This book was good, but not my favourite Findley novel, although perhaps this is the point. It is well redeemed by its imagery and thoughtful passages that stuck with me long after finishing the novel itself, and reasonated with the complexities and ironies of life and death, love and beauty, power and humility, memory and truth. Findley uses Germany in 1938 as an example of unrecognized power, and then holds it up against Ruth's husband, and even with his own power as author within the book, all sources of power which were (or are) largely unrecognized or ignored, changing history, people, courses of events, without much opposition at the time. Ruth becomes a symbol of resistance through her eventual opposition to her husband's abuse and domination, and her role as "the dreamer" who sees or remembers things that others don't think happened. Perhaps Findley's desire to show the power in his role as author justifies the loose ends at the end of the book, the strange change of voice and verb tense, and a feeling that the story lacks a conclusion. I had a thought after reading it too that the story ended as life might end - with not everyone's stories figured out or tied up nicely in a bow, but rather a mess of unanswered questions that we wish we could hear more of.
