Timothy Findley's "The Wars" is … elegantly written and structured and well aware of what can't be said about important human experiences. (Like other Canadian writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies and Marian Engel, Mr. Findley seems closer and more responsive to natural mystery than his peers south of the border.) (p. 14)

The book has flaws, certainly. Its rather poetic prose sometimes turns overripe. Its climactic moment—when Ross disobeys orders, shoots his commander and leads a herd of panicky horses to what turns out to be their death in a burning barn—is over-prepared for by insistent imagery of horses and fires….

But for the most part "The Wars" is an impressively sustained meditation on how war crystallizes an unfinished personality even while destroying it, and on how the past remains available and valuable only in our ability to reinvent and reinterpret it. Ross's terrible story is...