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A Literary Review of Canada U N A J A JOURNAL OF IDEAS Celebrate the new year with AWARD WINNERS from UBC Press

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A JOURNAL OF IDEAS

FIRST WORD CLIMATE CRISIS BYGONE DAYS Shot in the Arm Paws for Thought In the Eye of the Historian Kyle Wyatt The costs of man’s best friends Three takes on Louis Riel 3 Susan Crean Christopher Dummitt FURTHERMORE 13 24 Murray Angus, Tamsin Tahoma, An Arctic Fable Comfort Foods Heather Menzies, Sharon Hamilton Once upon the melting ice The tragic tale of a cookbook 5 Sandra Martin Hattie Klotz 15 PLAYTIME 27 The Magical History Tour COMPELLING PEOPLE Front-Line Worker A family’s postwar trials It was the summer of ’69 Lives Less Ordinary John Fraser David Macfarlane Peter Mansbridge’s unsung heroes 28 6 J. D. M. Stewart 17 THE PUBLIC SQUARE THE ARTS Her Little Black Book A Maritime Murder Stage Management Barbara Amiel doesn’t give a damn Fourteen fixes for a broken theatre The final book by Silver Donald Cameron Kelvin Browne Marianne Ackerman Frank Macdonald 18 30 9 The Colossus LITERATURE Je me souviens de quoi? Notes on our twelfth prime minister A fresh take on the beautiful province J. L. Granatstein No Country for Young Women Graham Fraser 20 The latest from Ava Homa 10 Keith Garebian THIS AND THAT RUMINATIONS 34 Cobbled Together Home Is Lagos The Great Cover-Up Me and the shoemaker Our pandemic wasteland Francesca Ekwuyasi’s debut novel Michael Humeniuk Marlo Alexandra Burks Brett Josef Grubisic 21 11 35 For Your Reference BACKSTORY OUR NATURAL WORLD Citing foreign influence On the Banks of the Miramichi Michael McNichol Metaphor Surrendered Fire seized upon the town 22 Harriet Alida Lye Margaret Conrad Graphic Narrative 36 12 Drawn-out dramas of the North J. R. Patterson 23

POETRY Kate Marshall-Flaherty, p. 7 Jocko Benoit, p. 14 Betsy Struthers, p. 16 Maureen Hynes, p. 29

OUR CONTRIBUTORS Marianne Ackerman watches from Montreal. John Fraser is the executive chair of the David Macfarlane has published several books. National NewsMedia Council. His new memoir, Likeness, is due out in May. Kelvin Browne is the executive director of the Gardiner Museum, in Toronto. Keith Garebian wrote Mini Musings: Sandra Martin is the author of A Good Death: Miniature Thoughts on Theatre and Poetry. Making the Most of Our Final Choices. Marlo Alexandra Burks is working on a book on the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal. J. L. Granatstein writes on Canadian political Michael McNichol serves as co-chair of the and military history. Forum for Information Professionals. Margaret Conrad wrote At the Ocean’s Edge: A History of Nova Scotia to Confederation. Brett Josef Grubisic will publish his ﬁfth novel, J. R. Patterson divides his time between My Two-Faced Luck, in 2021. Canada and Portugal. Susan Crean authored Finding Mr. Wong. Michael Humeniuk daydreams in Toronto. J. D. M. Stewart is a teacher at Bishop Christopher Dummitt hosts the podcast 1867 & Strachan School, in Toronto, and the author of All That and teaches history at Trent University. Hattie Klotz is a writer, journalist, and Being Prime Minister. gourmet in Ottawa. Graham Fraser is a senior fellow at the ◆ Graduate School of Public and International Frank Macdonald reads and writes in Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Cape Breton. His latest novel is Tinker and Blue. On the cover: “Damn Yankees,” by Salini Perera.

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Shot in the Arm

N TO-MORROW, DATED AUGUST 1803, THE Sadly, V-Day never arrives for Basil and Lucy’s Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth young son. Basil appreciates the urgency of the portrays a couple weighing the pros and situation, but he has Rousseau’s Emilius and cons of various preventive measures Sophia to finish and some errands to run. He against smallpox. The wife, Lucy, wants thinks he can buy some time. He soon finds Ito have her only son inoculated in the “ common out, though, that “a few hours may sometimes way,” by which she means variolation, a mild make all the difference between health and sick- but (hopefully) preventive infection. Her hus- ness, happiness and misery.” His son contracts band, Basil, knows there’s something a little smallpox and dies. more cutting-edge out there: “I think we had So far in this pandemic, we have lost more better have him vaccined.” than a million and a half people, and the daily Edgeworth, a literary celebrity in her day, was case numbers climb yet higher and higher. We’ll writing just five years after Edward Jenner first continue to skeptically eye strangers who sneeze described vaccination, in An Inquiry into the in public for months to come, just as we’ll con- Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, and tinue to wear masks (yes, even the vaccinated the technique’s efficacy was still under review by among us). But the banner headline is hard to the Royal College of Physicians. In her novella, ignore: “A Fix to the Crisis Is Near.” she paints Basil as a learned man who keeps up Transfixed as we are by the cure that is, still with the papers, a man who sees tremendous too many of us are blind to the cure that isn’t. potential in medical advancement. But despite “To put it simply,” the secretary-general of the being informed of current events and despite his United Nations, António Guterres, said in a wife’s desperate urging —“Oh, my dearest love, major climate address at Columbia University on do not put it off till to-morrow”— Basil takes a December 2, “the state of the planet is broken.” rather unhurried approach. “My friend, Mr. L–, The symptoms of this other sickness are legion: has had all his children vaccined,” he tells Lucy, We are losing our ice, our wetlands, our for- “and I just wait to see the effect.” ests, our coral reefs, our fish stocks. Even with We are all Basil now. lockdown measures in place for much of 2020, In a head-spinning turn of events, so-called carbon dioxide levels are climbing, methane V-Day arrived sooner than many of us expected is pouring out of the thawing permafrost, and and mass vaccination against COVID-19 is now nitrous oxide emissions have gone up 123 per- under way, with a ninety-year-old retired shop cent — once again threatening the ozone layer. clerk from Coventry receiving the first dose of The fires, the floods, the hurricanes, the torna- the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 8, does, the heat waves are more biblical with each at 6:31 in the morning. (Eighty-one-year-old passing season. And, as Guterres reminds us, William Shakespeare, of Warwickshire, received “there is no vaccine for the planet.” the second injection: “A mark marvellous well No tomorrow comes in To-morrow, because shot, for they both did hit it,” indeed.) Basil ignores the increasingly grim reality that Pfizer should soon be joined by Moderna, stares him in the face. So confident is he in AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson in deliv- human ingenuity to solve a crisis on a timeline ering millions of doses around the world, and of his own making, so caught up with his own it seems that most Canadians are willing to get affairs, that he ignores the well-being of the next in line and roll up their sleeves — after they’ve generation. But once the mistakes really start to had a chance to see the effect, of course. In early compound, there is no going back. “I felt the December, an Ipsos/Radio-Canada poll found consciousness that they were all occasioned by that while 63 percent of respondents plan to my own folly,” he finally admits. get the shot, more than half want to wait a little We should all celebrate the ingenuity that while. This is in keeping with what the peer- will, eventually, bring this viral nightmare to an reviewed journal Nature Medicine found in an end. But we cannot wait for some equally ingen- earlier survey of nineteen countries, published in ious solution to the other, more serious crisis we October: “Current levels of willingness to accept face. We cannot wait to see the effect of another a COVID-19 vaccine are insufficient to meet the tenth of a degree, and then another. We can no requirements for community immunity.” longer put this off till tomorrow.

Kyle Wyatt, Editor-in-Chief

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 5 MARYJANIGAN.CA Literary Review of Canada Massey College 4 Devonshire Place Toronto, ON M5S 2E1 [email protected] EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kyle Wyatt ...an intellectual [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Michael Strizic ASSISTANT EDITOR and research Rose Hendrie POETRY EDITOR Moira MacDougall COPY EDITOR achievement of Barbara Czarnecki ART DIRECTOR Brian Morgan CONTRIBUTING EDITORS t he ﬁrst order... Cristina Austin, Marlo Alexandra Burks, Murray Campbell, Bronwyn Drainie, Basil Guinane, Beth Haddon, Mark Lovewell, Queen’s University Professor Emeritus Thomas Couchene Cecily Ross, Alexander Sallas, Derek Ungless PUBLISHER Eithne McCredie BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Macfarlane (Chair), Marina Glogovac, Scott Griffin, Neena Gupta, John Honderich, Kelly Jenkins, Joseph Kertes, Amela Marin, Don McCutchan, John Stackhouse, David Staines, Jaime Watt CORPORATE SECRETARY Vali Bennett FOUNDED IN 1991 BY P. A. DUTIL SUBMISSIONS See reviewcanada.ca/submissions for guidelines. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CIRCULATION In Canada, $56/year plus GST/HST ($68 for libraries and institutions). Outside Canada, $86/year ($98 for libraries and institutions). Literary Review of Canada P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 [email protected] (416) 932-5081 SUPPORT Literary Review of Canada is published ten times a year by Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization (NO. 848431490RR0001). Donate at reviewcanada.ca/donate. ©2021 Literary Review of Canada. All rights, including translation into other languages, are reserved by the publisher in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and all other countries participating in the Universal Copyright Convention, the International Copyright Convention, and the Pan-American Copyright Convention. Nothing in this publication may be re produced without written permission. ISSN 1188-7494 Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Canadian Index, and distributed by Disticor and Magazines Canada. Literary Review of Canada may allow carefully selected organizations to contact subscribers with offers that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, email Subscriber Services at [email protected], call (416) 932-5081, or write P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1.

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RE: This Is Not the End of the Story the Liberals. If such is the case, almost forty RE: Power Down by Ian Waddell (December) years later, it can only be assumed that Waddell by Srdjan Vucetic (November) buries his political grudges with well-marked Xs. IAN WADDELL ASSERTS THAT HIS STORY OF HOW Whatever the reason, the end result is an incom- IF I HAVE CORRECTLY READ SRDJAN VUCETIC’S Aboriginal rights were recognized in Canada’s plete telling of the behind-the-scenes story. excellent review of Exit from Hegemony: The new constitution “is not the end.” One of the For the full story to be told, history must rec- Unraveling of the American Global Order, one of reasons this may be true is that his telling of ord that it was more than the white guys who the book’s main lessons is that liberty and dem- the story is so incomplete. did it. ocracy don’t necessarily go together. For reasons that only he can explain, he This was the theme of C. B. Macpherson’s ignores the influential — and decisive — role Murray Angus 1964 CBC Massey Lectures, The Real World of that Inuit leaders played in lobbying to get the Ottawa Democracy, where he traced the emergence of Aboriginal rights clause into the first and then Western democracy as individualized freedom the final drafts of the patriation resolution. Even RE: Don’t Kid Yourself of choice in a market-like competition among more strangely, when listing the members of his by Jessica Duffin Wolfe (December) alternatives. Similarly, the late U.S. Supreme own caucus who were advocating for the clause’s Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent much inclusion (Jim Manley, Jim Fulton, himself), A VERY WELL WRITTEN AND POIGNANT PIECE. THERE of her career arguing that liberty without equal- Waddell studiously ignores his colleague Peter are lessons for trade policy in this as well! ity is largely mere rhetoric. This point was elo- Ittinuar, the first Inuk elected to Parliament and quently elaborated by Pamela Karlan in her one of only two NDP members who sat on the @Camillerilaw elegiac essay on that fiercely intelligent, prin- special joint committee that toured the country via Twitter cipled jurist in The New York Review of Books to gather public input on the draft resolution (October 22). (Svend Robinson being the other member). In RE: Twists of Fate Thank you for this timely reminder that the fact, Ittinuar was the person who ultimately by Ethan Lou (November) work of democracy building is ongoing — and moved the motion to include section 34 (now possibly barely begun. section 35). To ignore Ittinuar’s role and the sup- I READ “TWISTS OF FATE” WITH GREAT INTEREST. porting role of the Inuit Committee on National Ethan Lou gets at something I’ve definitely felt Heather Menzies Issues is to do them both a great disservice. yet could not place; he put it into words beauti- Gabriola, B.C. At the other end of the story — when sec- fully and eloquently. The examples he cites are tion 35 was yanked from the draft resolution great, and the way he strings them together — it RE: Migrations on November 25, 1981, to appease certain pre- was exactly what I’ve been feeling inside. by Sarah Wylie Krotz (October) miers — Waddell recounts how “Indigenous The pandemic is changing the world in all leaders and allies, including the Vancouver lawyer sorts of ways, but I feel the biggest one is the AFTER READING SARAH WYLIE KROTZ’S ESSAY IN THE Louise Mandell and hundreds of others, flocked one we can’t put a finger on. I was particularly Literary Review of Canada, “Migrations”: My eyes to Ottawa by train, aboard the Constitution struck when Lou mentions “that book that never rise to the skies. My ears open. Get out. Walk Express. They forced the prime minister and the became your favourite because you never saw for birds. premiers to restore section 35.” While there was it on the lap of a fellow subway rider.” I think indeed widespread public outrage over the drop- about how I discover new books — conversations @peterpoole ping of the Aboriginal rights clause (as well as the with friends, word of mouth, browsing a book- via Twitter women’s equality clause), it was Ittinuar and the shop, and so on. It’s almost always by chance. national Inuit leadership who secured a private I did pick up Lou’s new book, Field Notes from . . . and Remembering the Boys of Summer meeting with Pierre Trudeau at 24 Sussex and per- a Pandemic, after reading his essay (thanks for suaded him to hold off bringing the resolution pointing me to a great title). But I wonder about I AM WRITING IN MY CAPACITY AS CHAIR OF THE to a vote for a month, to allow them to pursue the broader “discoverability” of new books newly formed Century Committee with the lobbying efforts to bring the necessary number when we increasingly lack moments of chance. Society for American Baseball Research. The of premiers on board. As it turned out, it was Will reading become more exclusive, becoming idea behind our group is to celebrate import- Peter Lougheed of Alberta who bent to both the the domain only of those who actively seek it ant milestones in baseball history. I just wanted lobbying and the public pressure and acceded to out? And if so, will we end up with less and less to say that in this role, it was my great pleasure Canadians’ desire to see Aboriginal rights recog- selection and variety of titles? to bring your excellent September 2020 base- nized in a new constitution, albeit with the word ball pieces to the attention of our members. “existing” added to the clause. Tamsin Tahoma I do hope that you will let Mark Kingwell Waddell ends his account with a long list Toronto (“The Ashes”) and Michael Taube (“A Sultan’s of individuals whose “moral courage” led to Education”) know that their fine work was very the successful inclusion of Aboriginal rights LOST BUT NOT FOREVER. THE REAL VALUE OF ANY much appreciated. in Canada’s new constitution — Broadbent, conference is not what’s happening on the plen- Berger, Trudeau, Watts, Woodward, Rosenbloom, ary floor but what’s happening in the corridors. Sharon Hamilton Aldridge, and Chrétien. Heroes all, but not an Post-pandemic there will be a huge pent-up Ottawa Inuk in sight. demand for human contact. One has to wonder how much of Waddell’s Write to [email protected] or tag our exclusion of the Inuit role was influenced by the @DSProudfoot social media channels. We may edit comments and fact that Ittinuar later left the NDP and joined via Twitter feedback for length, clarity, and accuracy.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 7 PLAYTIME

The Magical History Tour It was the summer of ’69 David Macfarlane

John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool Greg Marquis James Lorimer & Company 248 pages, softcover and ebook

ONCLUSIONS ABOUT BOOKS drawn from single sentences are reckless adventures, if you ask me. Words don’t operate fully as words except in the presence Cof other words. The same is true of sentences, which depend on context for their resonance. It is in the variations of their echoes that nuance is established. And nuance, as it turns out, is often what makes writing interesting. As a rule, things are not what they declare themselves to be between a capital letter and a full stop. The story is usually more complicated than that. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule. There are sentences that, unassisted, provide readers with a good, solid sense of a book as a whole. I am going to quote such a sentence from Greg Marquis’s thoroughly researched and The pyjama- clad host and hostess were a “darling couple.” intriguing cultural history, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool. But first, some in my opinion) had a truly great pop voice. The battles with Richard Nixon, the military- background. whine that made his speaking a bit reedy was industrial complex, American immigration, If, like me, you are a Canadian, a Beatles fan, perfect for rock ’n’ roll. And I do mean perfect. and the other Beatles — this all figured largely and a thousand years old, you will recall that Just give his vocal in “Anna,” from the Beatles’ in my sense of how the universe was unfolding John Lennon and Yoko Ono kept showing up 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, a listen. in those days. By 1969, there were few celebrities, here (of all places) in 1969. In my world — mean- That same year, the Beatles did a cover of as far as I was concerned, of equal stature. But, ing the world as I saw it when I was seven- the Marvelettes’ 1961 hit “Please Mr. Postman.” of course, I thought very differently about both teen — this was very big news. It’s as good as it is for a number of reasons, John Lennon and Canada in those days — and I was one of those nerdy, slightly irritating none more important than Lennon’s voice. Of one of the pleasures of reading Marquis’s book “John is my favourite Beatle” types, but the course, it’s a great song. Dangerously great. The is being reminded of that. position was (I still maintain) defensible. By Marvelettes were a tough act to follow. But the Lennon’s name had none of the association 1969, I wasn’t following John’s post-B eatle forays Beatles (being the Beatles) pulled it off, and with tragedy that it immediately has for me now. with anything like my earlier dedication to the Lennon’s vocal is particularly good. He seems He was dashing and bold in a kooky kind of band. But that didn’t really matter. I’d always sometimes to be channelling the spirit of the way, and Marquis captures his convictions and been a fan. Years before, when I first heard the kind of American pop music that other young contradictions deftly. Lennon was interesting, Beatles’ cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and English musicians were only imitating. He got and he was funny. His outrage at the Vietnam Shout” (I can picture my friend’s living room it somehow. War was entirely justified, and he was trying to on a Saturday afternoon when his parents were Lennon was a very good (I would say under- figure out how to use his celebrity for good. I see out and we could turn up the hi-fi), I knew rated) rhythm guitar player. He was, obviously, no reason now why I should not have admired Lennon was someone worth idolizing, at least a great songwriter and an inventive musical him as I did then. On top of which he was a O T

for a while. spirit. But it was in his voice that you could most Beatle. And it’s worth recalling, as Professor O H P

It’s hard to convey the excitement — the clearly hear how well he knew and how much Marquis does (he teaches in the Department of K actual, physical, in-the-pit-of-my- stomach he loved the music that inspired his band. His History and Politics at the University of New C O T S

excitement — of John Lennon’s stupendously voice was a lightning rod struck by the Shirelles Brunswick), that during the period covered in Y good, stretched- to-its- limit vocal on “Twist and and the Marvelettes, by Ray Charles and Buddy this book, it was not yet officially clear that the M A L

Shout.” The conditions in my friend’s living Holly, by Chuck Berry and Elvis. At his best (and Beatles had broken up. A

; room on that long- ago Saturday afternoon were here I remain in complete agreement with my Broken up, like forever. D E T never to be repeated, of course. They relied on younger self), he really was rock ’n’ roll. For the seventeen-y ear-old me, the ongoing I M I L the Beatles being the Beatles and on my being So that was what first sold me on John. His speculation about the Beatles was existen- S S almost a teenager. It was the purest blast of activism and superstar celebrity came later, but tial — a word I happened to know thanks E R P rock ’n’ roll I’d ever felt. I was on board with that too. The “War Is Over! to an adventurous grade 11 English teacher. L A Youthful revelations are not always a reli- (If You Want It)” ad campaign, Yoko’s extremely Existentialism makes perfect sense — in fact, I R O able guide over the long run, but this one was. weird performance from inside a bag (don’t ask) it’s obviously how things are — during those T C I

Lennon (particularly on the pre- Revolver albums, at the Toronto Pop Festival, Lennon’s ongoing interesting, fun-f illed years when you have a P

