Book Review: The Watch That Ends the Night

The Watch That Ends the Night

Author: Hugh MacLennan

Publisher: Macmillan of Canada, paperback, 373 pages

Reviewed by Rev. Garth Wehrfritz-Hanson

The Author

John Hugh MacLennan (1907-1990), was a reputable Canadian author and professor of English at McGill University, winner of 5 Governor General’s Awards, and a Royal Bank Award. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. He wrote several novels and non-fiction works. 

The novel’s title comes from the hymn by Isaac Watts, “O God, our help in ages past,” which Watts based on Psalm 90:4. 

The novel begins during the first winter of the Korean War. The place is Montreal. The main characters are George and Catherine Stewart. George was a political commentator on the radio, and a freelance writer. Now he lectured part-time at the university. Catherine was a painter. She had been married before to a surgeon, Jerome Martell, and they had one daughter, Sally. He had been a close friend of George. After not hearing from Jerome for around a decade, George and Catherine believed he had died in a Nazi prison camp.

Catherine had been handicapped since childhood with a rheumatic heart. In the last few years, she had almost died from it. So each day George and Catherine were aware of the sobering reality that it could be Catherine’s last. 

In Part One of the novel, one day George received a phone call at the university from Jerome Martell, whom he believed had died around ten years earlier. However, Jerome’s life was spared because he was a surgeon. He spent time detained by the Russians, and later was sent to China. Eventually he was freed, and now he arrived back in Montreal. Jerome told George he wanted to see Catherine and Sally. 

Part Two goes back in time, when George was seventeen, and he has just come home from a long canoe trip from Port Arthur to Georgian Bay. He then introduces his parents, sister and aunt Agnes, as well as when he and Catherine fell in love with each other. They both decide to study at McGill. However, because of Aunt Agnes’s influence and deliberations, George did not go to McGill; and his relationship with Catherine ended until several years later.

Part Three fast forwards the reader to Montreal again. George is hobnobbing with federal politicians in Ottawa. George, reflecting on the meaning of time has these thoughts: “What is time anyway? The past seemed part of the present today. Time had lost its shape. Time is a cloud in which we live while the breath is in us” (p. 90).

As Part Four begins, George tells of his past, when he lived and worked in Toronto in a bank and studied and obtained a degree. During those ten years, George states: “I lost my faith in religion; I lost my faith in myself; I lost my faith in the integrity of human society” (p. 107).

With an honours degree in history from the University of Toronto, George was able to find work teaching at Waterloo school for boys. He describes the backgrounds of the other teachers.

Part Four also focusses on George’s relationship with both Catherine and Jerome Martell. Both of them share personal details about themselves with George. Jerome, having fought in World War I, has this to say about the capitalist system: “Wars are the inevitable products of the capitalist system. We’re all compelled by the capitalist system to become murderers” (pp. 167-168). Jerome confessed to George that he had killed eleven men with a bayonet. In a state of psychological shock (likely post traumatic stress disorder), Jerome couldn’t speak for several weeks. 

Part Five consists mainly of Jerome telling George about his childhood. After his biological mother was killed, he was adopted and raised by the Reverend Giles and Josephine Martell in Halifax.

Part Six describes the demise of Jerome as a reputable surgeon, thanks in large part to the press’s negative coverage of a riot Jerome participated in; the exposure of his affair with nurse Norah Blackwell; and his subsequent resignation from the hospital.

One of the impressive features of this novel is MacLennan’s creative, poetic and mystical descriptions of the natural world. For example: “April had turned into May and the world was bright and clear: cool air and warm sun, a powder of buds on the hardwoods, fields skunk-cabbage green against the heavy viridian of spruce and fir, the muscles and bones of the land visible as an athlete’s under the light dust of its first verdure. All the waters were cold, and crossing the bridge at Sainte-Rose I saw the wash of the river coming around the northern curve of Montreal Island with eddies as smooth as the backs of enormous jellyfish” (p. 262). 

Also in Part Six, Jerome leaves Montreal for Spain because of his communist-leaning political convictions, and the loss of his reputation as a surgeon, and the unlikelihood of finding another job.

In Part Seven, Jerome returns to Montreal after twelve years of being tortured by the Nazis and imprisoned in concentration camps in Poland, Russia and China. Everyone had thought he had died, but he had survived all of his sufferings. He has one last visit with Catherine, and tells her that he was most likely going out west, and would not see her again.

After Jerome’s visit, Catherine ends up in the hospital. George is beside himself, and goes into a long monologue lament about God’s seeming lack of justice, theodicy, and the meaning and meaninglessness of life. He interestingly cites portions of the Genesis creation account, 1 Corinthians 13, and Job. Catherine seems to be lingering between life and death.

In the Epilogue, Catherine after taking a long time to recover from a surgery, has a second surgery, and recovered from it as well—although it had weakened her and she was slowly dying. George eventually becomes more peaceful and content. Both George and Catherine come to view life as a gift. The novel ends with the Latin phrase: nunc requiesce in me (now rest in me).

Overall, this novel is somewhat autobiographical: for example, in real life MacLennan was not happy teaching at Lower Canada College, nor is George happy in the novel teaching at Waterloo School.

In this review, I have left out a detailed description of several of the rather intense and lengthy conversations involving the main characters concerning several personal, political, philosophical and theological, etc. subjects of the day. I therefore commend the novel to readers to discover them.