The Watch that Ends the Night, Hugh MacLennan

This is not only a deeply moving novel of enduring love and all its costs, it was published in proper paperback form, the old style: small enough to fit in your pocket and to prop open with one hand; but mostly, this is a great story with living characters. These aren't cuddly people, not at all, they are strong and honourable and decent, though buffeted by fate and uncertainty, but more than that, they are people who are attracted to greatness, and that comes with its own hardships. This novel is a tour through Montreal life in the Thirties, as the Spanish Civil War galvanized morality in the lettered classes and pushed many an idealist to take up arms for the preservation of democracy in a foreign land. The book was written three decades later, and so is about its own time as much as it is about the thirties, and the still-pertinent issue, reflected today, among other things, in record-rate suicides among returning troops: it is on the homefront, among the ones we love that real courage is needed. This is a beautiful, quiet story about long love.
I somehow made off with this book from a high school I taught at fifteen years ago, and I read it then, in the little house I shared with my old bud the year before I got married and she had a baby. This is a great story, but I can manage without it.
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