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    A Jest of God
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    A Jest of God
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    A Jest of God
    Ebook264 pages4 hours

    A Jest of God

    By Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    'An almost perfect book' MARGARET ATWOOD.

    Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric.

    Rachel Cameron is a shy, retiring schoolmistress, tethered to her overbearing invalid mother. Thirty-four and unmarried, she feels herself edging towards a lonely spinsterhood. But then she falls in love for the first time, and embarks upon an affair that will change her life in unforeseen ways.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHead of Zeus
    Release dateMar 9, 2017
    ISBN9781786691217
    Unavailable
    A Jest of God
    Author

    Margaret Laurence

    Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) grew up in the small prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada. Recognised as one of the greatest Canadian writers, her masterwork is the Manawaka sequence of five novels.

    Read more from Margaret Laurence

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    Reviews for A Jest of God

    4/5

    145 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Rachel, a 34-year-old teacher, lives at home with her gently tyrannical mother. Her first sexual relationship is with Nick, who goes away letting her think he's already married. A moving story, told plainly but with great insight and understanding for this young woman's predicament. [July 2005]
    • 5/5
      Wow. What a book. This is the first Laurence book I've read and now I can't imagine how I could have possibly reached this point in my life without this experience. We get to know the main character at a level that I find to be as rare as it is satisfying. There must be an element of autobiography here, or else Laurence is remarkably good at imagining a character who is so complete and consistent that we feel that we know her intimately and forever.
    • 5/5
      I don't usually re-read fiction, but I was a teenager when I first read "A Jest of God" and thought that I would see it from a different perspective now. I had forgotten how wonderful it is.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book I've read by Margaret Laurence - and what a welcome discovery. Must find more. The novel charts some grim, grey territory - an unmarried teacher in a small Manitoba town, painfully shy, socially awkward, repressed, no self confidence, a helpless victim of her widowed mother's tyrannyy. She stumbles into a 'summer romance' which inevitably ends unhappily, but she weathers romantic and health crises and at last gains some confidence and control of her life. She leaves the claustrophobia of small town Manawaka and relocates herself and her mother to Vancouver. Laurence tells the whole story via the interior monlogue of the heroine and it's a triumph. This technique vividly conveys the young woman's anguish and confusion, then in the closing chapter it's a relief to see her opening up at last to new life and new possibilities.
    • 4/5
      Rachel Cameron is trapped. At 34, she lives with her widowed mother in the Manitoba town of Manawaka, in the same house in which she was raised. She has never married, she has never had a sexual experience, and she has never really opened up to another human being. Rachel's mother controls Rachel with disapproval veiled as love, and Rachel's most constant refrain is "I'm sorry." During the day, Rachel teaches grade two, and is probably more attached to her students than is healthy.Laurence wrote a series of books set in Manawaka, each dealing with different characters. Her most famous book is probably The Stone Angel, which I read when I was in my last year of high school - and hated. To be fair, I was 18, and The Stone Angel is about a woman in her 80s, so identification with the main character was minimal. I also think that I had not yet learned to appreciate Laurence's style.A Jest of God is not an epic, but a small, quiet book. The reader is pulled into Rachel's everyday life, and experieces her frustration. To break up the monotony of her life, Rachel begins to date Nick, a man who grew up on the opposite end of Manawaka. Finally Rachel experiences an adult relationship, and learns to open herself to another person. Her growth as a character is the focus of A Jest of God, and as the book is told in first-person, the reader gets a very believable account of a woman's emotional journey.I found this book in a used bookstore for $1, and it has sat on my shelves for over a year. It has succeeded it changing my opinion of Laurence, and I will certainly seek out more of her works in the future. As for The Stone Angel, well, it just might warrant a reread - something I never thought I would do!
    • 4/5
      Rachel teaches school in her hometown and goes home every night to her mother's house. She has only a few friends and rarely goes out. But one summer she has an experience at a church, and then an affair with an old classmate which challenge her to question her life.
    • 5/5
      Though some of the period details in A Jest Of God seem hopelessly dated, its endearing heroine transcends time and place. At 34, dutiful schoolteacher Rachel Cameron slowly and belatedly develops an awareness of her own power, sexuality and worth. Laurence skillfully explores this deeply personal journey that many women, and more than a few men, will recognise and enjoy.
    • 5/5
      I was raised in the US and had little introduction to Laurence except through the Diviners, which I remembered primarily because of the sperm stain on the woman's dress. (I led a sheltered life and was shocked about that). And when I read The Stone Angel, I was too young to appreciate the feelings therein. And, sorry to say, high school English ruined it for me.
      This book I picked up because the woman in it is at a phase of her life I could identify with entirely. Rachel Cameron is trapped, totally trapped, in a life of service and guilt and concealment. It's so small town Ontario...Still, she finds rewards in her life, and eventually opens herself - only to experience additional challenges.
      It's not a comfortable book. I feel so for Rachel. The scenes with her mother run right to my spine, as her mother passively-aggressively ruins her life. They are underwritten - not heavy handed at all, but the chills are there as her mother says "Don't be late, will you, dear?". Little tendrils of control.