8 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA different body, a different voice, and a different brain every time you turn around. “Man is and the danger ended — condemned to be free,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. I wasn’t certain what that meant, but it always we came out of our hiding places, got a red check mark when I worked it into a grade 11 essay, and to the extent that I did under- the undershrub, old leaning fence, stand the freedom of existential choice, I could Mrs. Liebowitz’s shed, or the tire mound see that each year of my teens had been an in the tangled ravine — advance in some unfated and unpredictable way on its predecessor. The same was true of Beatles records. To this day, if I am recalling something and Mooney called ally-olly-incomfree again, from that distant time, I use the order of those so the youngest Dunphy would hear, albums as a way of keeping track of my own personal history. Puberty, for instance, was wriggle out of the crack, smirking, something that happened somewhere around and we’d wipe the weeds from our pants Rubber Soul and Revolver, and an association and faces, sighing a deep heave like that is not to be taken lightly. The Beatles slowly breaking up wasn’t something that was just happening. It was something that was hap- that WE were not IT; my brother had pening to me. been tagged, and it was his turn to So, for all kinds of reasons, John Lennon was a huge deal for me in 1969, and it was fun to be hide his eyes and count, and hunt, and reminded by Marquis’s portrait of what now search for the most exposed, the one feels almost like an old friendship. I’d nearly who couldn’t hide fast enough, or forgotten the comfortable feeling of thinking of Lennon as something like an admired counsel- find a place just right for a small body lor, a hip, young teacher, maybe an impossibly cool, moved- out-of-the-house-a-while- ago older and the danger spiked again, electric brother. Was he a role model for me? You bet he was. Recreating the context of John Lennon’s in the spine-hair of fear cultural heroism (cultural heroism, that is, as that we might be caught, be tagged, be the next IT — millions of John Lennon fans imagined it) is and some of us grabbed a youngster by the hand one of the achievements of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool. It was a to stuff them safe in a leaf pile, and some of us different time. For one thing, John Lennon’s kicked the crab ladder off the wall, so no one could worst songs had not yet been played to death follow; and some just hid, some ran, one cried — every Christmas. Marquis is quite right to take a good look at this strangely Canadian moment, if only all of us in the game, and not, wondering because it sprang from such an intriguing con- why the chill of the chase, night after night? fluence of characters and themes: pop culture meets the Vietnam War meets Quebec nation- Kate Marshall-Flaherty alism meets Pierre Trudeau meets Yoko Ono meets Thor Eaton. What a strange trip it was, Kate Marshall-Flaherty is the author of, most recently, Radiant and Reaching V. and yet many of the subjects feel contemporary: the ascent of celebrity, the dominance of pop culture, the rise of nationalism, the effective- John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Canada No subject on God’s green earth attracts iron- ness (or lack thereof) of protest, the circumven- Was Cool is doggedly, you might even conclude ists like pop music. It is prudent, therefore, to tion of mainstream media. All these are playing deliberately uncool. It took some initial adjust- wade into the thickets of cultural history with out today, just as they played out in Canada in ment, but I came to think of this as not a bad caution when there are guitars involved. Because 1969 — most famously, in, on, and around a thing. If the book were all cool and ironic and (and this thought also crossed my mind) the queen-size bed in a suite in the Queen Elizabeth clever, it wouldn’t be as vivid as it is. Uncoolness cover of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Hotel, in Montreal, where, along with Timothy provides a stable platform for the story Marquis Canada Was Cool could be a perfect imitation of Leary, Tommy Smothers, et al., “Give Peace a wants to tell. This is clear from the get-go. those year-end roundups that Canadian news- Chance” was recorded and the term “bed-in” Consider the title alone: total squaresville. papers published in 1969. was (inevitably) coined. The book’s title is as square as its design, as In those distant, pre- digital days, there were And here, as is his professorial wont, Greg a matter of fact. If this were a textbook from a creatures called arts reporters who sometimes Marquis steps in to translate the ’60s termin- sociology course you had to take in 1975 and the wrote of their forays into the counterculture, and ology. Which gets us, finally, to the single, title was Studies in Twentieth- Century Canadian when they did, they were writing for a readership unassisted sentence from John Lennon, Yoko Ono Popular Culture, you wouldn’t have to change that comprised teenagers (like me) and adults and the Year Canada Was Cool that I maintain is a thing. The display copy on the back cover is (like my parents). For this cross-g enerational a clue to the book’s fundamental nature: “The equally anachronistic: “Follow the celebrity reason, arts reporters had to assume that many bed-in is often portrayed as a spontaneous and couple on their visits to Canada in 1969 and dis- of their readers (like my parents) couldn’t tell somewhat chaotic 1960s ‘happening’ (a term for cover the spirit of the Sixties, Canadian- style.” a Beatle from a Rolling Stone, or a Dylan from performance art, or in some cases, a hip social And yet . . . and yet. Marquis is an informed a Donovan. Everything about rock ’n’ roll had event associated with the counterculture).” guide, and eventually I came to find the book’s to be explained to people who didn’t get it. Based on no evidence other than that sen- absence of coolness interesting. Interestingly Marquis employs the same didactic approach. tence, a reasonably perceptive reader — some- ambiguous, to be precise. Does John Lennon, I found it kind of comforting, frankly. It took one attuned, perhaps, to the ebb and flow of Yoko Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool sim- me back. popular vernacular — could accurately conclude ply have (and the thought did cross my mind) “In the 1960s, no one was cooler than the that whatever else this book is, it is most def- a terrible title on a terrible cover? Or is the Beatles,” the professor writes in his introduc- initely not cool. I’m not all that cool myself, cover — a combination of sans serif text, back- tion. It’s one of a number of sentences in his but even I know that nobody cool says “a hip ground blankness, and an absolutely predict- documentation of Lennon and Ono’s three social event.” Ditto for “a somewhat chaotic able stock press photograph — meant to be visits to Canada in 1969 that might as well not 1960s ‘happening.’ ” ironic? be there at all.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 9 Assuming that we are all on the same page flown over because they express obvious truths. Here’s a thing I did not know: Petula Clark of about what “cool” is, it’s not an indisputable Yup, I kept saying to myself, skimmingly. “Downtown” fame was performing in Montreal statement that there was not a single person “Fans in the know (and all guitar players) at the time of the bed-in. Clark visited Lennon in the whole entire world who was a teensy bit were aware that rock, like jazz, had a lineage.” and Ono in their hotel room, and she is one cooler than the Beatles in the 1960s. And let’s Yup. of the members of the ragtag chorus on the start the list with Nina Simone and Miles Davis. “By the end of the year, tens of thousands of unusually long single “Give Peace a Chance.” But who cares? How do you measure such a American military deserters and draft dodgers (So was my late, great friend the writer Alison thing? Honestly, what does it matter, and if it were living north of the border.” Gordon.) I also did not know that Jacqueline doesn’t matter, why say it? If the point is that the Yup. Susann, author of the bestseller Valley of the Beatles were influential in the 1960s, well, I think ◆ Dolls, happened to be in Montreal as well. most readers would take that as a given. TO BE FAIR, THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS I DID NOT Susann dropped by the suite for a drink and There are similar sentences scattered through- know in these pages. John Lennon, Yoko Ono and reported that her pyjama-c lad host and hostess out these couple hundred pages — sentences the Year Canada Was Cool is a bit of a treasure were a “darling couple.” that affirm mythologies so well established trove. It’s solidly researched — full of the political, I was interested to learn that (rather like the in pop history that their affirmation seems social, and cultural issues that were being dis- Queen) Lennon didn’t travel with money or unnecessary. Did you know, for example, that cussed (endlessly, it seemed to the teenage me) in credit cards. He was John Lennon, and as a there was a big rock festival at Woodstock, the newspapers and magazines and on the radios result he could just show up at one of the bet- New York, in the summer of 1969? Well, hang and televisions of the day. Names and events ter hotels in Montreal, move with Yoko into a on to your reading chair, because “participants came back to me as I read about them. I kept say- suite, have all the furniture immediately moved spoke of the memorable music, the spontaneity, ing to myself, Oh, I remember that. Marquis has out (except for the famous bed, of course), the positive vibrations (‘vibes’) and the sense caught the texture of the time, and his instinct to and assume that somebody would eventually of community, with people helping pick up inspect it through the prism of Lennon and Ono pay for everything. (Somebody — an official at garbage and volunteering to assist those experi- is a good (and oddly revealing) one. the Beatles’ company, Apple Corps — eventu- encing bad LSD trips.” Assisted in his research by his wife, Marquis ally did.) But I was even more interested to be These are flyover sentences that a reader sim- has drawn on a pretty impressive archive of reminded by Greg Marquis’s John Lennon, Yoko ply skips — but not because they are wrong or sources — a thoroughness to which the extensive Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool that there offensive or poorly written. Marquis has a calm endnotes attest. He seems to have a firm grasp of was a time in my life when that’s exactly how narrative voice. He has a pleasantly lucid style. the personalities, venues, and general trends of I thought a semi-d eity such as John Lennon And his judgment seems sound. So far as I can the pop music world of 1969. He’s just as confi- moved through the world. tell (and so far as I can remember), he is gen- dent in his broad overviews of politics, and here A moment in time that I’d thought had been erally right about what English Canada was his staid, academic tone comes into its own. mummified by boomer nostalgia turns out to be generally like in 1969, although, as he acknow- Marquis can go from what the seventeen-y ear- full of surprises. For instance: I had never known ledges, an Indigenous historian or one from old me would have thought the coolest thing that one Lillian Piché Shirt, a Cree woman from Quebec would view the year (and the occasional going (John Lennon on stage at the Toronto Alberta, gave Lennon the idea for what became visits of a rich, eccentric musician and his no less Pop Festival, let’s say) to the dullest subject his most popular song during a phone conversa- eccentric partner, a Japanese artist) from quite a in the universe (Canadian politics) without tion she had with him while he was in Canada, different perspective. The flyover sentences are shifting gears. of all places, in 1969. Imagine that.

This excellent biograph“y should be required reading for foreign policy practitioners and academics alike. 2020 Winner — SEN. PETER BOEHM, International Journal J.W. Dafoe Book Prize

Brendan Kelly’s” insightful, entertaining biography offers a unique window to domestic and foreign events and personalities whose legacies are still being debated. Cadieux believed deeply in the dignity of public service, and the principles reflected in his career still speak eloquently to readers today, when professionalism and expertise are often undervalued.

The C.D. Howe Series in Canadian Political History

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978-0-7748-3897-9 hardcover THE PUBLIC SQUARE

A Maritime Murder The final book by Silver Donald Cameron Frank Macdonald

Blood on the Water: A True Story of he argues, because far too little attention was Samson poses no danger to them. (Bail, when Revenge in the Maritimes paid to the extenuating circumstances that it does come, takes him far from Isle Madame Silver Donald Cameron preceded the incident — the accumulated years until it’s time for his own trial.) Viking of torment and harassment that carried little Not even the victim, Phillip Boudreau, is 256 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook weight in the courtroom. And so Blood on the fully apart from the community, despite his Water ranges far and wide, as Cameron ventures minor reign of terror: “Phillip was an outlaw, deep into the affected community and supple- but not an outcast.” Despite having bullied his HEN PHILLIP BOUDREAU ments the legal proceedings with conversations, way through life — threatening to burn down was murdered on June 1, interviews, anonymous voices, anecdotes, and people’s houses, destroy their traps, steal their 2013, by fishermen from Isle Acadian history. ATVs — Boudreau evades multiple attempts by Madame, Nova Scotia, the ◆ the RCMP to arrest him, in large part because crime generated a popu- CAMERON WAS BORN IN TORONTO, IN 1937. HE his neighbours will not betray one of their own. Wlar headline across the country and beyond: grew up in Vancouver and eventually earned Yet he is no escape artist and spends nearly half “Murder for Lobster!” A sensational story would his doctorate at the University of London, in his life incarcerated. (Some in the community always follow: a poacher caught raiding lobsters 1967. Then, in search of a quiet place to write, wish he could simply be jailed during lobster from other fishermen’s traps was shot at four he moved in the early 1970s to D’Escousse, a vil- season, which would greatly reduce the harm times with a 30-30 rifle, his small speedboat lage on Isle Madame, which today has a popu- he could do.) rammed and run over, his body gaffed in the lation of approximately 4,300. While his given Cameron paints a picture of a man whom water and dragged out to more than twelve name — Donald Cameron — might have carried some consider a local Robin Hood — one who fathoms, where it was allegedly tied to an anchor weight elsewhere, it brought nothing but confu- has been battered and abused since child- and sent to the bottom of the sea. sion in and around Cape Breton. To distinguish hood — but also one accused of multiple rapes. Boudreau’s body was never recovered, but him from a myriad of other Donald Camerons And despite Boudreau’s relentless theft and there was enough evidence, including confes- in the area, he was quickly rechristened Silver destruction, the larger community mourns his sions, to bring charges against the crew of the Donald Cameron, for his white hair. He married death. “You hear it over and over,” Cameron Twin Maggies. The lobster boat’s former owner, into an Acadian family and came to respect a writes. “It shouldn’t have happened. Nobody deserves James Landry, and its captain, Dwayne Samson, place whose respect he also came to earn. to die that way. Those guys aren’t killers. We should faced second-d egree murder charges. have stopped it.” (There are exceptions, A lesser charge of accessory after the of course, and James Landry is among fact was lodged against Craig Landry, “If a single phrase can them, telling investigators, “I hope you a deckhand. The following year, in don’t find him. Let the crabs eat him. November 2014, reporters filled the describe the spirit of the They don’t have to put him in the cem- provincial courtroom in nearby Port etery. He don’t deserve a Mass.”) Hawkesbury for James Landry’s trial. book, it is ‘deep respect.’ ” Throughout Blood on the Water, But one person covering the proceed- Cameron quietly makes a case for the ings really stood out. statement “Those guys aren’t killers.” Silver Donald Cameron, the award-w inning In fact, if a single phrase can describe the Theft and cut traps had long plagued James journalist and author, wrote about the trial as spirit of Blood on the Water, it is “deep respect.” Landry and other lobster fishermen. Boudreau a freelancer and later distilled the events sur- Throughout Cameron’s telling, place is as import- would taunt them by moving two or three traps rounding the murder into a compelling book, ant as the people who inhabit the story — whether ahead of them, stealing their catch and waving Blood on the Water, completed shortly before his it be Her Majesty’s Story or the story of James as he cut the traps loose. In his fourteen-f oot death last spring. Within its pages, he sets aside Landry, Phillip Boudreau, or anyone else partici- speedboat, Midnight Slider, he would make quick the sensationalism and instead relates a tale pating in the drama. escapes, while those on lumbering vessels could that’s part courtroom narrative, part community Cameron scatters Blood on the Water with hear him laughing. But his boat failed him one profile, part assessment of Canada’s justice sys- numerous Phillip-isms and “island voices.” And day, and the lives of several people and an entire tem as experienced by marginalized peoples. “To as the book moves from a murder trial to Isle community were changed. an Acadian or a Mi’kmaw,” he writes, “English Madame and its residents, it remains a unified What seems not to have changed in Isle common law presents itself as rigid, insensitive, narrative. The accused are not simply villains Madame is the sense that Phillip Boudreau’s hostile, and unrealistic — an artificial set of rules who cause local Acadians to shake their heads crime wave could have ended much earlier — and that don’t resonate with the nature of reality, or in dismay. In Cameron’s telling, James Landry, with much less violence — had law enforcement with authentic lived experience, or even with Dwayne Samson, and Craig Landry are as much been more present on the island. “Whatever basic principles of equity and fairness.” With a part of their community as their neighbours, James and Dwayne get,” Cameron quotes one Blood on the Water, Cameron tries to convey that friends, and enemies. They are fishermen caught local as saying, “the last three RCMPs and the last authentic experience as lived on the small island, up in the tragic consequences of a terrible deci- three Fisheries ofﬁcers should get the same, because just off the coast of Cape Breton. sion made one fateful day. it’s just as much their fault.” Cameron details what he calls “Her Majesty’s The Acadian community presents the court Ultimately, James Landry was sentenced to Story”: how the Crown prosecutors set out the with a petition, containing more than 700 fourteen years for manslaughter and Dwayne facts and evidence against sixty-f ive-y ear-old names, calling for Dwayne Samson to be released Samson to ten. Both men were paroled after James Landry. This is the testimony and evi- on bail. It has no standing, but for Cameron three years. Underlying Silver Donald Cameron’s dence that was generally reported in contem- its existence underscores a broader sympathy final book is an unsettling question: Was porary news accounts. But that’s not enough, and level of trust: those signatories know that justice served?

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 11 THE PUBLIC SQUARE

Je me souviens de quoi? A fresh take on the beautiful province Graham Fraser

La condition québécoise: Une histoire dépaysante Jocelyn Létourneau Les éditions du Septentrion 320 pages, softcover and ebook

T’S A VERY GOOD TIME TO READ JOCELYN Létourneau’s extended essay on Quebec history. For one thing, last year was a year of anniversaries: fifty years since the October Crisis, forty years since the I1980 referendum, twenty- five years since the 1995 referendum. Reflections on these existential events stimulated a stream of articles, books, and documentaries that were coloured by regret and recrimination, that opened old wounds, and that aired old grievances. But La condition québécoise presents readers with a more chal- lenging interpretation of events. Consider its subtitle alone, for the word “dépayser” means two things: to give a change of scenery and to disorient or make ill at ease. Since 1978, Quebec licence plates have been adorned with the phrase “Je me souviens” A different way of lighting the history of Quebec. (I remember), and there have been many discus- sions about what, in fact, Quebecers are being difficulty of being and moving forward.” The moderate canadianité marked by britannicité and asked to recall. Decades of oppression? An ideal legacy of the Conquest has also meant ambigu- francité as a result of a historical situation that pre- Conquest society? Astérix’s Gaulois and ities and contradictions: two languages, leading had to be accepted, willingly or not. Within this other heroes, who kept French-s peaking societies to confusion before the courts; the continued imagined identity, the Indigenous part is literally alive under alien domination? Some elements of application of French civil law, resulting in a forgotten or rejected.” these stories are part of the traditional narrative legal system with competing logics; a British Another fact often neglected in the prevailing that Létourneau takes on. Where some see a past administration “caught between its sympathies nationalist narrative: Lord Durham was followed in stark and simple colours of black and white, and its interests.” by Lord Elgin, who signed the Rebellion Losses the Université Laval professor sees ambiguity, Even the fundamental but sometimes forgot- Bill in 1849. Despite the violence the law pro- paradox, complexity, and nuance. Indeed, even ten Quebec Act of 1774 acknowledged all this: it voked and the burning of the parliament build- the most traditional accounts of Quebec history gave back to the Catholic Church the prerogative ings in Montreal by angry English merchants, it S include conflicting elements: the habitants who to collect tithes, it re- established the ownership confirmed what Létourneau calls “the real but I A R

stayed put and farmed the land, and the c oureurs rights of the seigneuries, and it formalized tol- limited sovereignty that the Canadian colony A M de bois who paddled across the country. erance of the French- speaking majority. “In a had acquired.” S E D Nationalists have not been amused by the stroke,” Létourneau writes, “the equally French For some in the nationalist tradition, includ- D L book’s appearance. One former FLQ member, and Catholic character of the colony was tacitly ing the political scientist Denis Monière, the A N

Jacques Lanctôt, wrote in the Journal de Montréal recognized, which officialized, for better or failure of the 1837–38 rebellions meant that O R

; that “Létourneau is trying to demonstrate that worse, a cultural and institutional duality.” established society as defined by the Catholic 3 5 9 1

we are something other than a defeated people Létourneau returns again and again to this Church was imposed — or reimposed — in the ,

E seeking its independence” and concluded that theme of duality. Yes, there have been moments years following the Durham Report. But for R

S his analysis was “troubling rather than disori- of extremism and violence in the distant and Létourneau, the pillars of traditional society I

N enting.” Le Devoir sniffed he didn’t have the recent past, but moderates have prevailed. were shattered: slavery, the clergy reserves, the I M

R literary quality necessary for this kind of essay. Yes, Lord Durham’s proposal to unify Upper seigneurial regime, and Métis communitar- E I The response is not surprising: La condition and Lower Canada was a punitive response ianism were all abolished by legislation or by M E

P québécoise confronts many of the standard and to the 1837–38 rebellions, but “in practice the force between then and the 1880s. And rather ,

S comforting verities of the past. Rather than constituted entity functioned like two separ- than seeing Confederation as the beginning of I S

E conquering the wilderness and dominating ate states. . . . Canadian duality was, de facto, “a long winter of survival . . . a sort of depressive L

P its inhabitants, the first Europeans were “in a reinforced.” And in the 1840s, Robert Baldwin, phase when the word of traditionalists and the U D state of dependence on the Indigenous peoples, Louis- Hippolyte LaFontaine, and Francis Church dominates,” Létourneau sees this period E C

I who gave them the information they needed Hincks — a trio of measured reformers — worked as “the beginning of a profound transformation R U to travel, manage, feed, dress, protect, care for, together: “In the wake of this reasoned and rea- of Quebec society and of a formidable change A M

. and enrich themselves.” Far from some glori- sonable complicity, based on the pragmatism and progression of its economy.” M

, ous origin, this condition meant society “built of practical possibilities and the opportunism of The academic and journalistic cheering section Y B A itself in disorganization, uncertainty and the exploitable circumstances, emerged the idea of a for the Quiet Revolution has often referred to G

12 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Maurice Duplessis’s tenure as premier (1936–59, RUMINATIONS with a four-year interruption during the Second World War) as the grande noirceur — the great darkness. Létourneau doesn’t see things that way. To understand the inherent logic of the Duplessis regime, he argues, it is essential to The Great Cover-Up shed the “grande noirceur cliché.” In describing the period from 1945 to 1957, he writes of a Quebec that was “carried by the whirlwind of Our pandemic wasteland the North American economy. By and large, the transformation of the economic and social land- Marlo Alexandra Burks scape of the province is remarkable.” As in so many other areas, Létourneau rejects the simplicity of conventional labels. “It is essential to nuance the interpretation that presents the Quiet Revolution as the result of a desire TORES ARE SELLING THEM, MOTHERS- form of courtesy to others and as a shield from widely shared by the population to change the in-law are sewing them, and most air pollution. order of things completely,” he argues. “The people (thankfully) across Canada Yes, we filter out the germs, and so too the par- desire for renovation that is perceptible at the are wearing them. Fabrics vary: ticulate matter that’s released by heavy industry heart of Quebec society is, at the time, modest, cotton is popular, though targeted and fossil fuels (our latter-d ay “brown fog”). reformist, and pragmatic.” That is also the lens Sadvertisements are now hawking the new and But consider this: the carbon that pollutes the through which he sees the story of contempor- ostensibly more breathable linen kind. The pan- air also provides the synthetic polymer fabric ary Quebec: a society that wants to tackle chal- oply of patterns, colours, and insignia denoting for the disposable filtration systems we sport. lenges in a positive and original fashion, one brand loyalty marries our needs (protection) to Remember how the tobacco industry once that has experienced “the confident decoloniza- our wants (consumption). Enter our era’s bold- funded lung cancer research? The dramatic irony tion of its collective imagination and identity.” est fashion statement: the face mask. is tortuous: Are we the characters in the play, or Should anyone think that the referendum If the essence of beauty is variety, then we the audience, or both? losses have meant an end to nationalism, might suppose that the essence of morality is China produces most of the world’s protect- Létourneau advises caution. Self- affirmation is simplicity. So it’s no surprise that the elegantly ive face masks. Recent videos bring to mind the actually “following its quiet path between the unpretentious and disposable face mask is one optical rhythms of Weimar cinema: the undula- desire for autonomy and recognition on one of the most popular products of the day. tion of comforting blue being lifted, lowered, hand, which is sovereignty, and the desire for And, indeed, the disposable variety has great stamped, steamed, sewn, packaged. In Rizhao, integration and tacit agreement on the other, appeal. It’s always clean, until it’s not, and then which has been in the game since 1993, the pro- which is partnership.” After 1995, indépendantiste you simply throw it away. It’s readily available, cess is masterfully streamlined: The synthetic leaders like Jacques Parizeau and Jean-M artin too. At Canadian Tire, you pay about $30 for a material is brought in. The non- woven material Aussant were concerned about the failure of the fifty-p ack of the three-ply sort (reminiscent of is ultrasonically welded together. The ear loops “separatist” option, which Parizeau referred to that other three-ply COVID commodity). The are affixed. And, along the way, everything is bitterly as “a field of ruins.” But most Quebecers purchase itself offers a little dopamine hit as you machine- checked before being double- checked were more “resigned, exasperated, or relieved” tap your card: This purchase feels good. . . . I can by human hands. Each little veil is slipped into a and “seemed open to the idea of shifting their buy my safety. . . . I can display my virtue! And plastic sleeve and kissed with a seal before being political questioning toward economic and it does and should feel good to remind ourselves placed into a box for shipment. social questions, focusing on ‘the real country’ that we are showing solidarity and concern for The process is not dissimilar in Warren, rather than ‘the dreamed-of country.’ ” It’s as if the well- being of others. But there’s something Michigan, where GM has converted one of its they were saying sovereignty perhaps, but only else happening here: the mask sings out to our facilities to spit out masks. Factory- line workers “after health, the economy, the environment, “deepest consumeristic impulses,” as Samanth labour in ten-hour shifts to produce the much- gender equality, education, immigration, and Subramanian has pointed out in the Guardian. needed item. Their bosses, understandably, have the aging of the population.” “In the absence of a drug or a vaccine, the mask had to increase production. Much of the work As far as younger Quebecers are concerned, is the only material protection we can buy.” is automated, yet human labour still plays a independence is not an ongoing project but Dr. Schnabel’s plague mask, with its aromatics role. Last March and April, they couldn’t meet something that has already happened: “In prac- and avian beak, may have had more going for demand. We were shocked in July, when a flurry tice, young people consider themselves to be it aesthetically, but modern history is more rel- of reports told of China’s exploitation of Uighur sovereign already.” Their attention has turned evant here than medieval. During the 1918–19 flu workers — including those making our masks. from the national question to social ones; they pandemic, the wearing of masks was enforceable But the long shifts closer to home in Warren are more diverse, inclusive, and open. Rather by law in places, but, of course, there were anti- aren’t exactly appealing either. than disappearing, the province’s distinct iden- maskers then too. Even when diligently donned, The trip from Warren or Rizhao to Leduc tity is transforming itself: “The paradoxes of the masks didn’t always stop H1N1. T. S. Eliot and his or Nain is a long and costly one. The endless Quebec condition mean that the tendencies that first wife, Vivienne, caught the virus in December tolls are welded into our “disposable” protec- are developing within it do not take extreme 1918. Capturing something of those ailing times, tion — the price of capitalism running our forms.” Quebecers today are also more likely to the poet wrote of an “unreal city”: “Under machines and slicing through our waters and believe in personal achievement — a break with the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd skies. Sleek industry is a co- creator of COVID-19; the traditional views that seeking wealth was sin- flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not when we pull on the mask, we inadvertently put ful and that the government would ultimately thought death had undone so many.” our mistakes and their consequences on full redistribute it anyway. Eliot’s imagery reveals something about how display. As a fashion statement in a consumer Ultimately, Létourneau’s argument is that face masks can screen us from a parlous reality: society, the mask is hollow. As a symbol and a Quebec and its past are shaped by inclusion, the threat seems distant, unreal, foggy (espe- warning, it is a powerful recapitulation of the heterogeneity, and the accumulation of influ- cially for the bespectacled among us). Has our exploitation of resources and labour. ences and difference rather than separation, sub- sense of time’s passing been blurred along with Sometimes a mask’s short life is cut even traction, and homogeneity. Quebecers should our glasses? It’s strange to think that it’s been shorter. An ear loop breaks. Or maybe it simply embrace their society’s complexity rather than almost two decades since the SARS outbreak of gets left behind, as we shuffle our mittens and shrinking from it. This is a cheerful and opti- 2002–03, when people once again began wear- scarves and toques. It flutters to the ground or mistic vision — of a society that shuns extremes ing medical masks outside of hospitals — as they the gutter, gets caught in the brush, or blows and embraces pragmatism. It is also a refreshing had in 1918. Even though SARS was declared away. For a while, we can’t follow its journey. But antidote to both referendum nostalgia and the contained on July 5, 2003, people in East Asia, it will surely end with the rest of our waste and polarization that the recent U.S. election has especially China, Taiwan, and Japan, continued broken belongings — as detritus, from which highlighted elsewhere on the continent. to cover their noses and mouths — now as a we’ll need to protect ourselves in the future.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 13 OUR NATURAL WORLD

