[In the following, Bemrose assesses the plot and principal theme of The Piano Man's Daughter.]

So often, Timothy Findley's fiction circles some central image, like a tribe dancing around a fire. In his 1977 novel, The Wars, it was horses: horses screaming under the artillery barrages of the First World War, or stampeding away from the madness of the trenches. Findley's 1993 novel, Headhunter, offered the image of its heroine, Lilah Kemp, the unforgettable street woman whose schizophrenia harbored an element of strange, life-nourishing sanity. And in his richly layered new novel, The Piano Man's Daughter, Findley conjures up the presence of a simple field in a southern Ontario farm. This field—like both the horses and Lilah Kemp—becomes a touchstone for what is sacred in Findley's vision: a buffer against a society that seems bent on destroying innocence and psychic health.

Findley is, in the best, nondenominational sense, a religious novelist. His books reflect a world where wholeness has been grievously broken, although he occasionally allows a character to catch a glimpse of redemption shining among the fragments. In the opening pages of The Piano Man's Daughter, the first-person narrator, Charlie Kilworth, seems afflicted by a peculiarly modern sense of rootlessness and loss. It is 1939, war is looming, and his wife, Alexandra, has left him. His mother, Lily, has just died in a fire at a mental institution where she was a patient. As well, Charlie has no idea who his father was. It seems that Lily was not only mad but sexually profligate, and could never remember which of her couplings produced her son. So, with the help of some old photographs and letters. Charlie sets out to reconstruct his mother's life—with the hope of bringing some meaning into his own.

His search leads him to the closing decades of the 19th century, and the prosperous Ontario farm where Lily was born. He discovers that her penchant for making love to strangers was inherited from her mother, Ede Kilworth. Ede, it seems, fell in love with a travelling piano player, Tom Wyatt. She led him into a field that had been special to her as a girl, made love and later gave birth to their daughter, Lily, in the same place. This field—beautifully evoked by Findley with its wildflowers and brooding cows—is her refuge from social and family disapproval, as well as her solace when Tom dies in a trolley-car accident.

Ede's field is both an important symbol and a naturalistic detail woven into the novel's wondrous recreation of late Victorian and Edwardian Canada. For a time, Charlie all but disappears from the story, replaced by Findley's vision of life on the Kilworth farm, and in the big Toronto house where Ede takes her daughter to live after marrying Tom's wealthy brother, Frederick, a manufacturer of pianos. Findley has evoked the spirit of a time and place basking in the late sun of Empire: both its outward confidence and security, and its secret shadows. Lily's stepfather represents the former: he rules his household with a firm paternalism everyone accepts as completely normal, adhering to his demands like trains to a schedule.

The young Lily proves a threat to that tidy world. She is a pyromaniac. She also has violent fits, and when a seizure spoils an important dinner party, Frederick locks her in the attic—the first of several such incarcerations—and later banishes her to a strict boarding school. These two characters are the mythic poles of a tragic imbalance. Frederick embodies an overdeveloped masculine principle, grim and all-controlling, Lily, with her ready sympathy and love of animals, is the repressed feminine. And when the First World War erupts, it is as if Lily's pyromania has taken global revenge.

Those themes are buried in the substructure of the novel. On another, more naturalistic level, Findley's characters are also rounded human beings—here, even Frederick has his more likable side. The Piano Man's Daughter works best when both levels support each other, and that happens most impressively in the first two-thirds of the novel. Here, the story feels deeply, mysteriously organic—propelled by a vast, entirely believable web of relationships, from the sprawling Kilworth and Wyatt families themselves, to the servants who look after their houses and horses, to their cats and dogs and even the ants that live in their gardens.

Much of the novel's final third—which evokes Lily's university days at Cambridge, as well as her itinerant years raising Charlie in a series of boarding houses and hotels—feels attenuated and forced by comparison. Removed from the matrix of her family. Lily's character becomes static, while Charlie's search for his father's identity is not particularly compelling. Yet, Findley recovers in the novel's final, elegiac pages, in which Charlie achieves a deepened understanding of his mother's suffering. Here, too, he reconnects with his wife, and together they renew their hopes for the future. The reader last glimpses the characters in the field where Lily was conceived and born: it makes a moving conclusion to a novel that reaches memorably into that crucible of origins and losses we call the past.