The Diviners is the most comprehensive [of all the Manawaka novels] in its quest and the most complicated in its structure. Morag's journey is epic in its striving and cosmological in its scope. She seeks to understand her relation to all life, all time and eternity, and the resolution she finally comes to has both sacred and secular meanings for her.

In all of her Manawaka novels, Margaret Laurence has worked with concepts of time. Hagar, Rachel, and Stacey are all enslaved by quantitative time, the man-made measurement of minutes, hours, and days that inexorably hastens Hagar towards her death, that wears away Rachel's life,… and that marks off Stacey's life in a grinding routine of household chores and family responsibilities. All these women are relentlessly in service to a schedule which is not self-determined but society-determined. In their heads, they also experience felt time, existential time, in...