On the Banks of the Miramichi Fire seized upon the town Margaret Conrad

The Miramichi Fire: A History Miramichi area in 1825 was a rough-and- ready MacEachern’s description of the fire — still Alan MacEachern resource frontier, home to a mixed population one of the largest ever recorded in North McGill-Queen’s University Press of Mi’kmaq, Acadians, and recent immigrants. America — makes for gripping reading. Even 288 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook Sloppy forestry practices meant that there was the Miramichi itself offered little relief to those plenty of fuel lying around, and colonists had who fled, because in some areas the water was become accustomed to fighting flames. At the so low that it was impossible to submerge a ITH WILDFIRES HAVING same time, slow communications — mostly human body. Scottish immigrants arriving recently raged in the word of mouth, drums, and smoke in the dis- at the mouth of the river saw the flames and Amazon, California, New tance — meant that people in the path of a fire- immediately turned back, carrying with them South Wales, Siberia, and storm might have little time to escape its fury. some of the earliest accounts of the disaster elsewhere, the appearance As in most disasters, people pointed fin- that began appearing in British newspapers in Wof Alan MacEachern’s The Miramichi Fire is gers at various culprits for setting off the November — accounts that helped explain the a timely reminder of earlier conflagrations inferno — human carelessness, lightning, even high- altitude smoke that had earlier blanketed that attracted global attention. MacEachern, spontaneous combustion — but MacEachern’s much of the northern hemisphere. an accomplished environmental historian at contextual reading of the event suggests it could Although timber exports from the Miramichi Western University, has spent sixteen years region dropped in 1826 and a few businesses exploring New Brunswick’s experience with faced bankruptcy, Newcastle was rebuilt, its forest fires almost two centuries ago. His com- rivalry with Chatham was rekindled, and the mitment to the topic shows in a book that is industry resumed its uneven course until British accessibly written, wonderfully sourced, and preferential tariffs were abolished in the 1840s. often a page- turner. By then settlers were turning to farming and In 1825, the eastern part of North America shipbuilding to complement the timber trade. experienced an exceptionally dry summer and A few decided to try their luck elsewhere, among fall. On the evening of October 7, a Friday, a fire them founders of the community of Miramichi driven by hurricane-f orce winds roared across in the Ottawa Valley. Its name was later changed northeastern New Brunswick, descending on to Pembroke, but a nursing home there still communities along the Miramichi River, wiping bears the former name. out the shire town of Newcastle, scorching its MacEachern writes engagingly about his sister town of Chatham, and taking at least 160 research, and it seems he literally went the last human lives and those of countless fish and kilometre to flesh out his analysis. In an appen- wildlife in just over a day. The scope and speed dix, he provides the names of 130 victims gleaned of the calamity brought international attention from diaries, genealogies, newspapers, relief to a colony that, at the time, was the largest records, tombstones, and the website Ancestry. exporter of timber to the British market. One of He reports that 90 percent of the sources turned the most famous natural disasters of the nine- up by his sleuthing have never before been teenth century, it inspired ballads, commentary, mentioned in any account relating to the fire. and sympathy on both sides of the Atlantic, pro- In an effort to assess the long-term impact of

duced an international outpouring of relief for the disaster, he even travelled to the Miramichi R K C

survivors who had lost everything, and remains area, where he surveyed remote timber stands I L F

of interest to historians who count it among and bored holes in ancient trees to see if they ; S the first signifiers of a changing relationship contained any trace of fire scar or charcoal, but E G A

between humans and their environment in the to little avail. The lieu de mémoire had vanished, M I

Industrial Age. The disaster inspired ballads. replaced by new (and different) forests, which, K O

Before plunging into an analysis of the like New Brunswick forests generally, have been O B

fire, MacEachern offers a chapter on the early have been any or all of the above. Indeed, what extensively exploited by timber companies over V I nineteenth- century timber boom that first became known as the “Great Miramichi Fire” the intervening 195 years. Today only 2 percent H C R A brought the communities of Newcastle and was actually one of many fires, not all of them of the province’s woodlands are more than a T Chatham (amalgamated in 1995 as the city of conjoined. On the same day that flames erupted century old. With climate change bearing down E N R

Miramichi) to global attention. Timber was a along the Miramichi River, they lapped at the upon us, even the mix of trees is likely to tilt E T N critical resource for the British Empire, which borders of Fredericton, destroying one-third of from coniferous to deciduous varieties. I

; 1 was built economically and militarily on sea the town; swept through parts of Maine; and MacEachern laments that the Miramichi 7 8 1

power. When the Napoleonic Wars reduced threatened areas around Montreal, where locals fire has been largely lost to historical mem- , Y

British access to Baltic timber supplies, tariffs after the fact referred to their disaster as the ory, but, as he points out, this is not entirely N A P

were imposed to encourage imports from North “Miramichi Fire.” Focusing on the nearly 16,000 true in New Brunswick, where it is featured in M O C

America. New Brunswick became the quintes- square kilometres burned in northeastern New museums and newspaper retrospectives. The S sential “timber colony,” and it continued to Brunswick, MacEachern argues, minimizes the disaster also figures as a life-s haping event in W E N serve the British market in the expanding inter- impact of the many similar fires that erupted Annie Proulx’s novel Barkskins, from 2016. Yet a N national trade following the war with France. throughout the region, each one of them ampli- first-rate a cademic study of the disaster has been A G I

Much like Fort McMurray today, which serves fied by a climate episode that had made forested missing. Happily, we now have one that will not H C I corporate empires built on petroleum, the areas tinder dry. soon be superseded. M

14 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA CLIMATE CRISIS

Paws for Thought The costs of man’s best friends Susan Crean

Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife Extinction Peter Christie Island Press 280 pages, hardcover and ebook

T’S A GAZE THAT SPANS TIME AND SPECIES. A sea wolf, the very definition of cun- ning and strength, stands on a rocky ledge with a huge rhododendron in riotous bloom close behind him. The Iphoto on my desk occupies half a page in the Guardian Weekly and is arresting, all the more so because the face is familiar. With colouring and demeanour like that of a German shep- herd (save for the short ears and straight hind limbs), the subject could be mistaken for a dog. Because it’s shot from a distance with a tele- photo lens, the image dissolves the literal space between photographer and animal. The wolf appears close up — calm, curious, frozen — as two realms collide. In this intimate encounter between mammals — the watching and the watched — something s uddenly shifts. Implicated in the extinction of others. He was called Takaya, meaning “wolf” in the language of the Songhees Nation, whose terri- News of Takaya’s killing set off a debate that “We’re really in a massive extinction crisis,” tory lies in the southeastern region of Vancouver tended to vilify the hunter who fired the shot. Christie writes, quoting the Mexican ecologist

R Island. The community knew him, as did a Although it is not illegal to kill wolves, the deed Gerardo Ceballos. But what’s sobering is the K C

I handful of others who encountered him on rare seemed gratuitous, out of step with current ideas critical role our pets play in that ongoing crisis. L F

; visits to Discovery Island, about a kilometre off about the preservation of ecosystems and wild- ◆ A C

I the coast in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. First spot- life. Was he motivated by surprise, fear, oppor- THE GUARDIAN CONCLUDED THAT TAKAYA HAD R E ted there in 2012, he lived alone, surrounded by tunity? Was it trophy ambition? Truth is, most only himself to blame: the wolf’s curiosity, M A shoreline that afforded him access to harbour humans view other mammals with a certain explained Leyland Cecco, a Toronto-based jour- N I

N seal, salmon, and the occasional otter. He had myopia. While many of us criticize the hunting nalist, was “built up from years of protection E

M adapted, abandoning the diet of black-tailed of wild animals — and their removal from nat- offered by the islands.” And that, he wrote, “was O W

deer that has allowed coastal wolves to flourish ural habitats to live their lives in zoos and aquar- his undoing.” The apex predator had simply F O

ever since the old-growth forests were young. To iums — we lavish decidedly unnatural lifestyles gone soft. Contrast this interpretation of ani- Y R flourish, but with intermissions. on our pets. What’s more, we fail to consider the mal curiosity with Christie’s take on our own: O T S

I Well into the 1960s, wolves were widely con- impact that those animals we consider family for tens of thousands of years, it was obligatory H

E sidered vermin and were hunted to near extinc- have on those we consider wild. This is the sub- to pay attention to the world around us. “If you H T

tion in many parts of North America including ject of Peter Christie’s Unnatural Companions, a didn’t notice nature,” he points out, “you didn’t N O

Vancouver Island, where they were wiped remarkable examination of our interactions with last long.” Far from making us soft, our inquisi- Y

R out with the help of government- sponsored the pets we welcome in our homes. He shows tive nature is hard-wired: “Our insistent need to A R

B programs. Two decades later, though, they how the simple act of adoption can have a dra- know about the life around us has been so influ- I L

R returned — swimming back across the Strait of matic impact on the world’s rainforests (which, ential in our evolutionary history that our brains E

G Georgia to repopulate their island territories. in Brazil, are being razed so cattle can be herded naturally veer in that direction — even as we try N I S The local population now numbers 250 (with for dog and cat food) and oceans (with schools to technologically distance ourselves from it.” It E L

H 8,500 or so living throughout British Columbia). of forage fish, like sardines, anchovies, and her- has also had lethal effects on the animals, plants, C S

; It is unusual for a pack animal to live alone, ring, being wiped out for similar purposes). and untrammelled landscapes that “are fuel for 8

2 as Takaya did for seven years — a long time in Christie, a science writer based in Kingston, our powers of metaphor and myth, connection, – 3

0 a wolf’s life. Perhaps it was age that prompted Ontario, also reminds us how our pets have and understanding.” 9 1

. him to leave last January. Swimming across to participated in the annihilation of entire spe- We see this in the stories we tell our young, C

S Victoria, he followed a route downtown through cies. One oft-quoted example is the Stephens stories like Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The L

A backyards and laneways before he was stopped Island wren, once found on a tiny isle just off Owl and the Pussy-Cat” and Dennis Lee’s inimit- E B

X by a tranquilizer dart and removed to the coast the north coast of New Zealand’s South Island. able “Alligator Pie.” Yet what we retain from O

B near Port Renfrew. Authorities hoped he’d find A single cat, Tibbles, hunted it to extinction in a such tales wilts in the face of the great extinction R A

T the terrain there familiar, but by late March 2020 single year, 1895. We all know that since Tibbles’s we are living through now — only the sixth in

E I

S he’d made his way back across the interior to exploits, many other species of mammals, birds, the billions of years of life on earth. Sometime S E

J Shawnigan Lake, where he was shot dead. reptiles, amphibians, and fish have vanished. after 1850, the mass of humanity “eclipsed that

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 15 Tibbles may have wiped out a single species, food. But there’s no getting around the fact that The Gloves Come Off but her feline descendants are implicated in the he was a killing machine — small mammals, extinction of at least 175 others. In Australia, for reptiles, insects — with an ecological footprint Two disposable plastic gloves example, feral cats have joined red foxes (also much, much larger than his little paws would introduced from Europe) in the decimation of suggest. tumble across a field — 10 percent of the continent’s 273 autochthonous When we moved east, we brought Lucifer to identical hand mimes in land mammals. Another fifth of those species are live in Toronto, to a two-storey semi that backed the same wind, but doing now considered threatened. In short, our dogs onto a park in South Riverdale. He remained and cats have become roaming invasive species, an outdoor cat who came inside as it suited different dances, almost whether we let them out of the house for a few him, and he found new hunting grounds upon clutching at the grass then hours or they spend their days on the couch. It’s his arrival. But he also grew fond of kibble the air, not touching or increasingly difficult to escape the paradox: our and, eventually, tinned seafood, even though stand-ins for nature are helping us destroy the mousers aren’t natural fishers. (Try telling that crossing paths. They are very thing we desire. to Australian cats, who, Christie notes, average getting away — contaminated ◆ thirty pounds’ worth of seafood each year.) litter no one will touch without FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS, I LIVED ON GABRIOLA Though he had access to that park, Lucifer Island, one of the larger Gulf Islands located didn’t thrive in Toronto. Like Takaya, he died another glove. They are a perfect up the coast near Nanaimo. On ten acres of before he grew old. crime escaping from a silent raw land, we built a one-room cabin, heated by ◆ heist they can never applaud. a wood stove and set in a small clearing, ringed WHEN WE TELL THE STORY OF PEOPLE AND THEIR by cedar, Douglas fir, and arbutus. We were the pets, we often miss the true ending and, quite They have exchanged the tyranny only human residents on that part of Ferne frankly, the true beginning. We think we know of hands for the freedom Road, with panoramic views of Mudge Island where to get pets — the breeders, the pound, the of wind. End over end they and the Strait of Georgia, the Coast Mountains various rescue organizations — but few of us see rising in the blue distance. Being in a rainforest, the way the global supply chain actually oper- flex, wave, give the finger, those acres were alive with sounds and smells ates. When we factor in all of them — the snakes, crumple, twist, dive. and growing things: fungi and nurse logs, sting- the gerbils, and, yes, the dogs and cats — we have She and I watch them until ing nettle and alder saplings supple enough to 82 million animals sharing Canadian homes. bend into tent frames, tree frogs harmonizing That’s more than twice our human population. the light turns green and we by a nearby spring. The fir trees along the cliff And each year, six to eight million of them end drive away in silence and I would sway with the prevailing winds, like a up in shelters. don’t know what to do chorus line mocking the stolid maples and People and domestic animals have an ancient their leaves the size of placemats. In early even- connection based on mutual benefit and com- with my hands. ing, the meadow would succumb to the hermit panionship. The association was originally thrushes, their calls beginning tentatively, a riff defined by work, which dogs could often be Jocko Benoit of ascending notes, sharp as a pennywhistle and trained to do. The job of cats — containing the Jocko Benoit has published three poetry col- mysterious as mercury. The air would crackle rat population in granaries — was self-assigned, lections, including Real Estate Deals of the with the expanding sound as one call became the work being its own reward (as Lucifer liked Apocalypse (Poems about Donald Trump). three and then six in a surrounding circle. to remind me). But despite this primeval con- As Takaya would learn years later, islands are nection, we know that to experience nature an easy reach for creatures that fly and those that requires something more than visiting the local of all the wild land mammals on earth,” Christie swim — wolves and cougars, otters and beaver, dog park or roughing it on the Gulf Islands with observes, and since 1900 nearly half of all mam- all of them known if not often seen around a humorous stray. To actually hear the planet mal species have seen their ranges reduced by Gabriola. Domestic cats, however, don’t swim. talking, as it warns us of what’s to come, we more than 80 percent. Our built-in need to Unlike the wounded band-tailed pigeon that need to reframe how we see animals — animals connect with other animals has not gone away, took refuge in the alder sapling by the cabin like Takaya and Lucifer both. “Pet ownership however, so we increasingly turn to domesticated one spring, scrappy toms can’t get to Gabriola and a love of wildlife are both less like a hobby species: the cats, dogs, birds, fish, and reptiles on their own. But one day, a stray emerged from and more like a state of mind,” Christie writes. whose birthdays we celebrate and deaths we the woods accompanied by a female about to “It’s an emotional and psychological belief sys- mourn. Around the world, humans keep an esti- have kittens. When she and her five newborns tem.” Adoring pets and admiring wildlife are mated 113 mammals as pets, along with 585 spe- left us — for the vet and then for homes around not mutually exclusive, he reminds us, but we cies of birds and 485 species of reptiles. Many of the island — he lingered. We didn’t feed him need to reconfigure those acts in ways we may the most popular animals — like parrots — are at first, but we did leave the window ajar so he have forgotten. also the most endangered. The reptiles we keep, could visit. Sometimes we would disappear for Personally, I always configured my relationship for example, “are five times more likely to be a time, always to find him still around when we with Lucifer as an off-grid and non-c ommercial threatened with extinction” than those we don’t. returned. He seemed at ease with the arrange- one. We had a pact, he and I, more than he had The multi-billion-dollar pet industrial complex, ment, and the feeling was mutual. an owner or I had a pet. Unnatural Companions Christie reminds us, contributes to an increas- This black and white tuxedo cat, a deft hunter shows how even that arrangement was magical ingly negative feedback loop. and patient confidant, came armed with a sense thinking at best. At last count, 41 percent of Canadian house- of humour. In the lamplight shadows, we would ◆ holds have at least one dog and 37 percent have watch him with an intensity we rarely gave the BESIDE ME AT MY DESK IS ANOTHER PHOTO — at least one cat, figures that have surely gone up darkened forest itself. Once, for his amusement, with another gaze that spans time and species. during the pandemic. Collectively, we own over I pretended to swallow a dead mouse. He fell Familiar slanted eyes of yesterday stare through thirteen million of them — four-legged compan- for the trick and, a few evenings later, returned the camera into the present. They look beyond ions who always seem to be hungry. (Another with two mice stuffed in his jaws — one for me and into a garden that hosts the mischief of ten million dogs and cats are on the streets.) me and one for him. When he first arrived, we rats who recently evicted a scurry of chipmunks, Christie reminds us that, unlike the chickens were rereading Paradise Lost, enjoying Milton’s who nonetheless continue to raid the bird feeder our grandparents might have kept as backyard tart humour and noting how Lucifer delivered while dodging incoming cardinals, chickadees, sources of protein, our best friends “are nothing insights as well as bons mots about the superi- and sparrows. They watch as a lone sharp- but protein consumers.” He cites Gregory Okin, ority of Hell. The fallen angel’s name seemed to shinned hawk, the neighbourhood’s current a geographer at UCLA, who has done the calcu- suit our earthly trickster, who even then struck apex predator, lands high in the naked branches lations: “Dogs and cats — if they were their own me as too clever by half. And who, I now have to of a Norway maple. country — are about the fifth largest global meat admit, was an environmental disaster. I’ve looked into Lucifer’s eyes often since those consumers.” That puts them just behind Russia, Back then, I loved that Lucifer lived au naturel, days on Gabriola Island. Now I have to wonder: Brazil, the United States, and China. without our having to supply commercial cat Are we finally seeing each other differently?

16 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA CLIMATE CRISIS

An Arctic Fable Once upon the melting ice Sandra Martin

Ice Walker: A Polar Bear’s Journey through the Fragile Arctic James Raffan Simon & Schuster Canada 192 pages, hardcover and ebook

S A PARENT, I REMAIN A DUD WHEN it comes to shopping with my fashionista daughter and playing sports with my athletic son. What I loved, when they were younger, Awas reading with them — especially snuggling together in bed with chapter books long after they knew how to read by themselves. We had ground rules: no skipping ahead (I still blush at being caught in the act more than once by a wakeful offspring) and, most important, the choices had to appeal to both adult and child. I wasn’t going to waste my time with a series like the Baby-Sitters Club; my kids could indulge in those guilty pleasures by themselves. Instead, we plunged into Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Philip Pullman, L. M. Montgomery, Janet Lunn, Farley Mowat, and C. S. Lewis. It’s a tradition that Survival in a fast-changing world. I have maintained with my grandchildren. James Raffan’s Ice Walker is a happy addition America, and a former governor of the Royal If only the ice today were as reliable as it to our reading list. That is not to suggest it is Canadian Geographical Society. was when Nanu was a cub. Her mother knew a too elementary for grown-ups — not at all. Like With Ice Walker, Raffan introduces us to spring world “of vast sky and ice with occasional the best multi-g enerational books, it creates Nanurjuk — or Nanu — a seven-y ear-old polar leads of open water.” But Nanu “lives in a world charismatic animals, thrums with an enticing bear who roams the shores of Hudson Bay north with wet skies, more water and altogether less narrative pace, and instills an imperative moral of Churchill, Manitoba. For thirty- six months, ice.” The climate crisis is a danger not just to one choice. Ice Walker is elegant in its telling, heart- with the watchfulness of a 24-7 camera, we fol- polar bear but to all of us, of course. The “drip, breaking in the dangers its characters face, and low her through the Canadian Arctic, learning drip, drip of melting pressure ridges might as compelling about our shared existential threat. fascinating details about her characteristics well be the tick, tick, tick of accelerated time in a It belongs to the naturalist genre that includes and her habitat. Early on, Raffan explains how fast- changing world,” Raffan writes. He describes Fred Bodsworth’s Last of the Curlews, a haunting bumps, or papillae, in the hair- covered soles an environment where almost everything is pow- tale about a lonely migratory bird, the Eskimo of Nanu’s feet are a “two-way communication ered by diesel, a dangerous pollutant that can curlew, on the edge of extinction and in a des- system.” They sense crucial differences in the be devastating to the “feathers, skin or coat of a perate search for a mate. As generations of read- texture and temperature of the ice, and they send seabird or mammal.” ers know, a budding romance ends in tragedy out messages, through her skin glands, to other Thanks to Raffan’s storytelling skills, we when a farmer looks overhead, sees the couple bears crossing her tracks. They signal that she is engage readily in Nanu’s struggles to survive, swooping and trilling in a courtship ritual, and healthy and ready to mate. along with the successful birth of her cubs, callously hauls out a loaded shotgun. Nanu’s first pregnancy ended in the stillbirth Sivu and Kingu. They are as real to us as a lit- Nobody talked much about climate change of two cubs; she had not gained enough weight ter of kittens or puppies born to the family pet. when Bodsworth published Last of the Curlews in to nurture the fetuses. Now she must mate suc- They tumble, they fight, they snuggle into their the mid-1950s. Back then, the threat was greedy cessfully and hunt more ruthlessly; then she mother’s belly when they want to nurse or sleep. hunters killing for adventure. In that sense, must find a secure den in which to bear and And eventually they all emerge from the safety Raffan inhabits a different milieu than his liter- feed her young. of the den and move into the lengthening day- ary predecessor. The son of Scottish immigrants, ◆ light of a new and changing world, one in which he grew up studying and exploring the nat- IN TELLING US NANU’S STORY, RAFFAN REVEALS THE high-p owered rifles have replaced harpoons and ural world, travelling from sea to sea to sea by underlying theme of his book: for many thou- noisy, smelly snowmobiles have mostly sup- canoe, snowshoe, sailboat, and even icebreaker, sands of years, polar bears and polar people planted dogs and sleds. and honing his skills as a geographer, explorer, have cohabited in one of the most unforgiving As cute as the two cubs are, they are also an 2 1

