[The Butterfly Plague] resembles an appreciative description of a fantastic film, the kind that depends on surrealistic images and a voguish "sense of period", more interesting to see than to read about…. A quick succession of intricate, brightly-coloured scenes must have been the aim; but Timothy Findley cannot, as a novelist, rival a film-director's pace. Instead of being fixed in cinematic images, the details of landscape, facial expression, physical appearance and (especially) clothing have to be set out in lists, as if they were instructions to the property department, the designer and the wardrobe mistress. Thus the novel proceeds more slowly than can have been intended.

The setting is Southern California, 1938, with flashbacks to Nazi Germany. The mood is one of fear, with epicene women and men wincing at hazards as normal as motor accidents or as nightmarish as Nazidom….

[Many disasters occur to] bizarre characters. Miss Trainer...