In his two novels, The Kite and Who Has Seen the Wind, W. O. Mitchell makes use of [the transition from childhood to maturity] as a means to consider man's awareness of time and perception of reality during his life's span on earth. The two novels explore these questions, however, from different points of view. Though one is an artistic success while the other falls short of this, part of their interest lies in the extent to which they complement each other…. (p. 45)

Mitchell's first novel, Who Has Seen the Wind, is the success. It is a study of the development involved in a boy's increasing conscious awareness of abstraction, a study of Brian O'Connal's transition from the perfection of sensitive childhood, through conflict, to a balance that is achieved in early maturity. In The Kite, which fails largely because of technical difficulties, Keith Maclean is parallel to...