0 and raconteur in books, articles, speeches, and environments on the planet, largely because of encumbrance. In the same way that toddlers 2

, podcasts. A modern naturalist who wears his their common ability to hunt and harvest seals. slow down a woman trying to earn a living, E I

K erudition lightly, Raffan is a former curator of It is this “triad of bear, hunter, and seal — and the Sivu and Kingu often distract Nanu in her hunt C I D

the Canadian Canoe Museum, in Peterborough, ice on which they live — that is central to the sur- for seals, necessary to replenish her fat stores N

A Ontario, an international fellow of the Explorers vival of the Arctic world.” Raffan insists that each so that she can protect her cubs from maraud- Y R

B Club, past chair of the Arctic Institute of North of them has “the right to thrive and to be cold.” ers — including wolves and other bears.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 17 wannabe in Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Fever Be. No, Nanu is a real polar bear, or so she seems, a notion that is reinforced by captivating black No matter her need, she is not allowed and white photographs. But is there something wrong here? Ice Walker to be with him, can’t hold the hand is promoted as non-fi ction, yet is it actually a that jerks with each breath the ventilator novel in camouflage? Anticipating this tension pumps. Even if she could talk her way past between genres, Raffan explains in his author’s note why he, a writer who began his career as the guards, she has no code to unlock a marine biologist, “would be stretching the the elevator, no script to hand the nurses. bounds of creative nonfiction with a story about a made-up bear.” The scientist in him couldn’t invent dialogue to put in Nanu’s mouth or She may as well shelter at the cottage include anything that he didn’t know to be they built together, every surface bears accurate. But that left a gap between data and his touch. She can’t sleep, the bed too wide. comprehension, facts and persuasion. So he created ursine characters with names and person- Wraps his robe around her, goes to watch alities and invited us to enter their world in the the storm gather. Pine needles under bare feet, hope that we would share his apocalyptic vision. the dock boards blood warm where she has Raffan has pre- empted questions about authenticity, a contentious issue in naturalist waited while he butterflies out to the lake’s middle, writing in Canada since the mid-1990s. That’s the rhythmic bob of his head as he returns. when the journalist John Goddard accused Mowat of “selling fiction as nonfiction” and having “broken a trust with his readers,” with Sheet lightning makes this a still such Arctic- focused books as People of the Deer from a black and white film, woman and Never Cry Wolf. The magazine Saturday Night on the edge, hair flying, arms spread published Goddard’s devastating critique as its May 1996 cover story, with an illustration of an to embrace or ward off the clouds impish Mowat with a Pinocchio nose. The article that would drown her. Hugs herself unleashed a scandal that hounded the beloved in his sleeves. Thunder moans low and best- selling author until his death in 2014. Thirty years ago, I was both shocked by on the far side of the hill. The first rain Goddard’s accusations and troubled by Mowat’s licks the salt from her cheeks, teases justifications that the larger truth mattered more her lips open. than a pedantic recounting of the evidence. Mowat was right to raise the alarm in the 1950s Betsy Struthers about starvation among the Ihalmiut people, because Ottawa had forcibly relocated them Betsy Struthers has written three mystery novels, a collection away from their traditional hunting grounds. He of short ﬁction, and nine books of poetry, including Still, was also correct in defending wolves from the which won the 2004 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. bad rap they had been given in popular literature as nothing but ruthless predators. But I wish he had explained up front the rationale behind By adopting a documentary approach, Raffan saving energy that she would otherwise need his passionate storytelling. That’s why I appreci- largely resists the temptation of anthropo- for all four to break through the deep snow. ate Raffan and his author’s note about blurring morphism, so beloved by naturalists, although The impression is that “she is on just two legs, some of the lines between fact and fiction. I also he does make occasional comparisons between upright like a woman.” know I will be prodding my grandchildren for bears and humans. Early on, for example, he Still, Nanu is not chatty like Charlotte, the their thoughts once we have finished Ice Walker. points out that Nanu’s back feet step perfectly arachnid spelling champ created by E. B. White, After all, arguing about books is one of the great into the imprints left by her front ones, thereby or zany like Mutt, the Dennis the Menace pleasures of reading them together.

We Still Here Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel edited by charity marsh I Can Only Paint Canada’s Waste Flows The State of the System and mark v. campbell The Story of Battlefield Artist myra j. hird The Reality Check on Canada’s Schools Foreword by Murray Forman Mary Riter Hamilton paul w. bennett irene gammel mqup.ca @McGillQueensUP COMPELLING PEOPLE

Lives Less Ordinary Peter Mansbridge’s unsung heroes J. D. M. Stewart

Extraordinary Canadians: Mansbridge’s take on extraordinary Canadians The National. But readers expecting to go inside Stories from the Heart of Our Nation is manifestly different from Saul’s. In fact, his his head or to get deep insights into the country Peter Mansbridge, with Mark Bulgutch book is really about ordinary individuals who or the nature of extraordinary Canadians will Simon & Schuster Canada have done extraordinary things. “ ‘Hero’ is a be disappointed. The book lacks an extended 304 pages, hardcover and ebook description that covers a wide range of possi- rumination from Mansbridge, someone who bilities and there are a lot of stories that fall in knows the country, its history, and its citizens that space between dying for your country and exceedingly well. His introduction to these HAT MAKES FOR AN “EXTRA- winning for your country,” he writes. “That’s seventeen stories is a mere three and a half ordinary Canadian”? It’s what this book is about. It’s about people who pages — not enough to do a deep dive on a a question that has been have put the lives of Canadians of all walks of worthwhile topic. asked, both implicitly and life, first. That’s what being a hero means to me.” A few other quibbles: There is no context explicitly, for a long time. As I read about these men and women, a for where or when the interviews took place. WSome answers come in the form of public dis- certain phrase kept popping into my mind: How did Mansbridge and Bulgutch land on plays, such as statues and the faces that appear Desiderantes meliorem patriam — they desire a bet- these particular compatriots? Where did they on our banknotes. Revering a person or group ter country. It is impossible not to be impressed, hear of them? How did they make their final in bronze, whether it is Sir John A. Macdonald, humbled, and awed by the contributions of selections? What was Mansbridge’s role com- Terry Fox, or the Famous Five, is a statement these Canadians who come from many different pared with that of Bulgutch, a former senior about who we feel made an extraordinary con- parts of the country, even if they’re not all Order editor on The National ? These may seem minor tribution to the country. The same goes for our of Canada inductees. Courage, determination, points to some, but Mansbridge notes that “we currency. Viola Desmond, who battled racial passion, overcoming adversity — these themes interviewed each person at length, for hours at injustice in the 1940s, earned the most recent run throughout the book. times, to capture their experiences in detail. They honour, in 2018, when she appeared on the Extraordinary Canadians is not a love letter to shared everything.” Adding dates, locations, and award-winning $10 bill. the country, though it will certainly leave read- a brief note for those talks would have added In publishing, the question has been asked ers uplifted, even if both the successes and the texture to each story as well as some context. more explicitly. Many readers will remember the failures of Canada are exposed. The individuals There is also something of a slapdash element books published by Penguin Canada, beginning Mansbridge includes have overcome racism, to the book besides the shallow introduction: in 2011, with the title Extraordinary the mediocre quality of the photos; Canadians. The series was edited by the occasional American spelling; the the public intellectual John Ralston “It is impossible not to be reference to William Lyon Mackenzie Saul and featured short biographies on one page (incorrect) and William of well-known figures — from Glenn impressed, humbled, and Lyon Mackenzie King (correct) on Gould and Nellie McClung to Maurice another. A bit more care on the edit- “Rocket” Richard and Big Bear. Saul, awed by these Canadians.” ing and production side might have not surprisingly, expounded on the given the book heft enough to match notion of extraordinary Canadians. its $37 price tag. “How do civilizations imagine themselves?” he sexism, ableism, and homophobia, to name just Still, to a very large degree, Extraordinary asked, philosophically. “One way is for each a few. Nadine Caron, the first female Indigenous Canadians is about what makes a great country of us to look at ourselves through our society’s general surgeon, talks about her achievements or even a great community. The multic ultural most remarkable figures.” For him, those were but notes they came with “sharp reminders mosaic of people assembled here truly rep- the “rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, about the divide that still exists within our resents the Canada of today. It reminds us thinkers, political leaders.” They were the ones country.” She appreciates Stephen Harper’s that our society will thrive only if there are who laid the foundation for a country. 2008 apology to residential school survivors people leading and persevering away from Lester B. Pearson, Wilfrid Laurier, Pierre but needs something more: “something that’s the spotlight — whether it is a young woman Trudeau — they’re all in the Penguin series. somehow deeper, more personal and therefore raising awareness of ostomy surgeries or a for- And no one will argue about the contribu- more meaningful.” mer schoolteacher who founded a call-in ser- tions they made to the building of this country. Gina Cody, who emigrated from Iran in vice to support lesbians in Newfoundland and Nevertheless, as Saul noted, “Civilization is not 1979, earned a doctorate in engineering from Labrador. Readers can be thankful that we have a collection of prime ministers.” Concordia University, in Montreal, and led one so many citizens who are working hard, making Seven years after Penguin published its seven- of Canada’s most successful companies owned sacrifices, and showing incredible determination teenth and final Extraordinary Canadians instal- by a woman. Yet she was often reminded of her and courage in their efforts. ment comes a book from Peter Mansbridge and sex: “I can’t count how many times my executive While the extraordinary Canadians selected Mark Bulgutch, and although the title is familiar, assistant would transfer a call to me and, hearing by John Ralston Saul are undeniably import- it prompts a fresh look at the question of who is my voice, the guy would ask, ‘Can I please speak ant to the success of this country, we should extraordinary. There are no prime ministers to be to your boss?’ That kind of stuff never ended.” never lose sight or appreciation of the many found here, nor would most readers recognize To be extraordinary usually means persever- others, from all regions of Canada, who have the names of those whose first- person accounts ing in the face of challenges, and the stories made — and continue to make — indelible con- make up the book. Matt Devlin, the television here prove it. tributions to who we are. As Mansbridge puts it, play-by-play caller for the Toronto Raptors, is Mansbridge’s book is currently a bestseller, “Their lives may not result in medals, Heritage perhaps the best-known personality, but he may perhaps no surprise considering his reputa- Minutes, or new names for schools, but then also be the least extraordinary of the bunch. tion as the long-time news anchor of the CBC’s again, they might.”

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 19 COMPELLING PEOPLE

Her Little Black Book Barbara Amiel doesn’t give a damn Kelvin Browne

Friends and Enemies: A Memoir to rationalize the whole endeavour by clinging The excitement of our rare custody visits was Barbara Amiel to the notion that even imperfect, highly flawed so intense that I almost never slept the night Signal people can be interesting and perhaps their before.” She seldom saw him after her parents 608 pages, hardcover and ebook experiences might help someone” (though she separated, and never again after she left England. admits that she’s no “Florence Nightingale for She was fifteen when her mother announced her the confused- female set”). father was dead: “He killed himself. . . . He went ARBARA AMIEL AND HER BOYFRIEND To simply peruse the index of Friends and mad. . . . I expect you’ll go mad too.” A lawyer, he Sam Blyth walked into the s tylish Enemies is to get a sense of what’s coming: preg- had embezzled client funds, couldn’t replace the Yorkville establishment and every nancy and abortion; financial and legal troubles; money, and committed suicide, leaving his new head turned to stare. They were false allegations against; seizure of personal wife and their two children “quite destitute.” beautiful and tanned — his shirt items; codeine reliance; depression; feminism; Amiel learned of her father’s death over the Brakishly unbuttoned and her flamboyant Pucci pets, aggression of; plastic surgery; reputation phone; she wasn’t living at home at the time. dress low cut, with a confident display of décol- as a bitch; reputation as gold digger; smearing Her stepfather thought it best that she stay in letage. They had a European cool and radiated of; thinness as ideal; Anglican baptism; and rented rooms, because she periodically upset sexuality seldom seen forty years ago in uptight anti- Semitism. her suicidal mother. So she had parted from her Toronto. As people gawked, the pair waved to family “involuntarily,” starting at age fourteen, my host and moved toward our table. They’re but she came to “quite happily [rent] different movie stars, I said to myself, certainly people rooms till my last year in high school.” She took who live in a different world than me. I was odd jobs, too, to keep herself afloat: “Children just a nerdy WASP, barely able to say hello. I’ve are malleable and take life as it comes. No one since met Barbara Amiel several times, but I told me how lives were supposed to be, and so I never really knew much about her, save for the didn’t feel shortchanged.” constant stream of gossip that a high-p rofile Despite the rooming-h ouse existence and personality like hers generates. Her new mem- part-time jobs, Amiel tried to play the part of oir, Friends and Enemies, proves that appearances an average teenager. She spent time with friends aren’t always deceiving. and boyfriends and edited her high school The world Amiel describes isn’t the world of magazine. And in 1959, she got herself to the a Jackie Collins novel, even though it has simi- University of Toronto: “I’d scrambled together lar ingredients: sex, money, ambition, fabulous the first payment of my college tuition and houses, fancy people with even fancier titles. three months of residence fees with my usual Actually, Amiel’s compelling reportage of life confidence that I’d find a job to pay for the rest.” at the top wouldn’t make for a Collins best- In that first year, she met Gary Smith, who was seller, because there’s too much pain and chaos. studying law at Osgoode Hall. For her birthday, Instead, Friends and Enemies is more an inadver- he gave her an opal ring: “My engagement was tent cautionary tale about, among other things, accidental. . . . A ring could mean nothing else.” the illusory world of celebrity, the motivating She dreaded marriage and worried about the suf- power of envy, and the impossibility of freeing focating role of a Jewish wife. yourself once you are ensnared in a legal system Then came Robert Hershorn: from a wealthy that can be unjust. Those who read for escape Jewish family in Montreal, he both sold and may not want such a potent reminder of the used heroin. Amiel found the outlaw in him contradictions that even the most introspective, appealing — the antithesis of steadfast Gary psychoanalyzed, and self- lacerating among us Smith. She admits she already had her own can’t fully reconcile with their life choices. Appearances aren’t always deceiving. addiction — a codeine habit that began as a At the outset, Amiel warns her story is a rocky teenager — but she had no interest in smack. road: she describes herself as “a misshapen piece BARBARA JOAN ESTELLE AMIEL WAS BORN IN She began a muddled affair with Hershorn and of work” and an object of derision. “By now December 1940, in England, and spent the war delayed her nuptials: “The evening that was S E

there has been sufficient material published in years at her grandparents’ house in Chorley supposed to be my wedding night was spent in V I H

newspapers, magazines, books, and film and Wood, Hertfordshire —“a safe place for a Jewish Times Square with Leonard Cohen holding one C R A television scripts concerning my husband and child in 1940s Europe.” When the war ended, arm of mine and Robert the other.” A month R A

myself that I am genuinely and though God she moved with her mother and baby sister or two later, she did marry Smith. It lasted T S

knows I hate to use the word, ‘authentically’ back to their “battle-s carred house in Hendon, seven months. “We parted amiably and with O T unsure of what I am,” she writes. “I can’t say in North West London.” Her parents divorced; no need of a financial settlement,” she recalls. N O whether it is after the fifteenth or the fiftieth her mother remarried a few years later and even- “I was working at the Canadian Broadcasting R O T negative article or the third or the fourth chap- tually gave birth to Barbara’s two half- brothers. Corporation and could afford my rooming ; 6 6

ter of one of the half- dozen books that dissect The reconstituted family immigrated to Canada house, which, with one marriage behind me, 9 1 you with a hacksaw, but at some point you leave and settled in Hamilton. was where I was again.” , O M outrage behind and a worm constricts your “If I adored my new stepfather, which I did, Over eighteen months at the CBC, she went E R P

chest.” What motivates her to share six hundred I worshipped my own father,” Amiel writes. from filing clerk to on-c amera interviewer and S

S pages’ worth of her eighty- year story is nothing “So tall, broad- shouldered, handsome and very story editor. Then, around 1968, she met the I R O other than a desire “to set the record straight, funny, revelling in my good school reports. film producer George Bloomfield and moved B

20 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA to New York. Life with him alternated in rapid Amiel. This was not to be marriage number four, jewellery — in its annual Age Issue. On their succession from the high to the low, depending although he proposed repeatedly, especially after own, the photographs of extraordinary entitle- on whether he had movie work. In 1972, she “felt her comment that “holding him is like clutching ment could be criticized as attention seeking, it was all right to leave him,” as he was direct- death” was widely repeated. The breakup with but not much else. But they were coupled with ing a film and her departure could be relatively Graham was “a stew of hysteria” and culminated a bold quote —“I have an extravagance that guilt free. She was motivated, because she was in in a suicide attempt by Amiel. After a brief rec- knows no bounds”— and caused an explosion of love with a man she had dated with “complete onciliation — on the condition that she return derision. Amiel meant the comment to be self- indifference” five years prior, the CBC radio what was left of her divorce settlement — Amiel deprecating, but her intent wasn’t easily under- producer George Jonas: “After we married”— in was once again looking for a new home. Her stood. And that’s ironic, considering she didn’t 1974 —”the violence, though very infrequent, London acquaintances were baffled: she was a consume conspicuously enough for the Group was material and culminated in my receiving smart woman who had divorced a rich man, (just too conspicuously for everyone else). The a dislocated jaw that required the ‘I bumped with little to show for it. Group’s de facto leader, Jayne Wrightsman, an into a door’ explanation for the disbeliev- Next came a relationship with the Oscar- admired philanthropist and noted grande dame ing emergency doctor.” Despite their volatile winning screenwriter and novelist William who spent far greater sums but didn’t advertise relationship, Jonas and Amiel wrote a book Goldman. And though the relationship “had it, told Amiel, “Anna should have protected you together, By Persons Unknown: The Strange Death elements apart from true love,” Amiel was not to more.” Of course, Anna Wintour wanted to sell of Christine Demeter, which received positive be his Princess Bride. Then there was yet another magazines. And that lack of protection is some- reviews and gave them some financial security, commitment-c hallenged man, there was clinical thing of a recurring theme of Friends and Enemies, however briefly. depression, there was another suicide attempt, perhaps coupled with an unwillingness to accept The couple divorced in 1979, when Amiel there was the constant issue with money — yet protection at the same time. “decided to leave no cliché unturned, oh God, Amiel kept churning out those columns. In fact, It’s probable the ensuing legal nightmare and, fulfilling Jonas’s worst fears, became infatu- throughout her life, work has been a solace, even for Black would have happened regardless, ated with the Younger Man.” The new beau was at fourteen. And though it wasn’t the right time but Amiel worries she helped ignite the fire- just out of university and was the “altogether so for another new romance . . . Conrad Black pur- storm of litigation and charges. Was it a folie physically perfect” Sam Blyth. Having no money, chased the Telegraph and started spending more à deux? Regardless, Amiel gave the mob a slo- they moved into a cheap, rodent- infested apart- time in London. Black and Amiel had met in gan — a “let them eat cake” gaffe — to sum up ment recently vacated by Blyth’s university Toronto, and it had not been love at first sight, why the lord and lady should be pilloried. Like friends: “His former co-residents left behind at least for her. When he announced that he was annoyed swans, the Group turned their backs thousands of fleas from their cats but sadly not separating from his wife, Amiel commented, on Amiel, especially when Black came under the cats themselves.” By then, Amiel was writ- “The girls will be falling out of the trees for you.” legal siege in the early 2000s (“A rockslide ing her column for Maclean’s as well as work- To which he responded, “Don’t restrain yourself, begins in silence,” she observes). While her ing for the Toronto Sun and CTV. Soon the new Barbara.” After many meetings — but before a put-downs of fickle friends are reminiscent of couple were widely criticized for blundering into first kiss — Black proposed marriage. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonﬁre of the Vanities, they are Mozambique without visas. They spent far more humorous — and they pale ten days in jail. The Canadian gov- in comparison with the acerbic barbs ernment was uninterested in freeing “It’s a taunt that seems she directs toward Black’s prosecutors, them, and eventually the British con- persecutors, and the legal profession sul secured their release. They lasted relevant to many in her life, in general. two years. ◆ Despite the ongoing relation- going way back.” WITH FRIENDS AND ENEMIES, BARBARA ship turmoil, Amiel’s career moved Amiel reprises many of her — as it’s ahead with high- profile Maclean’s often expressed — extreme right-wing columns and guest appearances on Front Page This would be a good place to end the story views. Many of her past opinions would never Challenge and other TV shows: “I was asked to if it were a Jackie Collins novel — the heroine see print in today’s cancel culture, and if they take positions on all predictable topics because finally finding true love, not to mention wealth, did, she’d be out of a job. So many have taken Canadian television couldn’t find another social prominence, and houses in New York, pleasure in castigating her (and her husband, female journalist with long hair and a bust to London, Palm Beach, and Toronto. Instead, this for that matter). So many have found them talk in favour of God, against affirmative action is where the heroine rises to stratospheric prom- guilty of a myriad of character flaws — pom- and strongly against a state policy of multicul- inence, so that she can fall from s pectacular posity, snobbery, wilful naïveté, arrogance. Yet turalism and enforced human rights tribunals.” heights. the peanut gallery has looked the other way Then, seemingly out of the blue, she was offered ◆ when equally imperfect characters espouse the job of Toronto Sun editor, even though she BARBARA AMIEL CAME INTO A FRENETIC AND ESTAB- woke attitudes. and the paper “were not compatible in any way lished social life when she married Black, in July Amiel literally lists her friends and enemies whatsoever, apart from a certain determina- 1992. But there were homes to decorate, staff to at the end of the book. The list of friends is long tion to shock and a sturdy belief in a Lockean hire, dinners to give — all things Amiel claims (we should all be so lucky), while the roll call of individualism.” she was unequipped to handle. Only because enemies is surprisingly brief. Still, she aims her Before her third marriage, Amiel’s fiancé gave of a lifelong interest in clothes was the upgrade final remarks at them: “I’m going to try to enjoy her his psychiatric evaluation. It read, in part, to couture of interest. (And though she made the remaining time left to me. And bugger off to that he had “difficulty trusting and making a full the occasional mistake, she also made the occa- the whole damn lot of you. We’re still here. You emotional commitment with people, especially sional best-d ressed list.) lost.” It’s a taunt that seems relevant to many in women.” Such a revelation might have deterred In New York, Amiel’s female friends were her life, going way back. others from tying the knot with David Graham, known as the Group — a select few who dom- When considering the merits of a memoir or a wealthy Canadian businessman domiciled inated the social columns. Early on, the Group autobiography, does one evaluate the writing in London, but Amiel moved to London to reminded her of a famous Duchess of Windsor or the life? And how can you judge a writer’s be with him and started writing for the Times. bon mot: you can never be too rich or too thin. impression of her own life anyway? Despite the There she became well known for her forthright The women were like Truman Capote’s Swans, confessional nature of her book, it sometimes views. Marriage number three was doomed. the name he gave to the most stylish and famous seems as if Amiel has only fleeting insight into Graham often travelled for business and did socialites of the 1960s, who appeared to glide what’s driven her more extreme behaviours: the not give up his pre-n uptial girlfriends. The final effortlessly through life while concealing the attention-d eprived childhood, the longing for straw, though, was Amiel’s relationship with constant and strenuous effort — those ungainly an idolized but remote father. On one point, the book publisher and inveterate party giver webbed feet moving as fast as they could. Amiel though, Barbara Amiel knows about herself what George Weidenfeld. paddled quickly to catch up. I knew right away in that restaurant forty years While extraordinarily well connected with In August 2002, Vogue featured Amiel — stun- ago: this is a woman who lives in a different the British upper crust, Lord Weidenfeld was ning and age- defying, a sixty-o ne-year- world. She’s also a woman who has survived a short, plump, and twenty- one years older than old who had come to appreciate expensive world that destroys most everyone else.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 21 COMPELLING PEOPLE

