I once spent a year in Toronto’s North York neighborhood while my wife was teaching at UToronto. Our second child was born Canadian and had to be exorcised by the shamans at Customs and Border Protection upon our return to the United States. We had the full Canadian experience: “free” health care and punishing taxes, multiculturalism gone mad, outrageous rents, milk in bags.

Wanting to delve more deeply into Canadian culture, I asked a local professor friend what he would recommend as the great Canadian novel. Two Solitudes, came his immediate but somewhat embarrassed reply. From the American perspective, it felt like the equivalent of sheepishly recommending a foreigner read John Steinbeck: nobody is going to enjoy it, but you might learn something about the country.

But upon opening MacLennan’s 1945 classic, I was captivated. I found every drama and conflict had drawn a bead on precisely the issues of identity and community that modernity has made so confusing. The novel was not a book of answers to those issues, but rather the planting of a stake in territory where the harshest polemicists would fear to tread. Readings of Two Solitudes as merely an origin story for modern Canada; a window on the clash of two cultures; even a critique of war—are excruciatingly deficient. Two Solitudes is a fatalistic analysis of how national identity creates an inevitable, perpetual war of the spirit.

The first part of MacLennan’s tale unfolds in Saint-Marc-des-Érables, Quebec at the end of the First World War. The landowning Tallard family, whose father, Athanase, holds a prominent position as a Member of Parliament in Ottawa, commands significant authority in Saint-Marc. Athanase has two sons from different marriages, the elder Marius, and the younger Paul. To advance his family’s interests, Athanase seeks closer ties with major English Canadian investors. This enrages Marius, who fiercely upholds French nationalism and loathes the economical, dispassionate Anglo way of life.

As the story begins, an Englishman named John Yardley has settled on Athanase's land, an act that ignites controversy among the locals. The English express their interest in constructing a factory on the land, but the devoutly religious French population objects, led by the local parish priest Fr. Beaubien. They fear that such a development would result in the English control of the local economy, reducing the French to serfs, paying reduced wages and leaving them as perpetual servants of their Anglophone masters.

The second half of the book shifts focus to Paul as an adult and his romantic relationship with Yardley’s granddaughter. Paul seeks to impress the Yardleys, but his unemployment due to the Great Depression leads the Yardley family to reject him as a shiftless moocher. Meanwhile, the threat of world war laces the story, as the adult Marius becomes something of a leader in a French anti-conscription movement.

The book is full of stereotypes despite MacLennan’s patent yearning for his characters themselves to transcend them. Even as they develop and their lives complicate, it becomes clear that neither faith, nor money, nor love can overcome the Englishness, the Irishness, the Frenchness (or even their perceptions of Chinese or blackness) that they exhibit or encounter. The destiny of who these people are pressurizes the container wherein they are forced to live with each other—which, incidentally, serves as a revealing meditation on the cause of the war in Europe.

This pressure is not a simple matter of cultural differences. “We eat bread; they eat porridge.” It is a struggle for superiority—or rather, a struggle arising from the assumption of superiority. The Saint-Marc villagers must preserve their way of life because it is beautiful and valuable; far more important than another British factory. The British uphold their march of progress as mankind’s most important mission—not to be stopped or slowed by provincial superstitions. Fighting the Germans is a privilege for all Canadians with national pride. But never does MacLennan let on who is truly a Canadian.

Nor does he take the easy path—as many novelists of his day preferred—of concluding that difficult questions are unanswerable, and therefore not worth asking. He seems to insist that one culture must win out. Superiority—at least contextual superiority—is a fundamental and unalterable fact about the clash of civilizations. And when those civilizations share the same plot of land, they coexist like fire and ice.

Step back, for a moment, from the new nationalist moment we are currently experiencing. 1945 was a year of exhausted nationalisms across the globe for both winners and losers of the war. To publish a novel reestablishing national identity—not political identity, but national—as the foundation of society is extreme counter-culturalism for the postwar period.

The fact that it was a Canadian author who did so makes it doubly intriguing. A couple years before our sojourn in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau infamously gushed that Canada had “no core identity,” and that there was no room for nationalism there because it was a “post-national state.” Canadians would still regularly bring up this gaffe as a starting point for political conversations.

MacLennan, of course, would view Trudeau’s claim as ironic coming from a French Canadian who has been dutifully reprogrammed into a faux-British globalist. Many Americans believe, not without reason, that Canada is a shapeless, cultureless blob defined by the whims of its bureaucracy—ending all private gun ownership one day, euthanizing the old and mentally ill the next. Reading Two Solitudes will provide a quiet counterpoint.