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The action of the novel takes place during one week, between May 4 and May 11, 1945, the period between the defeat of the occupying Nazis in this area of Czechoslovakia and the takeover by the Soviets. The title refers to the fact that in spite of all the brave sentiments mouthed by the townspeople, few of them really want to be involved in the fight against the Nazi troops, until the issue is no longer in doubt.

The Conformist is an attempt to trace the origins of the impulse toward Fascism in an individual mind. The novel portrays the life of Marcello Clerici from his childhood in the home of wealthy bourgeois Romans to his death in a random air raid at the end of World War II.

Ellen ldquo;Gypsy” Cuppy is devastated by the death of her loving mother, on whom she has greatly depended. Her older sister, Nora, is married, and her father is mostly away from home, traveling in connection with an oil business. To console Ellen, her father takes her on a long freighter voyage, down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and to London.

The novel begins with John Wellfleet, a resident of an old people’s compound, receiving a telephone call from a young man, Andre Gervais. The year is 2039, fifty years after a nuclear holocaust, known as the Destructions, has ended civilization, leaving only a few survivors. Gervais has discovered an old box in the ruins of Montreal. The box is full of papers and tapes of the Wellfleet family. Although Gervais knows that the repressive government, known as the Bureaucracy, would prohibit such an act, he wants John to come to the city to look at the box. When John recovers from the shock of finding records of a past long since dead and gone, he agrees to reconstruct the family history. That history, as told through John, or narrated directly from the journals, letters, and tapes of members of the family, constitutes Hugh MacLennan’s novel.

The main subject of Hugh MacLennan’s novel is the return of Neil Macrae from France to Halifax in order to clear his name. His uncle, Colonel Geoffrey Wain, had ordered an ill-planned advance on the Germans; Wain tried to blame the resulting debacle on Neil, ordering his arrest and court-martial for cowardice. When a shell hit the dugout in which he was being held prisoner, Neil was reported missing, believed killed. It is revealed, however, that he was picked up, badly wounded and amnesiac, and sent to the hospital. His rescuers believed him to be a private in the British North Country regiment that had relieved the Canadians. He gradually recovered his memory but retained his British identity until he returned to Canada.