The Colossus Notes on our twelfth prime minister J. L. Granatstein

The Unexpected Louis St-Laurent: and 40.5 percent of the vote, while Diefenbaker’s ment a reputation for arrogance. Then St-Laurent Politics and Policies for a Modern Canada Progressive Conservatives took 112 seats and and his foreign minister, Lester Pearson, broke Edited by Patrice Dutil 38.5 percent of votes cast. St-Laurent might have with Britain and France over the Suez Crisis in UBC Press tried to win support from the CCF and Social late 1956, a move that sharply divided Canada 540 pages, hardcover and ebook Credit to stay in power, but he resigned from and led to much criticism of Ottawa for simul- office and very soon from the party leadership. taneously supporting the position of the United The St-Laurent government’s record was States and abandoning Canada’s mother coun- OUIS ST-LAURENT IS ALMOST FORGOT- impressive. Pickersgill’s famous line was that tries. Combined, these two issues likely led to ten by Canadians, and it is unlikely St-Laurent made governing look so easy that the defeat of 1957. there will ever be a new biography: Canadians believed anyone could do it — and ◆ unfortunately (and inexplicably), that was why they elected Diefenbaker. St-Laurent I MET LOUIS ST-LAURENT ONCE. I WAS RESEARCH- his papers at Library and Archives ran his cabinet, leaving no doubt that he was ing a book about the Mackenzie King govern- LCanada are scanty, devoid of interest. There in charge, while giving his strong ministers — ment during the Second World War, and Jack is hardly anyone left to interview — the sole including C. D. Howe, the “minister of every- Pickersgill arranged for me to interview the exception being Paul Hellyer, who entered the thing”— their head. As Robert Bothwell notes ninety- year-old at his home in Quebec City. It twelfth prime minister’s cabinet as associate was November 1972, and St-Laurent was quite minister of national defence two months before frail. It showed during the hour I was with him: John Diefenbaker won power in 1957. There are he confused events from the First and Second a couple of good books on him: a biography by World Wars, and he seemed unable to focus for Dale Thomson, who worked in his office, and more than a few minutes. I was horrified, feel- another by J. W. Pickersgill, his closest aide and ing that I had intruded on a sick man; indeed, former clerk of the Privy Council. But both men he died eight months later. were Liberals, and neither had anything bad to Pickersgill sat in on the interview and was say about a leader they respected greatly. very upset as well. As we left, he was close to Perhaps there are few negative things — weeping at what was happening to the man he anyone can say about a man whose primary thought of as a great prime minister and close characteristics were intelligence and integrity. friend. Pickersgill had worked with St-Laurent St-Laurent was born in Compton, Quebec, in at the height of his powers, and he knew that February 1882. His father was a francophone the man was beset by bouts of depression, some storekeeper and his mother the child of Irish prolonged, from the early 1950s onward. Some immigrants. He attended classical college and of the authors gathered in The Unexpected Louis then law school at Université Laval, and was St-Laurent touch on these episodes, and perhaps offered — but declined — a Rhodes Scholarship there should have been a chapter on St-Laurent’s in 1905. Instead, he began a successful career mental state. representing corporate interests as well as Jews Nonetheless, there are some fine pieces among who wanted a voice on Montreal’s Protestant the twenty-t wo essays. Jean Thérèse Riley, one of Board of School Commissioners (there he did his granddaughters, sets the man into his family not succeed). During the Great Depression, he context with much charm. Stephen Azzi writes was legal counsel for the Rowell-S irois Royal well on how St-Laurent ran his cabinet, and Paul Commission on Dominion-P rovincial Relations, Litt analyzes the way “Uncle Louis” was mar- and in late 1941, when Mackenzie King’s Quebec keted to the voters so successfully. The volume’s lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, died, the prime editor, Patrice Dutil, contributes the introduc- minister asked him to become justice minister. A giant of intelligence and integrity. tion and three chapters: one on St-Laurent in St-Laurent accepted as a matter of wartime duty, government, one on his electoral coalition (with and he soon became King’s right-hand man. In in this new collection, he had a “quick, sharp some useful tables), and one (co-a uthored with 1946, King tired of serving as his own foreign mind and a decisive temperament.” He brought Peter M. Ryan) comparing party platforms in minister and stepped down as secretary of state Newfoundland and Labrador into Canada and St-Laurent’s three elections. There are also good for external affairs, and St-Laurent assumed ended appeals to the Judicial Committee of the chapters on immigration, on the slow move the role. On King’s retirement, in 1948, he was Privy Council in the U.K. He had generally good toward hospital insurance, and on the death chosen as Liberal leader and prime minister by relations with the provinces; for most of his penalty. While the authors do not hide the mis- a party convention. tenure, even Maurice Duplessis, the premier of steps or the government’s cautious approach to To some surprise, the new chief proved a very Quebec, was quiescent. some issues, the overall impression is of a prime successful campaigner: his “Uncle Louis” per- In 1954, St-Laurent was the first Canadian minister who modernized Canada and governed sona and his ability to relate to voters and their leader to undertake a world tour — an event that well for almost a decade. children were impressive. He swept the nation in even the opposition cheered. And yet that long The one exception is a politely scathing chap- the 1949 election, capturing 191 seats and 49.1 per- trip in a slow and noisy RCAF aircraft sapped ter by Xavier Gélinas, an able historian at the S N I cent of the popular vote; in 1953, the Liberals his energy, so much so that he seems not to have Canadian Museum of History, in Gatineau, who K R A won 169 seats and 48.4 percent of the vote. Even recovered fully, and his last years in office were details how St-Laurent dealt with the French fact. P

D in 1957, when St-Laurent was old, weary, and far from his best. The Pipeline Debate, which In Gélinas’s view, St-Laurent did almost nothing I V A gripped by depressive episodes, he won 105 seats Howe directed in spring 1956, earned his govern- to promote the rights and views of Quebec and D

22 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA francophones. He had supported conscription THIS AND THAT during the war, despite the opposition of francophones, and, although Gélinas does not say this, his government had everything in place to impose conscription if the Cold War had turned hot in the early ’50s. St-Laurent refused to open Cobbled Together diplomatic relations with the Vatican, something Roman Catholics wanted, and, more important, he did little to advance francophones to Me and the shoemaker the senior bureaucratic ranks. He also declined to introduce simultaneous translation into Michael Humeniuk Parliament and to address the need for bilingual government cheques. St-Laurent, Gélinas main- tains, “genuinely believed that French- Canadian nationalism was inherently navel- gazing and mistrustful, that it verged on xenophobia and NE AIMLESS AFTERNOON, Goethe wrote of the apprentice’s life. “The spirit religious intolerance.” What’s worse, he once shortly after graduating from in which we act is the highest matter.” said that “the province of Quebec can be a university, I came across an Three other apprentices watched as I removed province like any other.” To Gélinas, in effect, old magazine article about that first nail: two young men from Puglia, St-Laurent was apparently a vendu, a sellout, Daniel Day-L ewis and the ten the southern stiletto heel that steps away from which is a harsh judgment indeed. Omonths the famed actor spent in Florence Albania, and a teenager from Japan. We all Gélinas’s interpretation would be a stronger apprenticing as a shoemaker. The pages included worked Monday to Saturday, from eight to eight, one if he had tried to explain how St-Laurent enchanting pictures of leather, cork, and flame- our day punctuated by a mid- morning espresso won between 57 and 61 percent of the popular melted wax, accompanied by handsome men and a two-hour pasta lunch. On Fridays, Roberto vote in Quebec during his three elections as using antique tools to turn suede and cordovan would bring us a bottle of red wine, his favour- leader. After the 1949 victory, for example, one into masterpiece footwear for the likes of Robert ite being the San Felice Chianti Classico, which newspaper wrote that the results constituted DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Richard Gere — even costs much less than the shoes we crafted. Those “la défaite des ennemis de l’unité nationale et Madonna. The more I read about the shoemaker ranged from €1,900 to €10,000, with each pair de la race canadienne-f rançaise.” Gélinas should to the stars, the more my imagination filled taking up to ninety hours to make. perhaps have considered that many in the prov- with sepia- coloured daydreams: labouring in The general process was divided into three ince might have been getting tired of Duplessis’s a warmly lit bottega, richly perfumed from the steps. First, a client would arrange an appoint- variant of conservative Catholic nationalism and turpentine of polish, to the symphony of scis- ment to have his feet measured (once while preferred St-Laurent’s brand of an expansive sors cutting hide and hammers thudding heels. seated, once while standing) and to select a Canadian nationalism instead. It all happened very fast: I put the article away model (the most common and conservative There is one more notable omission among and compiled a list of twenty Italian ateliers. choices were black oxfords, while the least con- the chapters: defence. The St-Laurent govern- On my first call, to Mannina Firenze, I reached a servative I witnessed were blue spectators made ment, from the late 1940s to its defeat in 1957, young shoemaker named Giovanni. I disclosed with legal elephant skin that had been tattooed). was without question Canada’s best peace- that although I had experience in the manual Then, about a week later, a wooden last would time government for the armed forces. On trades and was an attentive student, I was no be fashioned. Some were displayed at the front St-Laurent’s watch, Ottawa signed the North Grimmian elf — I needed training. Too easily, he of the shop, usually those belonging to famous Atlantic Treaty, built the Distant Early Warning said yes, but on the condition that I secure my clients and repeat customers (it was not uncom- Line with the United States, and negotiated own visa through a local language school. Also, mon for some to order three pairs annually). We the North American Air Defence Agreement. I had to agree to long hours without pay. But kept the rest in the back — hundreds of them, The number of soldiers, sailors, and airmen common sense would not sabotage my fantasy! some so old that they were the ghostly tokens of tripled over that period to some 120,000, and When I arrived in the Tuscan capital, wearing men long presumed dead. These were tied to the the defence budget rose dramatically from some torn-up Nikes, Giovanni feigned ignor- ceiling in clusters that naturally fell into shapes $269 million in 1947–48 to $1.96 billion in 1952 ance of our agreement and refused to even look similar to banana bunches. (the percentage of gross domestic product spent at the emails I held up as evidence. My Italian Working with the last, we would begin the on defence by that point was almost 10 percent, was not yet good enough for argument, which I second step of constructing a prova — a trial shoe the highest outside the world wars). The navy doubt would have helped, but the language bar- made of low- quality leather and a plastic heel. sent destroyers to Korean waters, became lead- rier intensified my frustration. Imagining how Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, ing practitioners of anti- submarine warfare, Caravaggio once resolved conflict, I considered they say, and if the prova was too loose, part of and fielded an aircraft carrier and state-of-the- clobbering the cobbler. But I wanted to see the last would be shaved down. If too tight (the art destroyer escorts; the RCAF put fighter jets the museums, at the very least, and restrained most common problem region would be above into continental air defence, sent an air division myself. For two months, on a shoestring budget, the metatarsals or behind the heel), then a layer of twelve squadrons of Sabre fighters overseas I walked miles and miles, wandering the cobble- of leather would be added. But typically the to support NATO, and created substantial air stone streets and entreating dozens of calzolai to model fit perfectly. Cinderella would be happy, transport capabilities. The Canadian Army, take me on. They all turned me away, until I met and we would begin the final step: the long, meanwhile, had 40,000 soldiers (double the the most famous of them all: Roberto Ugolini. unforgiving manual construction. present number), with a brigade group in Korea, Roberto has been Florence’s top calzolaio ever Traditional shoemaking happens not on from 1951 to the 1953 armistice, and another since Stefano Bemer, Day- Lewis’s mentor, passed a table or even a cobbler’s anvil but in one’s with NATO that, once it had shaken down, was away in 2012. (Admittedly, any superlative praise lap — using both thighs as a vise and bringing widely recognized as a top-of-the-line forma- should be taken lightly: every maestro has his oneself autofellatially to the work. Most days, I’d tion. At the same time, defence manufacturing partisans.) I had put off coming here, because I leave the shop with polished palms, sore from picked up sharply, as did exports. How this sub- assumed I’d have little chance of working for the bending, and with skin shavings under my nails. ject could have received only a few pages in this master craftsman. But by special providence, it After only six months, my money was running book is a mystery. turned out this maestro despised Giovanni, and, out. While my Italian had improved, my truancy Nonetheless, The Unexpected Louis St-Laurent to put a pea in his arch-e nemy’s shoe, he told at the language school and my unpaid appren- is a fine volume, one of the few recent edited me I could sit and watch for an afternoon. That ticeship meant that I had violated the conditions collections held together by more than the unlikely day turned into an unlikely two weeks, of my student visa. And my back was in chronic binding. If it gives Canadians a new regard for and after many hours quietly observing the cord- pain. As much as I wanted to continue learning a leader they have forgotten, it will have served wainer at work, I was at last handed a precious from Roberto, it was time to leave. With nothing its purpose. Judged against our present cadre of last with a leather sole. Remove the clinching to show for my experience, except one cherished leaders, Louis St-Laurent looks more and more nails, Roberto told me, without saying anything photograph and some peculiar tools, I even wore like a giant. else. “Words are good, but they are not the best,” the same old sneakers on my way home.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 23 THIS AND THAT

For Your Reference Citing foreign influence Michael McNichol

HERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL AND irreconcilable difference between Americans and Canadians on the issue of freedom of speech or expression. Although both of our Tnations value and protect this human right, the limits to which we take it are markedly different. For Americans, it is inalienable, intrinsic to the dignity of the individual; while the Canadian Constitution subjects it “to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” Rights discourse in Canada, although grounded in a conception of the individual, is more concerned with the welfare of the community than is its American counterpart. If the United States is founded on the myth of individual rights, then Canada is founded on the myth of social cohesion. And nowhere is this more evident than in libraries, where the tension plays out in surprising and consequential ways. Founded in 1876, the American Library Association has had a Canadian presence since at least 1900, when its yearly conference was held in Montreal. (The lesser-known Canadian The tension plays out in surprising and consequential ways. Library Association was founded in 1946 and, unfortunately, dissolved in 2016.) As the pre- fully challenge each other’s ideas and not the the Ontario Court of Justice declined to rule on eminent organization of its kind, the ALA sets library’s democratic mandate to provide space the real Charter issue at hand, finding instead the tone for libraries and, importantly, accredits for both,” as the head of the Toronto Public that the library had acted appropriately within university programs across Canada. This accredit- Library, Vickery Bowles, has explained. Thus, the bounds of contract law and was within its ation, which is granted only after an applicant a library itself is somehow above criticism for rights to cancel the screening. school proves that it can reproduce the standards what’s said inside it. No doubt, many maintain, along with the and values espoused by the ALA, is no small But the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does ALA and its Canadian adherents, that libraries thing: most career positions throughout the not provide for absolute rights, inalienable from need to provide a full range of views that repre- country, in either public or academic libraries, the individuals who hold them; rather, our rights sent an entire community. And in the American now require an ALA-approved graduate degree. are guaranteed alongside “reasonable limits.” formulation, this might be correct. But is it Through its outsize influence, then, the Chicago- (Those who crafted the Charter, of course, had also correct that Canadian libraries, subject to based non- profit reproduces its ideology in our the benefit of seeing how the American model Canadian laws and social mores, should pro- librarians and library administrators, while it had actually played out.) More fundamen- vide platforms for groups whose messages hurt directly and indirectly shapes the policies and tally, it reflects our more social conception of others? If by providing space for one you are views of the institutions they run. the greater good, with individual rights being effectively excluding the other, then you are not The ALA’s position on freedom of expres- held in service of the protection of the whole. representing the entire community or diverse sion is a severe one: it is “an inalienable human Remember, in Canada, your rights end where viewpoints; you are merely providing space for right and the foundation for self-g overnment” mine begin, and the contestation between them hatred to breed. If trans people or Jewish people and “encompasses the freedoms of speech, is an ongoing balancing act. or any other people are frightened (or otherwise press, religion, assembly, and association, and The creeping Americanization of how we unable) to make use of a library because that

the corollary right to receive information with- understand freedom of expression has led to branch has hosted groups hurling hateful or vio- M U E

out interference and without compromising scandal, including that surrounding the contro- lent claims, then the avowed goal of freedom of S U

personal privacy.” Such absolutism requires a versial writer Meghan Murphy, whom Bowles expression itself has been undermined. M S K library to provide material of every kind and to allowed to speak at a Toronto Public Library What’s more, this is an issue of cultural sover- J I R

play host to any group or speaker, since doing branch in October 2019. (Consider that even eignty. Should Canadian libraries be subject to E H T

otherwise would interfere with its ability to Twitter has removed the welcome mat for the ideological requirements of a foreign organ- ; 0

impart information. Under this formulation, the Murphy, because of her repeated use of anti- ization that promotes an imposed understand- 5 – content of what’s shared is value neutral, with transgender rhetoric and misgendering of her ing of rights? Shouldn’t our libraries, available 5 2 8 1 all value being placed on its availability and critics.) Elsewhere, a trustee of the Edmonton to all and certainly a linchpin in our society, . C

transmission: fake news, racist hyperbole, and Public Library was forced to resign in early 2020 be replicating our values based on our own , N exclusionary ideologies have the same worth for her vocal criticism of free-speech absolutism. Constitution? So long as Canadian libraries Y M A as more reputable and inclusive information. And in Ottawa, the public library was taken to require their workers to hold degrees from ALA- S

S In this context, the only option for those who court in 2017 when it cancelled a screening of the accredited universities, this tension will remain I U O disagree with a speaker or group is to “respect- Islamophobic film Killing Europe. In that case, and future confrontations will be inevitable. L

24 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA THIS AND THAT

Graphic Narrative Drawn-out dramas of the North J. R. Patterson

Paying the Land fall into a more monetized sphere.” People IF CANADA NEVER OPENLY DECLARED ITSELF TO BE Joe Sacco are wary of his curiosity, and his medium isn’t at war with Indigenous peoples (as did the Henry Holt & Co. always appreciated; one man makes it clear that United States), it was only because war is predi- 272 pages, hardcover and ebook issues facing the Dene’s existence are “not a car- cated on a certain understanding of chaos. toon . . . not a joke.” Such is Sacco’s compassion Ottawa’s method was anything but: blackmail, that the elusiveness he sees drives him only to violence, and coordinated evacuations were SQUALLING BABY HELD ALOFT, indict himself. used to fulfill the dreams of Duncan Campbell its umbilical cord falling into a “What’s the difference between me and an oil Scott, who, as deputy superintendent of the moose-skin boat beached on a company?” Sacco asks. “We’ve both come here Department of Indian Affairs, promised “to riverside. Sinew nets bursting with to extract something.” But, of course, there is a continue until there [was] not a single Indian in fish. Dogs hauling laden sleds difference. He is measured without sounding Canada that [had] not been absorbed into the Athrough the d eep taiga forest. The fatty under- distant, impassioned without being discour- body politic.” side of a hide scraped with a flint rock. A cadre agingly biased. All the same, he largely recuses Flown to Inuvik’s Grollier Hall in the early of kin working together to erect a camp along himself from the book; his presence as both nar- 1960s, Paul Andrew was at the sharp end of the Mackenzie River. These interweaving scenes, rator and character (drawn, as always, as a pulpy, that ambition. His language, family, and home which open Paying the Land, come with a feel- were replaced with a number and a religion, ing of a history long since passed. But history is as the process began of forcing this child — yet close at hand in the Northwest Territories — and another nonentity from terra incognita — into the images are revealed to be a recreation of Paul the Anglo-C atholic mould. “You [weren’t] par- Andrew’s childhood. Recalling his years spent ticularly anybody or anything. So they’re going living on the land, Andrew, a former chief of the to have to remake you,” he recalls. After the Shúhtaot’ine, or Mountain Dene, describes a years of verbal, sexual, and physical abuse, “you difficult but satisfying life, one “dictated by the begin to believe what they say, that you’re not environment, by the animals,” where youth, by good enough.” watching, listening, and imitating their elders, Sacco has never shied away from putting the found themselves woven into the circle of com- “graphic” in graphic novels, and anyone inclined munity and tradition. to shrug off the horrors of residential schools Circles arise often in Paying the Land, as the and their consequences as overblown or rhetor- cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco winds the ical may find in his stark depictions of Andrew’s most complex story of his career into a finely experience something more effective than cold tuned narrative loop. Sacco, who was born in understanding: empathy. We are visual beings, Malta and now lives in Oregon, made his name and reading a man’s description of his ordeals, while reporting in the Middle East (Palestine, while simultaneously watching the boy he was from 1993; Footnotes in Gaza, from 2009) and the suffer through them, causes us to recoil. By Balkans (Safe Area Goražde, from 2000). While chronicling individual after individual this way, this latest outing finds him in the far safer NWT, Sacco reveals the impact the treaties and land he comes to see it as a place that’s just as frac- deals had and continue to have. tured as those war zones. Paying the Land is more than a collection of After contemplating the traders, missionaries, bad memories, however. There is also hope, oilmen, and miners who have gone north of although the term means different things to the sixtieth parallel to carve out their desired different people. While some Dene welcome pound of flesh or soil, Sacco changes tack rather resource extraction and a wage- based economy, abruptly. He realizes there is something else at Where history is close at hand. others search for a clearer path back to the self- play here, some deeper, lingering problem that sufficiency of their ancestors. contaminates the earth beneath the Dene’s feet: blank- eyed caricature) is largely absent. This The issues Sacco raises won’t be solved if a circle has no beginning, where does one look stance marks a departure from his other works, quickly, but there is an immediacy that runs to fix it once it’s broken? where he more fully integrates himself with the through the work. Shared knowledge of lan- ◆ story through a sort of gonzo cartoonism. guage, legends, and bushcraft skills — all SACCO SEEMS AWARE OF THE SNAGS AN OUTSIDER But intentional decolonization of the nar- substantial facets of reclaiming Indigenous like himself might catch upon in tackling a story rative leads the book to difficult places. Sacco heritage — grows weaker by the day. Although .

