr. Ames is presumably irresistible in the long run because his lifelong love has made him ideally human. In these last two novels, however, the plight of the hero battling for Love is partly submerged in the welter of city society, which Child does not find easily malleable for storytelling. (pp. 34-5)

In all the novels the plot brings about a triumph for the theme, but the mood is never joyous. Melancholy pervades the view of life which Child presents. The happy endings come as hard-earned rewards only to a struggling few. No one … is convincingly gay. Pathetic minor characters appear in every novel…. A cause that contributes to the melancholy mood is materialism which to Child … apparently goes with North American civilization…. When the fighting optimism of the novels is lacking, in Victorian House, the materialism seems to overwhelm every hope for spiritual comfort. The result is a haunting despair with the modern world, and a less haunting nostalgia for the good old days.

When vitality is missing, Child's weaknesses are the most obvious, and the scenes involving large scope or rapid movement, usually lack vitality. As a result there is neither a continuous awareness of the historic period in The Village of Souls nor a convincing recreation recreation of city life in the last two novels. Adventure too seldom moves easily in these novels. This lack of movement applies to characters too, particularly the women; they seldom come fully to life. Child has an extraordinary grasp of the types and techniques of modern fiction, as the extreme variety in his novels shows. He understands all the conventions and knows how to use them unconventionally…. Yet the ambitious themes and large scopes seem to defeat him and rarely achieve credibility. His characters, like his novels and poems, seem to belong to no recognizable culture. (pp. 35-6)