      I'm so glad I read this. It is beautiful, and written by a master. It's given me a new appreciation for Laurence after the high school destruction. I'm off to reread the others now.
    • 4/5
      When I first picked up the book I saw the word compassion written on the back description. It seemed a bit tacky and superficial, one of those words that critics stick in their review for want of something (ANYthing) to write. However, the book is permeated with it. You can feel the authors deep and true compassion for her characters even as she makes fun of them.
    • 4/5
      34 year old Rachel is a "spinster" (how she thinks of herself) in a small Canadian plains town. She dropped out of college to care for her demanding semi-invalid mother after her father's death. Years later, she is still caring for her mother and teaching elementary school.The entire novel is essentially an internal dialogue in Rachel's head. She's very repressed and self-conscious. In her mind she's constantly questioning the meaning of other people's words or actions towards herself, wondering if she's made some kind of mistake or acted wrongly. Rachel makes a very interesting character study.Then one summer, a "wild" boy from her high school days returns to town, and he and Rachel begin to see each other. Of course, their motives are completely at odds. Rachel in her naivetee hopes for marriage and a family, but for Nick she's just a way to pass the time during a summer visit to his family.I loved Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, a similar character study, but of an elderly woman. This was also good, but not quite as good as Stone Angel.
    • 5/5
      This is not the first time I've read Canadian writer Margaret Laurence's fine novel, A JEST OF GOD. But it's probably been at least twenty years since I last read it and it has lost nothing in the interim. Laurence's probing of the single life and the kind of "quiet desperation" Thoreau once wrote about will make you stop and reconsider those people you know who live alone, or with aging parents. School teacher Rachel Cameron is a character you don't forget, and may want to revisit from time to time, as I have. Because her secret, inner life - as demonstrated in her interior monologues and fantasies - are as important, if not more so, than her actual life, which seems pretty bleak. Thirty-four, Rachel lives with her hypochondriac whiny mother upstairs over the funeral parlor once operated by her late father, teaches second grade in a school presided over by a principal who is a secret sadist, and has a brief loveless affair one summer with a former resident of the town who is there to see his parents. The story is told in the first person and the reader is privy to Rachel's most private and intimate thoughts, and THIS is what makes this ordinary tale of loneliness and desperation so very EXTRAordinary.As I was reading Laurence's book, a minor Canadian classic, I was rememinded of another more recent novel, also by a Canadian, Elizabeth Hay's ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM, which I enjoyed equally. And I wondered if Hay would count Laurence as an important influence in her own development as a writer. I must try to remember to ask her.I should probably confess that I might never have read A JEST OF GOD had I not seen the scrupulously faithful film adaptation, RACHEL, RACHEL starring Joanne Woodward and directed by Paul Newman. It was - and still is - a small and perfect gem of film-making. I highly recommend both the book and the film adaptation.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Another classic of Canadian literature and a huge disappointment for me as a fan of Margaret Laurence whose Stone Angel is one of my favourite books.A Jest of God follows Rachel Cameron, a 34-year-old spinster school teacher in the small prairie town of Manawaka. Because it’s told in the first person from Rachel’s view, we are privy to Rachel’s thoughts. For most of the book there is a wide discrepancy between what Rachel is in her visible public life, how she deals with and appears to others, and what she really thinks and feels. Rachel’s life is dull – she lives with her mother and has no real friends. Then she meets an old high school classmate, visiting for the summer from the city, and begins an affair. That yields one of Laurence’s wonderful lines: “Some poisons have sweetness at the first taste, but they are willing to kill you just the same.”Despite Laurence’s writing, I really had a hard time with this book. I didn’t like Rachel at all and wanted to slap her silly: she hated being misunderstood but never said what she thought. She mistook a physical affair based on lust for love, and became obsessed with Nick.Read this if: you’ve seen the movie Rachel, Rachel and want to read the book upon which it was based; or you’re reading the entire Laurence canon, as I am. 3 stars
    • 4/5
      A Jest of God is part of Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, a collection of stories exploring women’s experience and women’s voices. Rachel Cameron is in her 30s, working as a teacher in a small Manitoba town in the 1960s. She lives with her mother in the house she grew up in, now a flat above a funeral parlor. During the summer holiday she encounters Nick Kazlik, a former school classmate visiting his parents. The attraction is mutual; an affair inevitable. Rachel is a virgin, and while the affair awakens desires she never before experienced, she is also burdened with sole responsibility for preventing pregnancy in a town where the only source of gynecological advice is the doctor who has treated her since childhood. Meanwhile, Rachel’s mother resents her daughter’s new-found social life. She unsuccessfully attempts to guilt Rachel into staying home with her in the evenings, and then stays up until Rachel comes home in order to deliver a passive-aggressive soliloquy about being alone. Margaret Laurence tells this story entirely through Rachel’s internal monologue, including imagined conversations with Nick and her mother where Rachel tries on different ways of handling situations. Rachel is portrayed as a strong figure, but one burdened with typical human anxieties and prone to self-doubt. Laurence uses Rachel’s voice to question conventional thinking about women, marriage, and sex. Rachel grapples with the affair and its impact on other parts of her life, but Laurence also shows how these experiences build Rachel's inner strength and allow her to break free from some of what binds her.