O like this: the white saviour complex, the noble- does well to render the knot of economic and there are no answers to be found here, it’s C

savage trope, the treaty-i dolizing “John Locke political dealings of the North understandable, clear that in a world where the buck stops at T L that reposes in every Western heart.” And he a Herculean task considering the thousands of capitalism, pain — especially the pain of the O H knows its telling isn’t easy. Rather than finding years’ worth of technological, religious, and powerless — is often meaningless unless it Y R

N media- starved people eager to share their past, societal change that descended upon the region can be coupled with an economic equivalent. E H

Sacco encounters a culture that feels tired of in mere decades. Only midway through does Governments banking on ecclesiastical aphor- F O talking and sick of not being heard. More than the book begin to soar, as sparse white panels isms (particularly “Money answers all things”) Y S

E once, he’s told that those outside the bounds of give way to a banking seaplane over a northern can repartee unto infinity; they will solve noth- T R

U family and community, especially those “pok- lake, the craft in transit to collect a payload of ing so long as “How much did it hurt?” refers to O

C ing around with their anthropology sticks . . . can children bound for residential schools. the pocketbook and not the soul.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 25 BYGONE DAYS

In the Eye of the Historian Three takes on Louis Riel Christopher Dummitt

The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story certainly offers. Her book retells Métis histo ry In reality, the push to account more accur- of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation from the origins of the “new nation” in the ately for the Métis side of things has been under Jean Teillet 1790s through what she calls its five moments way for decades. Even back in the 1950s, when Patrick Crean Editions of “national resistance.” That takes us up to Donald Creighton published his biography 592 pages, hardcover and softcover the present day and the legal battles with the of John A. Macdonald, he was criticized for government of Canada over Manitoba Act land being far too biased against Riel and the Métis. The Audacity of His Enterprise: grants (and whether they were the equivalent of Historical writing since then (not exactly “very Louis Riel and the Métis Nation a treaty), as well as the battle to define who is recently”) has more often been sympathetic to That Canada Never Was, 1840–1875 (and, most importantly, who is not) Métis. the “new nation.” M. Max Hamon Teillet’s opening, though, performs a sleight Teillet actually mimics, in a funhouse- mirror McGill-Queen’s University Press of hand. She pretends that the views of schol- way, the biased accounts she criticizes. She 432 pages, hardcover and ebook ars like Stanley or Begg or the political scientist eschews the idea of a balanced history and instead Thomas Flanagan actually represent current offers up a one-s ided narrative. In recounting A Rush to Judgment: opinion and scholarship: “The fact that these the infamous Seven Oaks incident, for example, The Unfair Trial of Louis Riel versions of history have until very recently when a group of Métis killed a large party of set- Roger E. Salhany tlers, she leads us to believe that the stupidity Dundurn and cruelty of the HBC governor were to blame. 336 pages, softcover and ebook On the battles between Métis and government forces in 1885, she lists the names of every Métis combatant who fell in battle, in a kind of rev- HERE WAS A TIME WHEN HISTORIANS erential Remembrance Day fashion. What she used some rather unsavoury, doesn’t do is mention the name of anyone who frankly racist language to talk about died on the other side. the Métis, the descendants of Such complex events have been analyzed Indigenous women and European quite well by several modern scholars, but for Tmen, who emerged as a collective group in the Teillet, Seven Oaks matters more as a nation- Northwest around the turn of the nineteenth building myth: “A battle in which your ances- century. In these older histories, they typically tors successfully defended themselves against appeared in accounts of conflict — with the fur outlanders who came to take their land — that trade companies, with the early settlers, and with is a good story, one that a people can be pleased the Canadian government. with, one that teaches them about their noble Most of these histories touched on two par- origins — as a good people who fought to defend ticularly famous, or infamous, conflicts. The first their lands and their families.” For genera- happened in 1869, after the new federal govern- tions, some settler accounts did the same thing ment purchased the Hudson’s Bay Company’s but in reverse, recounting the incident as a claims to vast stretches of land covering much brutal massacre by vicious “savages.” Teillet just of western Canada, without first consulting the switches the roles and makes the settlers the one- people who actually lived there. Then, in 1885, dimensional bad guys. the Métis called on their leader from that earlier If you blotted out all words in the text except conflict, Louis Riel, to return to Canada and help for adjectives and descriptive phrases, you would the communities along the South Saskatchewan still know when Teillet is describing someone River to force Ottawa to respond to their peti- who was Métis: a “noble” people for whom tions. And while most historians now describe On competing judgments. “family was deeply treasured.” They lived by these two conflicts as the Riel or Métis resistance “reciprocity, mutual support and the sharing movements — and not rebellions — that’s not been accepted uncritically as the history tells ethic.” They were known as “ ‘the best hunters, how many saw the events at the time. us more about the writers and Canada than the best horsemen and the bravest warriors’ of In The North-West Is Our Mother, Jean Teillet, about the Métis Nation.” But Begg published his the Plains” (she quotes the nineteenth- century O a lawyer in British Columbia and a proud des- book in 1894, and Stanley’s work, which Teillet explorer Joseph Nicollet). As they do now, T O H

cendant of the Riel family, offers a distinctly calls a “standard text,” first appeared in 1936. they possessed an oral culture that gave them P

Métis perspective on this history. Documents These aren’t exactly contemporary scholars. And amazing memory skills, but, as she condes- C O T

from an earlier era “rarely tell the Métis side of Flanagan, while a more recent practitioner and cendingly puts it, were “tolerant of the poor S

the story,” she writes early on, and the histories prominent in his own fashion, is more of a con- memory skills of those who live in reliance M A produced from these records “are anything but trarian outlier in the writing of Canadian hist- on writing.” The leader Gabriel Dumont was L A

;

neutral and unbiased.” Teillet cites historians like ory. In fact, what’s almost entirely missing from “a man of his word and a man who cared for N O I

Alexander Begg, who talked about the nation’s The North-West Is Our Mother is any indication the people he led.” He was a “lodestone” and T C

“wild and improvident” nature, and George of how much history has been rewritten lately to a “mighty hunter,” who was “forged in . . . bat- E L L

Stanley, who described the Métis as “indolent, include — and sometimes wholly adopt — Métis tle.” Other leaders “seemed invincible” as they O C

thoughtless and improvident.” It all sounds views of the past. It’s a useful omission for rode into battle “f earlessly”— like “holy men.” T T E rather sordid, and a reader might be inclined to Teillet’s purposes, and a classic case of a straw Throughout, Teillet assures us that Métis and R E V seek out an alternative perspective, which Teillet man argument. other Indigenous leaders were “chosen for their E

26 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA gifts of grace, fine oratory, qualities of courage As a student in Montreal, Riel took part in a through his exile and especially his involvement and vision, and for their charisma.” prominent debate with another student. The two in the campaign to get an amnesty for himself The contrast to her descriptions of Euro- re-e nacted a disagreement between Jean-J acques and others. Hamon draws on the various letters Canadians is striking. Settler leaders were Rousseau and Charles Borde. Rousseau was Riel wrote to figures in Quebec and the United “creatures of hierarchical training.” One was famous for his critique of civilization, for his States, and the documents he amassed about “two-faced.” Another was “a blunderbuss, full of romanticization of “natural” man, and for his himself and his people. The book includes dia- his own importance and righteousness.” When argument that the origins of human inequality grams of Riel’s interconnected circles. According that man, Governor Semple, was killed, along could be found in civilization. You might expect to Hamon, Riel “made strategic alliances with with most of his small group of followers, it was Riel to have taken Rousseau’s position. In fact, Canadien networks in an effort to hijack the really his own fault. Teillet repeats the insults of he defended that of Borde, who argued for the Confederation project and place Métis interests the day, calling him “Mr. Simple” and describ- benefits of education and culture to improve the at the centre of the Canadian political con- ing him as “impulsive by nature.” Settler lead- uncivilized. sensus.” When his colleague Ambroise Lépine ers, in general, were “autocratic, incompetent Hamon recounts the debate and assures us was arrested and then tried for the murder of or corrupt.” that the whole thing was a stroke of genius on Thomas Scott, Riel was there in spirit, helping The effect is Lego Movie history, where “every- Riel’s part. The colonial record has erased Riel to build the coalition that called for commuting thing is awesome”— at least when it comes to and his Métis identity, he argues, and we need the death sentence. Teillet’s own people. To give her a modicum to give Riel his “agency” back. The young man All of this might be convincing, or at least of credit, she pretty much admits this up front, was being ironic, as he “intentionally deployed interesting, if it were tempered by some import- arguing that her people need stories of which his Indigeneity to add weight to the matrix of ant contextual details. For one, Riel’s letter writ- to be proud. epistemological dichotomies of civilized/savage ing wasn’t at all unusual. Anyone who has been ◆ and morality/corruption.” through the archives of any political figure (and JEAN TEILLET TACKLES THE LARGER MÉTIS STORY, Riel’s adoption of Rousseau’s arguments, really just about anyone from the past) knows but with The Audacity of His Enterprise, the Hamon insists, was a ploy: clearly, his status that people wrote letters. You could come up Queen’s University historian M. Max Hamon as Métis — that is, as Indigenous —“contradicts with similar diagrams showing the “networks” focuses specifically on the nation’s most famous his argument for civilization.” As with much in of influence for literally tens of thousands of man, Louis Riel. Hamon is among the many the book, this may well be true. But the whole Canadians; many would look pretty similar to “ally” scholars who have taken it upon them- argument comes directly out of the historian’s what Hamon wants us to believe was so special. selves to “unsettle” Canadian history and Canada mind: it isn’t backed up by anything in the pri- It is useful to know how involved Riel was in the itself. They see their work on “settler colonial- mary sources. campaign for his own amnesty, certainly. But the ism” as a kind of academic activism. They aren’t The Audacity of His Enterprise follows a simi- larger interpretation needs a little more modesty. on the barricades, but their goals are decidedly lar trajectory elsewhere, as Hamon combines ◆ political. And so Hamon makes two broad argu- interesting archival research with overstretched HAMON ENDS THE AUDACITY OF HIS ENTERPRISE IN ments about Riel’s life: First, Riel wasn’t just arguments. He wants us to pay less attention to 1875, after the Lépine trial and the political solu- someone who “resisted” Canadian expansion; the physical violence of the 1869–70 resistance tion that Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal govern- he and his people were directly involved in cre- and instead focus on Riel’s role as someone ment imposed: Lépine’s death sentence was ating the country. Second, Riel was a translator who brought people together. And though Riel indeed commuted and most of those involved between the Métis and Canada. clearly did build a kind of political consensus at Red River were given amnesty. (The three Hamon starts with Riel’s family and parents, at Red River, other historians have told this exceptions were Lépine, Riel, and the Fenian arguing the Métis had a much more involved story — with less theoretical jargon. William O’Donoghue, who were exiled for five notion of kinship than Euro- Canadians (he uses Hamon goes on to give a rather one-sided more years.) It’s an odd place to end the book, the Cree word “wahkohtowin,” as others have). account of the many controversies of the rebel- though. Not long after 1875, Riel’s friends had Where some have suggested thirteen-y ear-old lion, including the execution of Thomas Scott, him admitted to an insane asylum. When he Riel felt out of place when he headed east to an Irish Protestant settler. The lasting controversy finally left it, in 1878, he went back to the United study at a Sulpician school, in Lower Canada, over Scott’s death is, Hamon argues, merely the States, where he married and started another life, Hamon insists that he felt right at home. Where result of “Canadian propaganda.” Again, this all with marginal success. other biographers have highlighted the fact that isn’t entirely untrue (much was made of Scott’s Hamon defends his end date, saying it’s Riel was asked to leave early, without becoming execution for political ends), but the leaps of “intentionally unsettling” and part of his larger a priest, Hamon argues that we shouldn’t read logic that Hamon and other ally scholars take attempt to “decolonize history.” Ending things anything into this — many students left early. So in defending the 1870 execution seem a little in 1875 also allows him to conveniently sidestep too, when a young woman rejected Riel roman- careless — as if the fact that Scott was a ruffian evidence that doesn’t square with a pre-s elected tically, we’re meant to believe this was absolutely justified his death. and highly politicized story, including Riel’s fine and that the young man wasn’t bothered Still, Hamon doesn’t go as far as Teillet, who final act, when he was invited back to lead at all. He actually headed back west, Hamon claims that Scott, a prisoner at the time, was another, less successful movement, at the end of suggests, because he was now well educated “perfectly placed to lead an attack from the which he was executed for treason. and had excellent contacts with which to bring inside.” Imagine all the executions that could be Unlike Teillet, Hamon is not a nationalist opportunities to his people. justified if prisoners were somehow too danger- who is motivated to provide great stories for Yet much of the evidence for this period of ous precisely because they were prisoners. You the Métis people. His book is more like an exer- Riel’s life is scanty and leaves rooms for dispute. don’t have to accept uncritically the Ontario cise in what the late British philosopher Roger For instance, if you ask someone to marry you Orange vilification of Riel, whose provisional Scruton called “oikophobia”— the opposite of and she rejects you, you might think this would government ordered the execution, to think xenophobia. This is not the dislike of foreigners hurt. It could well be that Hamon’s arguments that there might also be something wrong with but the dislike of one’s own culture and history. are correct. But your decision to accept his (as undisguised anti- settler accounts. A significant number of scholars have taken opposed to any other biographer’s) interpreta- The killing of Scott sealed Riel’s fate. The up the oikophobic interpretive lens, attacking tion is somewhat arbitrary. It just so happens Canadians from Red River went east and used Canadian sovereignty, fixating on the worst that Hamon always seems to select the inter- the incident to denounce the Métis uprising. The blemishes of the Canadian past, and offering pretations that make Riel seem magnificent. prime minister, John A. Macdonald, had already highly ideological renderings of old stories so The irony here is that, early in his book, Hamon set in motion a military expedition to head west that they are retold to emphasize the bad inten- cites the French historian François Furet on how and solidify Ottawa’s hold on the colony. The tions and harmful actions of so-called settler some biographers make “too much” of their government negotiated with the representatives colonialism. (It’s the kind of scholarship that subjects. And then he offers a version of Riel from Red River, but when the military arrived at offers an intellectual smokescreen for those who who is always in control of his destiny and never Fort Garry, Riel was forced to flee. pulled down a statue of John A. Macdonald, in makes mistakes. Hamon’s account of the next portion of Riel’s Montreal, last summer.) The most intriguing chapter in The Audacity life is both intriguing and, again, overstated. One of Hamon’s stated goals with The Audacity of His Enterprise presents a long description of In his interpretation, the following five years of His Enterprise is to promote Riel as a nation an incident Hamon uncovered in the archives. stood as something of a triumph. He traces Riel builder, someone who created and didn’t just

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 27 resist. But where has Hamon been over the overwhelming, and a defence of the justness of last three decades? Back in 1992, the Legislative Riel’s cause was not a valid legal argument. The Assembly of Manitoba declared Louis Riel a only way to save Riel was to convince the jury founding father. In 2007, Louis Riel Day became that he was not of sound mind. At the end of the a statutory holiday in the province. For a quarter trial, Riel finally had his chance to make his own century, anyone who has walked past the legisla- case. “The fact that his speech from the dock was tive building in Winnipeg has been greeted by a disavowal of his insanity,” Salhany writes, “was an eleven- foot statue of Riel, gripping his list of probably the strongest evidence of his insanity.” rights and looming over the entire scene. This Riel likely wanted to die as a martyr and, is hardly someone who has been relegated to a ultimately, he got his wish. Here, Salhany’s inter- dark corner of history. pretation is worth quoting at length, because it ◆ so resoundingly goes against Hamon’s version of IT HAS LONG BEEN POSSIBLE — AND ESTABLISHED Riel as a triumphant state builder: practice — to offer accounts of historical events that are actually balanced. From Gerald Friesen’s His life had been certainly one series of The Diary of Dukesang Wong classic work on the prairies to the books of J. M. failures after another. The earlier rebel- A Voice from Gold Mountain Bumsted, we have had many decades of excel- lion in Manitoba . . . had ended in his Edited with commentary by David McIlwraith lent scholarship that doesn’t insist on an overly exile, and a life of poverty and ignominy Diary translated by Wanda Joy Hoe politicized interpretation of Métis history. In in the United States. He had fought the The only known first-person account A Rush to Judgment, the former Superior Court Canadian government twice and lost. His from a Chinese worker on the famously of Ontario judge Roger E. Salhany follows in dream of creating a separate Métis coun- treacherous transcontinental railway that this tradition and takes the reader through Louis try had been dashed and it was unlikely spanned the North American continent Riel’s trial for treason, in July 1885. that there would ever be another chance in the nineteenth century. A lot has been written about the three-day to lead his people. If he died at the hands 978-1-77201-258-3 trial and its fairness, but Salhany offers the his- of the detested federal government, at torically informed view of someone steeped least in death he would be remembered. in the law. Sometimes he is a little “present- Impurity ist”— assuming or wishing that current ideas A Rush to Judgment is a fine example of sympa- Larry Tremblay of justice had prevailed at the time. But mostly thetic, thoughtful scholarship, with a clean style Translated by Sheila Fischman Salhany keeps this tendency in check and pro- that neatly summarizes complex topics in digest- A playful and macabre narrative tour vides a brilliant overview of the trial and a ible chunks, all the while rooted in the evidence de force that weaves a complex web of wonderful analysis of why parts of it were of the time. It is exactly the kind of scholarship interlocking narratives in multiple voices and a variety of forms. “unfair.” Anyone looking for a short and bal- that we need about controversial topics. One 978-1-77201-247-7 anced account of Métis history and the history of might quibble with particular points, but it’s the larger resistance could do much worse than clear how and why Salhany is making his assess- to read his first two chapters, which neatly sum- ment: he follows the sources closely. marize the key events and stories. ◆ Mégantic: Salhany then presents the personalities of BACK IN 2000, THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST ALAN A Deadly Mix of Oil, Rail, and Avarice those involved in the courtroom. Over the Cairns warned in Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny years, the proceedings have been criticized for and the Canadian State that we were in for a Translated by W. Donald Wilson many reasons: They were held in Regina, in tumultuous period of conflict between differ- Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny reveals how front of a jury of only six men and not the usual ing accounts of history. It was to be expected. the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster twelve. They could (or should) have been held in The colonizers’ version — with all of its assump- was not an accident, but rather was Winnipeg, where the jury would have contained tions of cultural superiority — was finally knowingly caused by powerful people six French or Métis members. Riel was charged being overthrown by the Indigenous take. Of and institutions far removed from the town itself. under a medieval statute, which dictated a pen- course, there was much to be gained by this 978-1-77201-259-0 alty of death, rather than an updated statute that reversal, and Cairns hoped for a “continuing would have allowed for a lesser sentence. And dialogue between competing versions of the the trial was rushed and didn’t allow the defence past”— competing versions that could “keep Music at the Heart of Thinking time to prepare. An even more modern-d ay cri- each other honest.” Improvisations 1–170 tique, put forward by scholars steeped in settler- We can still hope for this emphasis on diverse Fred Wah colonial theory, would be that Riel ought not to viewpoints, where a variety of perspectives A life-long poem project from the have been tried at all, because the Canadian state allows us to understand yesterday (and its Governor General’s Award–winning itself was engaged in genocidal warfare. A Rush implications today) in a more truthful and former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. to Judgment doesn’t address this last point, but rigorous fashion. We might hope that scholars 978-1-77201-262-0 Salhany carefully goes through all of the others. and historians don’t necessarily see themselves What Salhany ends up with is a measured as telling only “their” side of the story, as if analysis of the evidence that dissects the trial in one’s ethnic background means putting on a useful ways. He is especially critical of the judge, pair of glasses that allows one to see only in Searching for Sam Hugh Richardson, who probably should not a certain colour. We can also hope for scholar- Sophie Bienvenu have presided in the first place (for one thing, ship where non-N ative scholars are able to be Translated by Rhonda Mullins his boss appeared on behalf of the Crown). more than mere “allies” to Indigenous peoples, Mathieu lives on the street. His main Salhany also highlights several instances where relegating themselves to oikophobic attacks on companion is his pitbull, Sam – the Richardson got in over his head, allowed for a nation’s history. one connection he retains in the world, improper lines of inquiry, and failed to rule out There is much to be critical about in Canadian helping him to stay alive. So when Sam disappears out of the blue, Mathieu is left inappropriate questions. history, especially as it relates to the Métis and adrift. As he frantically searches for her, Riel’s lawyers opted to put forward a defence Louis Riel. But it would be a shame if we simply his past begins to re-emerge in flashbacks, of insanity. In The North-West Is Our Mother, replaced the racist term “half-breed,” with all of revealing the tragedies of his life. Teillet argues that this choice was “their” defence, its insulting stereotypes, with the term “settler,” 978-1-77201-246-0 not Riel’s. And surely this reading is correct, for which is increasingly taking on a racially charged Riel wanted to defend himself by arguing the hue of its own, with equally simplistic clichés. In merits of the Métis cause in front of the jury. But A Rush to Judgment, at least, there is hope that we See our forthcoming titles at it’s worth pointing out (as Salhany does) that in can escape the tragic pretense of progress, when https://talonbooks.com/catalogues/ deploying an insanity plea, his lawyers were try- we claim to be moving forward only to find our- ing to save Riel’s life. The evidence of treason was selves back where we all began. Talonbooks LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA BYGONE DAYS

Comfort Foods The tragic tale of a cookbook Hattie Klotz

The Taste of Longing: Ethel Mulvany and The two soon married, and Ethel conformed taken to a barracks at the tip of the island and Her Starving Prisoners of War Cookbook to social mores and gave up her job. In Cawn- did not see Ethel again until war’s end.) Suzanne Evans pore, the couple had a staff of eighteen, or, as It was at Changi — alongside 1,000 other Between the Lines she put it, “twenty-t wo if you count the four women and 330 children — that Mulvany experi- 354 pages, softcover and ebook who took care of the two horses.” With little to enced more than two years of grinding misery do, she volunteered — to the displeasure of her and worked tirelessly to distract herself and new husband — notably working to bathe and others from that reality. She negotiated con- F YOU’VE EVER BEEN PROPERLY HUNGRY, feed infants in the local hospital. stantly for special dispensation to leave the you know it’s a sensation that takes over In spring 1939, Ethel and Denis planned a camp, so that she might purchase extra sup- your whole body. By “properly hungry,” trip to Britain, where they would spend some plies for her companions, and she occupied I don’t mean you’ve missed a meal or time before she continued to Canada. Despite their minds with various projects, including the two. I mean when you’re already slim, the looming threat of war, she arrived home, quilts, stitched from scraps and imbued with Iwithout great reserves on which to draw, and just in time to see her dying adoptive mother. hidden messages. They also built a “silence you miss meal after meal after meal. This is the Returning to the U.K. in September, she had hut,” to escape the constant noise: “There was kind of hunger that becomes your only concern. her first bout of mania and was admitted to a nowhere on earth there wasn’t somebody yakety Suzanne Evans captures this preoccupation yak yakking.” By far her most successful diver- in her new biography of Ethel Mulvany, a sions, however, centred on food. Canadian internee at Changi Jail, the notorious Inspired by the poem “The Depression Ends,” Japanese prisoner-o f-war camp for civilians in by her former professor Ned Pratt, Mulvany Singapore. “There is nothing like that debilitat- organized “tea” parties, where dozens dressed ing, that going- down-the- valley-one-by-one pain in their prison best would envision what they of hunger,” she once said. “There is nothing would eat as soon as they were released: “As the where the body is more vulnerable to absolute women talked, their mouths began to water and capitulation.” soon they started having to swallow their saliva. Evans was working as a research fellow at the After these sessions it dawned on Ethel that she Canadian War Museum, in Ottawa, when she was left with the odd but very pleasant sensation first came across Mulvany, one of the driving of having actually eaten.” Mulvany also encour- forces behind the well-known Changi quilts, a aged the prisoners to write their favourite reci- secret communications system between female pes down on bits of newspaper and old ledger and male prisoners. The historian then redis- books, and when she at last returned to Canada, covered a forgotten cookbook compiled by the in July 1946, she compiled some of their recipes feisty woman from Manitoulin Island, who had in Prisoners of War Cookbook. “I want you to make

E survived on little more than bayam soup. “Not me two thousand copies,” she told a reluctant U

