My father thought he was bringing Salvation to Africa. I, on the other hand, no longer know what salvation is. I am not sure that it lies in the future. And I know now that it is not to be found in the past.
These opening lines of the opening story in the collection titled The Tomorrow-Tamer situates the thematic foundation of the author’s entire body of work within a microcosmic summation. At all points along the trek of her career writing short fiction, Laurence’s stories deal in one form or another with the division of identity and the pressures of conflicting loyalties. The narrator is the song of missionaries who was born in Africa and so is a native in one sense, but forever a culture outsider in another. The conflict at the heart of Laurence’s stories are not always situated within nationalities or ethnicities such as in this case, but it remains representative nevertheless of her overarching thematic pursuit.
“He was the only person in Manawaka who could read these plays in the original Greek. I don’t suppose many people, if anyone, had even read them in English translations, Maybe he would have liked to be a classical scholar – I don’t know. But his father was a doctor, so that’s what he was. Maybe he would have liked to talk to somebody about these plays. They must have meant a lot to him.”
Ewan is the father of the narrator/protagonist of this story which constitutes the second chapter of the short story cycle collection titled A Bird in the House. This quote presents another dimension to thematic pursuit which lays at the foundation of Laurence’s short story canon. Here we have a daughter inquiring about her grandfather and receiving a wistful family history lesson from the generation linking grandfather and granddaughter. Identity is explored in a multifaceted way just in this short excerpt: the grandfather could read ancient literature in its original Greek, thus connecting him to not just two different locales, but two different epochs of time. He is also torn in two by virtue of probably having been better suited to becoming a scholar but having to follow the family legacy of pursuing a career in medicine. These divisions of loyalty are sprinkled throughout the many characters in the author’s stories and inevitably create pressures of one degree or another.
“One year ago, when I was young, I was always thinking I am Luck’s very boy.”
“Scientifically, you realize, a consistently lucky person is an impossibility. You didn’t honestly believe you were an exception?”
As one might have gleaned from both the quotes above, there is another theme that is prevalent in the stories of Margaret Laurence: issues related to fate and destiny. One might well say that the characters here tend toward the fatalistic and lead lives which assume at least a sense of predetermination. Not so much in the religious sense as in the socio-political sense: one cannot escape the long arm of social history. As Debbie Harry once sang, one way or another, it is going to get you, get you, get you. Of course, there are also characters who are convinced that this is no proper way to live and seek to outwit the authoritarian nature of the past as it intrudes upon the present to shape the course of the future.
