Abstract
We can never forget. We must be aware that the apocalypse is not only imminent, it is happening now. The bomb is not the only threat hanging over the human race. It includes our move towards the bomb. The dropping of the bomb has begun.
Timothy Findley was generous and patient with interviewers. He listened carefully, and responded thoughtfully. He arrived early and paid for his own breakfast, even when suffering through a bad cold on a dark morning of an Edmonton winter. He was a man of conviction - his novels and plays all warn against the proclivity of the human race to self-destructiveness. But he also celebrated creativity and kindness. In the worst of all possible worlds, there is still some hope of salvation.
My first conversation with Timothy Findley was about his early novel, The Wars, which I believe in many respects is his best work. My second interview was about The Telling of Lies, the first of several "metaphysical mysteries" in which the search for a murderer is an investigation of the human heart and mind. Findley returned to the scene of the crime in his last novel, Spadework, set in Stratford, Ontario, where he had worked as a young actor with the Shakespeare Festival, and where his play, Elizabeth Rex, premiered in 2000. Findley won the Governor General's Award for this play, and for The Wars. But as the many testimonials of writers, actors, and friends made very clear when he died, "Tiff" was also a mentor and an inspiration to many writers in Canada. And he was also a collector of cats, when he lived on a farm in southern Ontario. In Not Wanted on the Voyage, Mottyl, the blind cat, is Findley's seer. The biblical flood he revisits in this novel will be only the first of many human catastrophes.