G much more than cooked-up buffalo grass,” printer on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue. “This A H Mulvany later recalled. “How would you like is to remember the ones who died and to help E H

T that?” The camp staple’s monotony notwith- those who just made it through.” In the end, he

T standing, Mulvany and others had fantasized printed 20,000 copies on low-grade paper, the S E

U a great deal about a great many foods. “How sales of which raised $18,000. With the funds, Q E

B could the prisoners write recipes while starv- Mulvany sent oranges, tea, and cigarettes to

B ing?” Evans asks. “Why did they? Who were these former POWs living under rationing in Britain. M

O women?” She does an excellent job at answering Evans includes one of those recipes at the T

S these questions by delving deep into the life of beginning of every chapter. Some, such as toad- E D

. an outlier: a social worker, teacher, and ambu- The prisoners’ mouths began to water. in-the-hole and posy pudding, are classic stick- A

A lance driver from a remote place who dealt with to-your-ribs comfort foods. Others, such as fowl

;

7 both bipolar disorder and what we would now nursing home; Denis, meanwhile, was posted badum or dry curry, nod to something more 9 6 1

call PTSD. to Singapore. Following her release, Ethel had exotic. In preparing the book, Evans asked her , S ◆ U an accident and dislocated her shoulder, which friends and family to test some of the seventy-

G A NOT CONTENT TO SETTLE FOR MARRIAGE, A FAMILY, delayed the couple’s reunion. After sailing to year-old recipes, and there’s a charming post- R

A P and the expectations of small-town Ontario, the Southeast Asia by way of Bombay, on an Italian script that includes their comments — helpful if S

A vivacious and audacious twenty- eight-year-old liner packed with refugees fleeing the war, she you’re planning to try a couple. H

T I Ethel Rogers set off in 1933 to study school sys- wrote about the voyage’s food, a precursor, per- With The Taste of Longing, Evans puts food into W

E tems around the world, on a trip sponsored by haps, to her obsession with the topic. sharp focus in the complex and remarkable life F

L the Canadian Society for Literature and the Arts. Ethel enjoyed a period of relative calm of Ethel Mulvany. Thanks to in-depth research L

L I In Kyoto, she met the emperor and empress in from March 1940, when she finally landed and access to family members blessed with T

, their garden at the Imperial Palace. In Shanghai, in Singapore, to December 8, 1941, when the boxes of memorabilia, hers is a biography that E T

R the Canadian trade commissioner threw a party Japanese started shelling the island city. And marches along at the pace of a novel. No spoil- O

O in her honour, shortly before fate and a dodgy then, just like that, it was over. The colony fell ers, but you can’t help but wonder whatever will C

N stomach on board an ocean liner led her into on February 15, 1942, and by March 2, Ethel was happen next to this woman who is tormented by E A I the arms of a British military doctor, Denis on her way to her first internment camp. She was mental health challenges, solitary confinement, R D

A Mulvany, stationed in Lucknow, India. transferred to Changi a week later. (Denis was divorce, and the sadness of postwar life.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 29 BYGONE DAYS

Front-Line Worker A family’s postwar trials John Fraser

The Captain Was a Doctor: The Long War humanist and poet manqué who fell helplessly phoned on the way home. He reached her from and Uneasy Peace of POW John Reid in love with the artistic girl of his dreams. He Pearl Harbor: Jonathon Reid went into medicine with a dollop of altruism Dundurn and then, almost before he could pick up a Reid’s low-key, almost cross-sounding 480 pages, softcover and ebook scalpel, was whisked away from his sweet- murmurs were hard to understand, and heart’s side to find himself in a world that was what Jean could make out wasn’t what simultaneously cruel and an open canvas for a she was longing to hear. His voice was RISONER-OF-WAR ACCOUNTS OF THE good man to conquer fear, sadism, and racism. clipped, giving the basics of where he was, Second World War fill a significant The wartime transformation of Jack Reid was how he was coming home, handling this number of shelves, with some of fashioned by necessity, dragooned as he was surreal reunion, hindered by technical the most shocking set in Japanese into a token POW leadership position, being difficulties, the best he could. camps: Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge the only officer among his men. Soon enough, “Say something nice to me,” Jean Pon the River Kwai, from 1952; Gavan Daws’s and reluctantly, he was forced into playing God finally blurted. Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II with people’s lives, which ate away at his soul. Reid’s questioning garble was lost on in the Paciﬁc, from 1994; Dave McIntosh’s Hell But in the end, the role enabled him to teach her, so she said again, “Please, say some- on Earth: Aging Faster, Dying Sooner, from 1997; thing nice to me.” Alistair Urquhart’s The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival during the War Her husband never managed that simple act. in the Far East, from 2010; Richard Flanagan’s Although he had married the young woman he The Narrow Road to the Deep North, from 2014; adored — although he returned to her in Toronto Louis Zamperini’s two memoirs, both titled and although they had two children — some- Devil at My Heels. The list goes on and on. thing had shattered inside him. He never really It’s not that these novels and memoirs are all managed “nice” again. And it was her heart he identical — they aren’t. But in so many of them, broke, a few years later, when she discovered there is a pivotal sameness that gathers around that he had created an entirely separate family well-documented cruelty, as well as the stoic on the West Coast — the whole kit and caboo- courage that inevitably envelops many of the dle — while completing his residency. survivors. The field has gotten to the point where ◆ any addition, especially so long after the war, is JONATHON REID, THE SON AND AUTHOR, HAS bound to be regarded with some initial skepti- painted a picture of a handsome and char- cism. This is not to diminish wartime brutality ismatic father whose triumph over hate is or to belittle the survivors, but one does wonder matched by his mother’s matter-of-fact and if any new POW narrative can reconfigure what’s faithful triumph of never blaming the damaged become something of a familiar story. man who abandoned her and her two young In The Captain Was a Doctor, Jonathon Reid boys. Jean Reid never looked upon Jack as any- has created a complex tale of his own father’s thing but a shell of the husband she had once experiences and takes us into territory rarely loved so fiercely, a remote and broken stranger seen. John Reid was stuffed into a soldier’s who had been changed in ways she could never uniform just nanoseconds after he graduated fully fathom. from medical school in Toronto. Jack, as he was Structurally, The Captain Was a Doctor is known, was then dispatched to Hong Kong, a adroitly balanced between war scenes and pene- posting “set in motion by a brief tropical medi- trating close-ups of the home front, between the cine course he easily might have skipped.” The dualities of a complex man. postwar life in Toronto and the hidden one in Reid arrived just three weeks before the British Vancouver. The dualities support the complex colony’s capitulation to the Japanese forces, in basic decency to even his captors — and to nature of Jack Reid himself. The son comes to late 1941. The bare bones of his account track come to the rescue when one was subsequently share the conclusion of the mother: that the with what’s generally known to have happened accused of war crimes. This is a big part of why war had changed the father so much that he during that bewildering and ugly time. The The Captain Was a Doctor is so compelling and was incapable of returning to normalcy. For treatment of Canadian POWs was particularly so different. the doctor, pre-war life was an existence forever gruesome. A year after capture, just when things The Enola Gay’s flight over Japan, in August shrouded; for his abandoned sweetheart, it couldn’t get worse, hundreds of Canadian and 1945, barely gets us halfway through the book. remained a light that glimmered from further British military prisoners were unexpectedly We are then launched into Jack’s postwar trans- and further in the past. evacuated to Japan for years of forced labour formation and the inchoate — almost equally Quite wonderfully, Jonathon Reid has and further privation. Then the bomb to end all cruel — consequences of post-traumatic stress deployed his well-honed skills as a filmmaker bombs fell in 1945. disorder. No one called it PTSD at the time, of and teacher to describe a complicated time. His N But the bare bones are just there to hold up course. It was understood that war could screw glimpses of the home front reinforce some of A M H the tale of a man who started life with a pro- people up, but they were also expected to get the horrible things that happened in the camps S U C verbial silver spoon in his mouth, a man who on with their lives. Damage wasn’t always easy a world away. His meticulous research captures E O

nevertheless dreamed beyond his position of to perceive at first, but Jean got more than a the afflictions that attended POWs and that his L H privilege. Born in October 1913, Jack was a strong hint of what was ahead for her when her man sensitive father was almost powerless to cure C

30 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA without adequate medicines. And his detailed description of the war’s end is mesmerizing. Floriography for a Pandemic The son quotes his father, who quotes the camp commandant, who announces it’s all over. This You have sent me Blackthorn for difficulty is a pivotal juncture in the account, and also something quite unlike the usual stories that have and a stem-knotted bouquet of my favourite come out of wartime Japan: spring flower, the Chequered Fritillary, an emblem of persecution. Delivered It was of a different tone from any official speech we had heard before. [He a hanging pot of my beloved said] we had been honourable men who Lobelia, whose message is malevolence, had fought in a hopeless situation and and you have surrounded us all with that they honoured us, and there was no stigma to being a prisoner under such Lavender for distrust. circumstances, and saluted us when he got through his speech. You want from me a Peach Blossom The men thought that was really something. They felt the war must really be to signify I am your captive, and another over now. sign of surrender with a single persimmon — Bury me amid nature’s beauties. This speech and the commandant’s tone is also a tribute to Reid’s own disciplined decency, which even the Japanese recognized throughout his With Borage for bluntness, I send back incarceration. Basil for hatred. To fortify my message, As for the author’s own story of growing up within a dichotomized family, it is also mov- I tie together Wild Licorice with Belvedere ing. He offers evocative glimpses from a boy’s both crying I declare against you, perspective of the tensions that inevitably arose, I declare against you. including a telling surprise visit by his father to a Georgian Bay cottage, to collect his sons. The boys were there with family friends, Jack’s for- For myself, I call the florist (she is still mer medical colleague and his wife, who simply working — delivery only) for a beribboned could not bear to witness the unexpected arrival, such was her rage at the betrayal of Jean. (It’s nosegay of Lily of the Valley, a scene that really bores into your conscious- like those sold on Paris streets ness.) And after his father’s death, in 1979, it is for Mother’s Day to mark the fragrant Jonathon who has to negotiate with the Bureau of Pensions Advocates for a fair distribution return of happiness. And though of Jack’s pension between the two widows, an it’s out of season, a spray of Mistletoe, event that finally brings him into contact with which murmurs I surmount difﬁculties. the other Reid family on the West Coast and that “sowed the seeds of this book.” ◆ For us all, Snowdrops for hope, and a few A GENERAL LACK OF BITTERNESS PERVADES THE Coreopsis for everlasting cheerfulness. Captain Was a Doctor and is what marks the book as a very special addition to the ranks of POW Oats? asks the florist, surprised. Yes, accounts. During his incarceration in Japan, for I say, include a spray to bring us example, Jack Reid used all of his quiet resolve the witching soul of music. All these, and dignity to pacify the expected cruelty of the prison commandant: rather educated and able no matter the cost. to speak English, Masao Uwamori “would prove Maureen Hynes over time to be someone Reid could manipulate and bend to his views and aims. The positive Maureen Hynes is the author of numerous collections, including consequences of this influence on Uwamori’s Sotto Voce, a ﬁnalist for the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. thinking would be crucial to the men’s survival.” The doctor literally willed his captor into ordinary decency — reawakening the man’s dormant compassion and bolstering the spirits of those under Reid’s care. After the war, Uwamori was indicted on charges of “abusing prisoners and causing many of them to die” and was facing an almost certain execution. It was the doctor’s written testimony that kept the noose from around the officer’s neck — explaining how the commandant transferred the most sadistic guards and took risks to find better food and some medicines for his prisoners. The Captain Was a Doctor is a powerful saga, especially at a time when charges of overt and systemic racism can be hurled about with abandon. It is an extraordinary and redemptive reminder of the basic decency in imperfect human beings that can come to the surface, despite a prevailing atmosphere of heightened distrust.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 31 THE ARTS

Stage Management Fourteen fixes for a broken theatre Marianne Ackerman

N EVERY THEATRE MAKER’S DREAM, THE stick to the stage I know best, but hope it can Montreal has increased by 20 percent, to 4.2 mil- pandemic ends, the doors are flung serve as an instructive mirror for others. lion, more than 55 percent of whom are fluent open, and the patrons rush in, hungry ◆ in English. After several years of strong economic for the visceral thrill of live performance. FOUNDED IN 1969, CENTAUR THEATRE ENJOYS growth, Montreal had emerged as the fastest- As the house lights dim, an actor speaks, strong name recognition that dates back to growing urban economy in Canada by 2019, Iand an ancient art form with a long history of the ’70s and ’80s, when new plays by David with a GDP second only to Toronto’s. reinvention enters a new golden age. Fennario and Vittorio Rossi attracted tens of Maybe Anglo Montrealers just don’t want There’s a nightmare version too: After months thousands of people. Centaur became a voice of live theatre anymore? That idea is easily refuted. of isolation, people crave connection and con- Anglo Montreal through turbulent times. At its Since the entrepreneur Alvin Segal rescued the versation. But the virus, unlikely to be the last high point in the mid-’80s, it had two subscrip- ailing Saidye Bronfman Centre, in 2007, the we’ll know, has instilled a phobia of crowded tion seasons on two stages. But in 1991, in mid- Segal Centre, located in the unhandy suburb of spaces. Sitting in the dark beside strangers con- recession, the founding artistic director, Maurice Côte-St-Luc, has been on a steep growth curve. tinues to feel risky, while at-home entertainment Podbrey, lamented in a Gazette interview that Under the artistic direction of Lisa Rubin, rev- keeps getting better and better. Theatre is forced after two decades of growth, the theatre had enue has increased to $6.6 million, thanks to a into the catacombs, where small bubbles of loyal racked up its first deficit. Still, there were 8,000 year-round program of contemporary plays and fans gather around to carry on the ritual of fam- ambitious new musicals. Hiring Rubin may have iliar stories and shared outrages. been Segal’s best decision, but the octogenar- I believe theatre will survive; it always does. ian’s considerable entrepreneurial skills, honed But, in the meantime, these cursed quiet days while building his stepfather’s suit business into present us with an opportunity to imagine a bet- an international force, are all over the theatre’s ter future — one where the hectic, insular activity management structure and strategy. With only of putting on plays becomes more important 4 percent of its pre-pandemic revenue coming and commands impact and power it did not from public subsidy (compared with 32 percent have when the lights went out in March 2020. at Centaur), the Segal has become a hopping Who even remembers what it was like back cultural centre, drawing accolades and audiences then? Faux bravado ruled. Some iconic play- across age, ethnic, and language groups. houses had already closed; others were strug- So, in the absence of another wealthy busi- gling to find audiences. The boomers who ness genius with many rich friends, what would propelled Canadian theatre in the 1960s, ’70s, it take to restore Centaur Theatre’s place in and ’80s had reached an age when their dona- Anglo Montreal and make it an important cul- tions were more avidly sought than their pres- tural force once more? Here are fourteen ideas. ence in the audience. “Youth and diversity” was Inspired by life in lockdown, they lean heavily the mantra. But now I wonder whether genera- on strategies for making new friends and get- tional change and loosening the grip of white ting back in touch with old ones. They’re all male management will be enough to kick-start a aspirational fixes — and offered up as fodder for future with new voices and new visions. a much- needed discussion. As theatre critic for the Montreal Gazette in the ’80s, I covered an explosion of creativity on the 1. Pursue growth. The 2019–20 Centaur subscrip-

francophone scene, a transformative experience tion season offered only fifteen weeks of theatre, M U that lured me to abandon a fat salary and launch including two shows brought in from elsewhere E S Theatre 1774. For most of the ’90s, I wrote plays, (and it was all cut short by COVID-19). A few U M S K

directed, and slogged to pay the bills. Since leav- short-run events filled out the brochure, includ- J I R ing the company to write novels, I’ve seen two of It’s time to aim higher. ing the Wildside, a mid- January festival of indie E H my plays produced at Centaur Theatre, in 2000 shows, and a public presentation of a new work. T

; 5

and 2015. Before the pandemic, I took annual subscribers to an eight-play season, which sold But these offered little revenue potential, and 9 8 1 theatregoing trips to London, often saw plays some 112,000 tickets each year. most local artists who participated were paid ,

L in Toronto, and made occasional visits to the In retrospect, even the early ’90s were the a fraction of union rates. Reducing high-risk, E M Stratford and Shaw Festivals. But it’s in Montreal good old days. Today the subscription season high-cost productions may be necessary to stop E H

E that I’ve most closely watched a community has dropped to five plays (and may go to four). spiralling deficits, but it is bound to exacerbate D

P of talented artists increasingly struggle against Subscribers number in the mid-2,000s. Seven Centaur’s slide off the public radar. In financially O

T impossible odds, coping with outmoded institu- of the last nine seasons ended with significant challenged times, the only route to growth and H

I tional models and missing out on the audiences operating deficits. If this were still the ’90s, we excellence is by way of a reimagined community R

R they deserve. Forced to scrabble for grants and might link Centaur’s misfortune to a sagging role, which requires top-tier diplomacy. U

A donations, they’ve made immense personal sac- economy and the shrinking Anglo community. During the last two decades, Anglo Montreal’s T N

E rifices to create. But with 780,800 first-language English speakers, indie theatre scene has grown and matured C

The situation here — with all of its dramatic Anglo Montreal is bigger than Winnipeg, where enormously. A dozen incorporated companies, N O D

woes — has much in common with the scene in the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre operates on with combined budgets of $7.2 million, offer an E R

the rest of Canada. And a more sustainable path, a $12-m illion budget, thanks to Montreal-b orn extraordinary range of high- quality professional N O L

I believe, begins with legacy theatres, specifically Steven Schipper’s sound management over thirty shows, including outdoor Shakespeare, youth I D with their leadership roles, or lack thereof. I’ll years. Since 2000, the population of Greater and children’s fare, new Quebec plays, and O

32 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA biting docudrama. The Black Theatre Workshop, first see the administrative bowels — a jumble when I took my grandson to The Nutcracker, an for example, will soon celebrate its fiftieth anni- of desks jammed into one corner of the ground underwhelming experience at $250 for three versary. Montreal’s bilingual Fringe Festival is floor. On my way to the artistic director’s tickets, Place des Arts was packed.) Montreal has a vibrant summer event, managed out of the windowl ess nook, I passed pale people hunched two successful young people’s theatre companies MainLine Theatre, on Boulevard St-Laurent, a around a photocopier, a strangely funereal whose work merits more exposure. Mainstage go-to venue for some fifty smaller companies. atmosphere, as if nobody dared talk out loud. family entertainment at Centaur should happen While these companies have strong identities The pandemic has emptied many great com- at least once a year. and devoted bases, none has the resources or mercial spaces throughout the city. Now is the opportunity to fully realize the audience poten- perfect time to move all but building- related 6. Single out singles. Going solo to the cinema tial of their most successful productions. But employees to some spacious, well-lit spot in is a thing to do, a perk of having spare time. The Centaur could curate a bill of top- quality work one of Montreal’s creative neighbourhoods. same cannot be said for theatre, which is deeply drawn from smaller stages. There would be no Consolidated under one roof, rehearsals, pub- imbued with the Noah’s Ark syndrome. Why be shame and much merit in a legacy institution licity, and administration can build experiences shy about our need for human connection (or showcasing the broader community’s creativity. that exude a welcoming aura. That should also the fact that even married people can find it hard The blunt fact is that without the vitality of make it easier for staff to cope with increased to get a date for the theatre)? Why not create a smaller companies, there would be no pool of usage of the performance spaces by other com- special solo price for designated performances, actors, designers, directors, and playwrights hon- panies and creators. along with a post- or pre-show drink? ing their craft and somehow managing to stay The tone of most theatre promotional cam- in this city. Whether these proudly independent 4. Feed and water the guests. On a trip to paigns oscillates between begging and boasting: troupes would be interested in being at Centaur London last February, I agreed to meet a friend We need your support! We are essential! Very is another question. Hence the need for diplo- for drinks at the Royal Court Theatre, on Sloan little effort goes into imagining what it’s like macy, and for a coherent “second season” that Square. Arriving shortly after 5 p.m., I was sur- to be an actual member of the public, which is lets theatregoers know they are tapping into prised to find the restaurant- bar filling up and ironic since, at its core, the art form is all about something special. And remember: nothing assumed there was an unscheduled event. Not pretending to be other people. makes you hungrier for playgoing than having so: all those people were there for a play, which just seen a good one. didn’t start until 7:30. In normal times, the best 7. Sell more tickets (and stop giving them away). London theatres are meeting places, alternative I was surprised to open the royalty statement 2. Demolish, rebrand. With its wide portico pubs. The Young Vic has a thriving all-day res- for my 2015 play, Triplex Nervosa, and learn that steps and stately columns, Centaur’s home at taurant on the main floor and a spacious bar on of 8,825 people who saw it at Centaur, almost the Old Stock Exchange puts on a brave face, the mezzanine. You can get Prosecco at West End 20 percent got in free with comps, vouchers, but renovation is long overdue. Priority should intervals. London has acknowledged an inescap- and passes. Early in the run, brisk ticket sales be given to the performance architecture. The able fact: our info- entertainment- sustenance prompted a one-week extension. Even in that smaller 241-seat space — unceremoniously cycle is now 24-7. fifth week, though, 300 tickets were given away. named Centaur 1 — has an anchored plywood The pandemic has thrown many of Montreal’s As the only member of the team whose pay balcony that looms over a shallow stage, which best young foodie entrepreneurs out of work, depended directly on the box office (10 percent faces a steep bank of fixed seats. The view from which makes this a great time to replace of net), I calculate the largesse cost me about side rows is annoyingly restrictive. The entire Centaur’s menu of chips, chocolate bars, and $5,000. More to the point: if that many tickets space would be far more effective as a black ho-hum house wines with inventive, creative are given away during a popular play, what hap- box with movable chairs and stage. If social fare. Celebrating and engaging our local foodie pens when tickets aren’t moving? distancing is required, everything could easily innovators might even incentivize their friends Most Toronto theatres offer “industry” dis- be reconfigured. and fans to check out a play. count tickets to people working in theatre, as do Gutting Centaur 1 is both a practical and a many indie companies. But discounts are a neu- symbolic necessity. A new name would help, too. 5. Reach out to families. Most parents will do tral gesture; a loyalty program aimed at creatives Something feminine — the Mermaid? — could cartwheels on behalf of their precious kids. would have much more potential. A paid mem- counterbalance the growly presence of a half Why not get serious about children’s theatre on bership could offer a range of perks. Why stop man, half beast that’s embedded in the corpor- Saturday and Sunday afternoons, timed so that with discounted tickets? Why not add a season ate brand. (The 422-seat Centaur 2 needs a ser- adults can see the main show while their little launch party? An invitation to attend the annual ious rethink as well, but that’s a longer story.) ones visit a big-tent performance in the lobby? general meeting? Opportunities to discuss the A juicy family show over the holidays would dramatic arts with the board of directors? 3. Move the ofﬁce. Not until 2000, when my play appeal to grandparents entertaining far-flung The free-ticket syndrome, while it might Venus of Dublin was produced at Centaur, did I family. (We know there’s potential here: last year, appear generous, actually keeps people at a

’MEMBERING AUSTIN CLARKE Paul Barrett, editor

’Membering Austin Clarke is a wonderful collection – a both discerning and poignant tribute to one of Canada’s great writers, which will be a landmark work in Austin Clarke criticism for years to come. – Aaron Kamugisha, University of the West Indies

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS 1-866-836-5551 | wlupress.wlu.ca 978-1-77112-477-5 236 pages paper $39.99 Available from: UTP (Canada) 1-800-565-9523 Ingram (USA) 1-800-961-8031 distance. It signals an entrenched feudal system: role in creating this incubation hub, and while effort: recruit a panel of avid theatregoers that the reigning king or queen confers perks on a those days are fading fast, a slew of established represents different ages, backgrounds, tastes, lucky few, chosen from the hordes of starving musicians live here. Music, of course, is one of and genders. Post their bios online. Invite them artists. The way forward is to treat creative types the art forms hardest hit by the destabilizing to see the plays. Record moderated conversa- as stakeholders, to cultivate a sense of belonging power of the internet, yet creative types have tions. Publicize it all widely. This theatrical ver- and participation, to ask for their support. found ways to build revenue streams by tour- sion of the CBC’s “At Issue” panel could end up ing and giving concerts in large venues. They’ve creating more buzz than yet another blizzard of 8. Open up to books. Whenever the novelist become masters at building their fan base self- regarding tweets from management. Louise Penny publishes a new mystery, it sits through social media and internal organization. Traditional theatregoing is a passive activity. comfortably on the New York Times bestseller Theatre can — and must — learn from this sector. As the explosion of Zoom meetings has shown, list for weeks. She’s just one of many Quebec At the same time, commissioning these amaz- listeners crave interaction — a chance to voice writers working in English — all part of a lively ing local talents to compose scores for Centaur their opinions and hear what others think. An Anglo literary scene celebrated by an annual productions is an excellent way to give plays a official comment panel is only the beginning awards gala organized by the Quebec Writers’ palpable Montreal feel, while tapping into their of what could become an ongoing conversation Federation (with its 780 members) and the considerable followings. I also know this from between audience and creators. Post-show talk- multilingual Blue Metropolis literary festival, experience: threading Patrick Watson’s music backs are old school. What’s needed today is an launched by the writer turned publisher Linda throughout Triplex Nervosa led to considerable app that allows patrons to comment instantly Leith in 1999. Still, Anglo Quebec authors and attention among his multi-generational fans. and that aggregates those comments for a range their publishers face the number-o ne problem of promotional purposes. confronting the book industry everywhere: how 10. Create buzz through conversation. The days to get copies in front of potential readers. of the Olympian critic are over. Most remaining 11. Get a bus. Montreal’s francophone scene Last year, Centaur spent $373,123 on publicity theatre reviewers are struggling freelancers, and is so much larger and more varied than Anglo to get a few thousand people into the building, sharing economic fragility with the medium you Montreal that comparisons are rarely useful. coats off, and seated. Why not offer these same cover does not exactly inspire trenchant com- But there is one practice on the French side people an opportunity to arrive early and browse mentary. Across the arts, the gatekeeper role has that could open up considerable potential for through a Quebec- themed bookshop? If Centaur shifted to the juries who award lucrative prizes. growth: touring the Island of Montreal, and pos- management can’t handle the burden of becom- This arrangement may work for books, which sibly further afield in the province. Francophone ing a bookseller, surely the local literary types remain on sale well after publication, but most Quebec theatre has a well-d eveloped circuit, could make this modest proposal happen. Even plays have long since closed when the awards are where hit plays from Montreal stages can have a if the effort doesn’t contribute significantly to handed out. In the absence of comment in the hundred or more performances before returning theatre revenues, it would help attract the atten- press, some theatres blow their own horns, but to the city for a second run. tion of smart readers and writers, who otherwise who believes self-praise? The francophone path has been decades might not consider going to a play. In our fragmented world, no single voice in the making, but surely Centaur could start can judge the merit of a work of art or steer the on a modest scale. Both Geordie Theatre and 9. Reach out to music. The Anglo Montreal music myriad of potential publics toward something Youtheatre have developed touring circuits that scene is often cited internationally for its origin- they might actually enjoy. So creating conversa- account for the bulk of their revenues. It’s hard ality and vitality. Cheap rents no doubt played a tion should become part of a theatre’s outreach to imagine that the mid-w inter Wildside Festival brings in new theatregoers or advances anyone’s of four powerful women ran for positions; three 14. Learn to know and embrace virtual space. The career. These shows could easily be sent on tour were elected by a paid-up membership, and eternal beauty of theatre resides in fundamentals instead — paving the way for larger works from the ex-chair was voted off the board. Clearly, a that have not changed since at least the Greeks. the main stage. Touring would enhance the feudal system is not the only way to govern a People gather around, one person stands to tell Centaur brand outside the downtown core and publicly funded arts organization. a story, another chimes in, and it’s a play. Each provide more exposure for Montreal actors. performance is a unique transitory experience, 13. Revise the CEO job description. Traditionally, living on only in human memory. It’s this sim- 12. Go public. The single greatest threat to combining the roles of artistic and executive plicity that draws talented people to invest vast the non-p rofit scene is the dreaded founder’s directors has been considered necessary to pre- chunks of their lives in the making of theatre. syndrome. Many companies were willed into vent messy clashes between the artistic vision It’s also what blinds those makers to the existence by visionary leaders, aided by waves and financial responsibility. In changing times, ongoing revolution in communication technol- of hard-w orking supporters (girlfriends, wives, however, running a building- based theatre has ogies, which are key to the survival and import- ex-wives, philanthropists), and these founders become hugely complicated; it’s unreasonable ance of the art form. Devising a comprehensive made sure their boards were composed of loyal- to expect that any one individual could have digital strategy is essential. Marketing is not ists. After a founder’s departure, boards might expertise or interest in all of the wide range only or even primarily about selling tickets; it’s drift or seize control, but mainly they stay invis- of tasks required to keep an arts organization about standing out, engaging audiences, setting ible — and become unapproachable. afloat — especially a working artist with an eye up transactional experiences that will prompt Non-profit boards are responsible for gov- on his or her own creative career. (Indeed, since people to reveal themselves and commit. The ernance. But how does a citizen taxpayer go Podbrey’s retirement, in 1997, his three suc- purpose of a digital marketing strategy, and about speaking truth to power? Who even is cessors have each taken time away from their indeed the goal of creative management, should the power? As far as I can establish, the fourteen $100,000-plus jobs, and from Montreal, to be to create better theatregoing experiences, men and women on Centaur’s board of direc- direct plays elsewhere.) Many theatres, such as expand revenue streams, and stimulate growth. tors recognize two duties: to choose the artistic Toronto’s Canadian Stage, have acknowledged Convincing people to sit quietly in the dark director when the job is open (by way of an the burden by dividing the job in two, handing while actors speak should be considered but a Ottawa- based headhunter, most recently) and over the business side to an executive director. In pause in the larger conversation between theatre to fundraise. The AD then works for the board reality, this division can simply mean giving the and its public. Otherwise, exit stage left to the in what, from the outside, appears to be a closed general manager a new title. catacombs. circle, a Vatican- style structure. This airtight It’s time to recognize that theatre management ◆ relationship sets the tone for everything that is itself a creative challenge, one that requires FOR LEGACY THEATRES SUCH AS CENTAUR, THE happens at Centaur, by ensuring the governors diverse skills, a deep knowledge of institutional time has come to acknowledge that every state- remain isolated from the environment in which context, and an intimate awareness of how a funded theatre is a public institution that exists the theatre must live. very particular research- and- development- based within a democratic social system, a market- Consider another paradigm: the Montreal organization works. To move forward, Centaur place, and a particular community. After the Museum of Fine Arts. When the board chair needs a creative director, tasked with reimagin- pandemic, the way forward begins with demol- recently undertook to fire the director general ing how the theatre could play a more effective ishing old feudal habits and structures. It’s time and chief curator, Nathalie Bondil, a public role in the community while taking into account to lower the drawbridge, open the gates, and air outcry ensued. At a subsequent meeting, a slate the city’s particularities and history. the place out.

The Call “of the World is above all a frank and compelling account of one Finalist policymaker's efforts to Shaughnessy Cohen Prize reconcile our highest legal and human rights ideals with the real world. — Greg Donaghy, H-Net

The C.D. Howe Series in Canadian Political History

In parnershi”p with

978-0-7748-9004-5 paperback LITERATURE

No Country for Young Women The latest from Ava Homa Keith Garebian

Daughters of Smoke and Fire in short, Kurds have a “criminalized identity.” I could see the heads of all those Kurds crushed Ava Homa But the story is not simply a list of complaints. beneath tanks.” Harper Perennial The opening expands into a tale of witness, So, too, the novel’s structure, which jumps 320 pages, softcover and ebook where a persecuted collectivity is represented by between the narrations of Leila, Alan, and Chia, members of a family whose lives pulsate with seems unsure of itself at first. The father’s nar- urgent passions. rative is the shortest and is related in the third HE KURDISH PEOPLE HAVE A LONG Names provide an additional layer of symbol- person, keeping him at some distance from hist ory of denied legitimacy, which ism within this story of defiance. Leila’s beloved the reader, yet simultaneously allowing for an has forced their authors to write younger brother, Chia, who becomes a political objective focus on his trauma. (However, one in languages other than their own. martyr, has one that means “mountain.” Their could wonder how a third- person perspective fits Consider the writer and filmmaker father, or Baba, whose badly scarred back is a into what is essentially a first- person account.) TKae Bahar, who survived torture as a teenager canvas of torture, imprisonment, and hunger Chia’s diaries and notes are incorporated dra- and an attempt on his life by ISIS. After fleeing for justice, is Alan Saman, a name that in Arabic matically into his section, but it is Leila who to England, he published Letters from a Kurd in denotes a folkloric flag-b earer. Their mother’s emerges as the ultimate storyteller, and through 2015. Set in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the account name, Hana, means “hope, flower, happiness,” her the author clarifies her intent. (regarded by many as the first Kurdish novel contradicting her volatile narcissism and domes- The Canadian part makes up the final fifth in English) follows a young boy struggling tic displeasure. Leila’s best friend, Shiler (“lily”), of the book and feels tightly pressurized. Leila, with his non-t raditional gender identity — in and her mother, Joanna (“beautiful”), are both by then in her mid- twenties, realizes that her a country of brutal sexual repression. He finds ill- fated — especially Shiler after she joins the new home has its own reprehensible record of escape through foreign films and by compos- peshmerga in the mountains. And the handsome racism and injustice: “Neither of the countries ing imaginary letters to his hero, the actor Clint young man who eventually becomes Leila’s was mine. One had crucified my brother and Eastwood. Bahar’s text serves as a meaning- saviour is Karo, which means “strong”— an threatened to kill me. One had killed its own ful introduction to Ava Homa’s own debut, epithet he earns after redeeming himself for his natives at one point and I wasn’t sure it had Daughters of Smoke and Fire, the first novel in unintended role in Chia’s tragic fate. a place for the likes of me.” Nevertheless, she English by a female Kurdish writer. The book spans Leila’s childhood, adoles- makes an assiduous attempt to learn English, Unlike the much older Bahar, Homa was born cence, and early adulthood, building from the and she matures sexually, listening to her body in Iran. But like him, she writes in yearn for Karo; but her frustrations exile and in a foreign tongue. Homa, with the language, her disapproving who now divides her time between “Bearing fiery witness to mother-i n-law, and the ghosts of her Toronto and San Francisco, previ- past are expressed naively. As Leila ously published short fiction, includ- the lives and struggles learns the facts of Karo’s accidental ing “Lullaby,” a tale about the young role in her brother’s capture and his Kurdish activist Farzad Kamangar. of a stateless nation.” sincere efforts to honour Chia’s mem- After imprisonment and torture failed ory, her doubts fall away and the two to crush his inner life (he turned his marry — properly this time. Homa suffering into rhapsodic poetry), Kamangar persecution and atrocities she meets with in rushes through Leila’s university studies in order was executed. Nevertheless, his words shook Iran to her daring attempts to find and free to solidify her role as a political activist. She the foundations of a theocracy that continues her imprisoned brother and the subsequent eventually becomes a celebrated filmmaker who to feed on division, fear, and despair. With threats to her own safety. Half Kurdish, Karo documents Kurdish suffering. Daughters of Smoke and Fire, Homa has again only gradually emerges as a hero when he Throughout, Homa’s focus remains fixed used his story and his trials to fuel her writing’s engineers Leila’s escape to Canada, first by on Iran. The ending is shaped with dark meta- incendiary power. means of a sham marriage, to get her past the phors — life as landfill waste or compost — but ◆ Iranian authorities, and then by arranging her it ultimately points to optimism as Leila, preg- HOMA’S NOVEL BEARS FIERY WITNESS TO THE LIVES refuge with his wealthy mother in Toronto. nant with her first child, anticipates a future and struggles of a stateless nation. In the pro- Over these tension- filled sequences, the story of “blithe abundance.” Her parents, who had logue, a woman is alone on a mountain at dusk, deepens as an exploration of freedom, identity, shown her very little understanding or accept- with an invisible boot pressed against her throat. and finally love. ance before their own exile to Canada, relish This imagined suffocation conforms with her While the narrative unfolds with genuine the spectacular success of Warrior Butterflies, sense of a “stifled future,” as she bemoans “the force and suspenseful momentum, Homa’s Leila’s film about three female Kurdish freedom daily cruelties of living as a woman in La’nat characterizations can stray into clichéd or fighters. The epilogue shows her parents watch- Awa, the damned place.” Her name is Leila, strained metaphors. Red poppies are described ing a televised broadcast of the film, the bitter and the “damned place” is the Kurdish region as dancing in the breeze; there is “a garden of tumult of their past conflicts put aside. A single of Iran. It is a setting where, by law, a man’s life anguish”; the past is compared to “a colony of tear streaks down Baba’s face as he composes is worth twice as much as a woman’s; where mosquitoes.” When she focuses on particulars an email with the subject line “My daughter.” the government, through its official policy of of Kurdish affliction, Homa is on firm ground, Such sentimentality threatens to turn the story “Enjoining Good and Forbidding Vice,” encour- but when she attempts to raise the dramatic into a stereotypical weepie, dulling the sharp ages children to inform on adults who don’t pitch of her plot, she is guilty of exaggeration, edges of a narrative about hard-e arned iden- comply with religious or political edicts; where even melodrama, as when Leila admits that “an tity. Yet the book survives its flaws. Daughters relatives must pay a bullet fee to retrieve the overpowering urge to scream my story, to expel of Smoke and Fire is a groundbreaking work of corpse of an executed family member; where, it from beginning to end, seized me. Suddenly “ warrior” witness.

36 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA LITERATURE

Home Is Lagos Francesca Ekwuyasi’s debut novel Brett Josef Grubisic

Butter Honey Pig Bread der about her mental well-b eing — the reason each of the women faces dilemmas and heart- Francesca Ekwuyasi why her “untethered” daughters have come ache, giddy love and bouts of despair. Taiye sees Arsenal Pulp Press home — Ekwuyasi sets up Kambirinachi’s story herself as promiscuous, believing that she has 368 pages, softcover through a poetic rendering of a west African trad- had too many lovers: “She found herself too itional belief. The half-page prologue launches a lustful, too gluttonous. She desired too much.” motif that plays out until the novel’s final chap- Her sister is “engulfed in a pitch-black hol- S YOU MIGHT EXPECT FROM ITS ter: “We are Kin here, in the in- between place lowness” following a violent sexual experience title, Butter Honey Pig Bread fea- where we live. We are one being, eternal, moving during her adolescence. Kehinde pines for invisi- tures a banquet of food. There’s in rotation to the flesh realm only because we bility and nurses “festering feelings” about her baked mackerel (burned due to must. As sure as the tides, as the sunrise, bound seemingly untouched sister —“my quiet partner, an absent mind), fresh guava to the rhythm of its particular realm.” closer than my shadow”— who didn’t come to A(nibbled on until the “knobby, slimy ball” is “all The disembodied “we,” who call themselves her aid. Their mother struggles between fealty to sucked clean”), and a lovingly prepared triple- gbanjes, circulate as voices in Kambirinachi’s this world and an adjacent one. layer cake intended to mend a long absence with head and act as narrators of her tale. “We sing Alongside these three distinctive characters, chocolate and caramel. There’s even a cat named reminders to the ‘I’s,” they state, referring to those Ekwuyasi has created a whole set of cinematic Coca- Cola. Across the novel’s four sections, circumstances for them to move through. meals are shared, summoned from memory, or Nightclubs, culinary school, spiritual awak- missed, and recipes are recounted step by step. enings, pregnancy, marriage, affairs, benders, Francesca Ekwuyasi’s appealingly rich debut jobs, and new cities, experiences, and friends celebrates the comforts and rituals of dishes, are all rendered in fine detail. There’s setting especially as they recall the tastes of home. and plot by the yard, but the book does not Home is Lagos — a hugely populous metrop- feel lengthy or bulky; the story’s pace is con- olis about which the characters harbour differ- sistent and balanced. Each character is equally ent shades of ambivalence or a desire to escape. important to the narrative, and the amount of Though she now lives in Halifax, Ekwuyasi material devoted to their perspectives meets the gives readers an immersive experience of the Goldilocks criterion: just right. city of her birth: a “voracious beast,” both ugly Butter Honey Pig Bread looks past food alone and beautiful. Taiye and Kehinde, estranged to assert the primacy of appetite. Across the vari- twins, return from their separate globet rotting ous generations, we encounter a small village’s lives — shifting between Paris, London, Halifax, worth of questioning, journeying characters. and Montreal — to take care of their ailing Often they are in search of immediate meta- mother, Kambirinachi. What follows is a long- morphosis, to find something alchemical. For delayed and much- feared reunion as each the protagonists, it’s a wish to elevate the every- attempts to make fragile peace with difficult day — through some magical combination of events from the past. ingredients — so that it isn’t quite so onerous. ◆ Whether drawing attention to the consump- BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD, WHICH WAS LONG- tion of alcohol and drugs (in an intentional listed for the 2020 Giller Prize, provides a com- overdose, in one instance) or pointing to a vivid plex and touching story of family and of the memory of a man’s “tobacco- stained teeth,” persistent regrets that fracture its bonds. Taiye, a Ekwuyasi consistently highlights a desire for queer woman whose desire, the “swell of want” transcendence. Primarily, it’s a carnal vision, a in her lower belly, threatens to control her, is pleasant if warily hedonistic one whose dual- already home by the time the novel opens. As Sharing the comforts and rituals of home. ism — life as difficulty and pain, substances she waits for her sister to arrive, she disguises her (narcotics, warm bodies, a spicy meat stew) as apprehension with the preparation of an elabor- (such as the twins’ mother) who have left the in- short-term relief — is as old as time. ate feast. While Taiye is the cook of the family, between place in order to taste the “unbearable Doors to the next world open as Butter Honey Kehinde is an artist. Juxtaposed against her twin misery of being in this alive body indefinitely.” Pig Bread closes. The composite dishes come sister, Kehinde appears more conventional, gbanjes are spirits who bring misfortune to together and old pains are cast aside; never- more insecure: “I’d hated my body for a long families when they die as children, only to be theless, the future isn’t entirely set. Ultimately, time, hated all the ways I felt it had betrayed reborn again in an endless cycle. Kambirinachi as mother and daughters are spread between me.” She is the “I” voice of the narrative — which chooses instead to stay. The “episodes” she Abeokuta, in southwest Nigeria, Lagos, and is divided among the three women in rotating experiences — are they madness or magic? — are Tangier, they are separate yet in a kind of com- chapters. Until now, she has built a careful, man- a constant burden as she fears the fallout of her munion. Their paths and their choices are their aged existence a hemisphere away, reserving only decision. Her daughters regard their flighty, deli- own, but Ekwuyasi gifts them a commonality of a small space for her mother and sister. Kehinde cate mother with a mix of bewilderment and experience that holds each in the others’ hearts. E

Z makes the journey from Montreal to Lagos with concern: “She is a vast garden of water-h ungry For a thoughtful novel about wandering and D I

R her husband, Farouq, whom neither Taiye nor flowers in a land of perpetual drought.” questioning, this alone-b ut-t ogether status has A Z

E their mother has met. From Kambirinachi’s troubled childhood in the feel of a satisfying happy ending. The book L

O Kambirinachi is categorically more com- rural Nigeria to the twins’ years of school, work, is a hearty, far- ranging reminder about “the sub- C I

N plicated. Before we have a chance to won- and relationships across Europe and Canada, stance, the very matter, of life.”

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 37 BACKSTORY

Metaphor Surrendered

N ONE WAY, I HAVE BEEN WRITING MY Either way, the answer was obvious to me: memoir since I was fifteen, when I was no. Maybe I just needed to write the truth, then. diagnosed with a novel variant of an My memory of the later part of my treatment, extremely rare leukemia, called natural everything that followed the fourth round of killer, which had no known survivors. chemo, is fuzzy, if not gone. After the fifth IWhen I returned to high school after missing the round, I got very sick — sicker than I’d been up end of grade 9 and the beginning of grade 10, I to that point. My body was a machine, simply enrolled in a writing class. All of my ideas were being told what to do: kill the cancer by kill- metaphors for the fight between life and death ing everything that grows. So while my four- that I felt still playing out within my body, my month-old son napped in his stroller beside bloodstream. me, I went back through my hospital records, all With everything that I wrote over the years the thousands of pages of digitized handwritten about my experience, directly or indirectly, I was files stored on computers in the basement of haunted by the feeling that the subject matter Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. was too narrow, too navel-gazing. Friends and I went over the doctors’ and nurses’ notes to family who read these early attempts tried to fill in the gaps. It felt like reading a suspense convince me otherwise. novel where I wasn’t sure what would happen “Are you sure it’s bigger than itself?” I would to the main character. I hoped she would live. ask them. “Significant worsening of pulmonary picture “Yes,” everyone urged. “Yes.” in face of continued poor clinical picture,” my I didn’t believe them. medical record read on October 22. And the next But when I became pregnant, unexpectedly, day: “Clinical deterioration overnight. Infectious having been told that conception after my treat- Disease team to examine: pt is clinically worse.” ment would be unlikely if not impossible, I had Nurse note: “Parents v. anxious. Many services a strong sense of the protagonist in the story of in to see pt.” And on October 24, nurse note: my life shifting. I was becoming the witness as “Harriet nervous + scared.” well as the narrator. The book could be about Just as I did while I was a patient, I had to rely this becoming: the transition from sickness to on my parents and doctors to write this memoir. health, from girl to woman, from woman to Their recollections are woven throughout the mother. As a mother-to-be, I suddenly felt a narrative, adding a chorus of voices that I hope greater empathy for my parents, for what they make my book “bigger than itself.” For it’s really would have gone through with their only child the story of a community. on the edge of death for nine months, or ten My parents had kept a journal to document years (until the chance of relapse is gone), or the many days we spent in the hospital, but also her whole life — however you choose to see it. to put the situation into their own words. My Within the pages of Natural Killer lies the story initial decision to write my experience as fiction of how another work almost came to be. I had was an attempt to take power over it, too. Does first tried to write a novel about my experience that make this non-fiction account a surrender? in which the protagonist died. She died because Making my book felt at turns like being a I was supposed to die, because people die, composer, an archivist, a curator, a psycho- children die — that’s life. But it didn’t feel right. therapist. I had never thought of the process of I poured years into that draft, and it never came writing as cathartic, but as soon as I finished, I together. Then one friend asked a question that found I could stop telling myself what had hap- nobody else had: “Did you want to die?” pened. And that was an incredible release. I sur- Or maybe she said it like this: “Did you want rendered metaphor and just wrote the truth. I let to die?” go of the story and gave it to you.

Harriet Alida Lye is the author of Natural Killer: A Memoir.

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