It is well written, of that there is no doubt. But I don't like it. I swing between boredom, disinterest (it's really a history but warped), and anger. Why does Johnston focus so much on Smallwood's relationship with Fielding, who, I assume, is a totally made up character? A fictional biography, although fictional, should have some truth in it, shouldn't it? What about Clara, Smallwood's wife? And why does he write of a fictional character so interwoven with Smallwood's life that could not have existed, that mocks him and whatever he did? I expected an afterward, an explanation from the author and I was disappointed that it was not included. This does not mean I won't read him again.For more info about Newfoundland history: http://www.heritage.nf.ca/home.htmlQuotations that remind me of things for my future writing, or that inspire.1. Remembering my youth."...I had had the company of like-minded people for the kind of rare, short time that in your youth you think will never end."2. Giving up on socialism:"Socialism. Better to find a cause, that though perhaps less just, had some hope of succeeding, the nearest thing to socialism that people would accept, than to revel all your life in the righteousness of your defeat."3. The houses with their foundations on stilts. I remember this well. It was quite shocking--the high cliff, the water below, wild."...The houses were perched at staggered altitudes on steeply sloping cliffs, often shored up by stilts where no foundations could be dug."4. Fielding's mockery of Valdmanis and Smallwood. They did go on a trade mission together (I think), but not like this and not with anyone like Fielding who is an imagined character."They are a lively, fun-loving pair who betimes will wile away the hours playing 'pedals,' a Latvian children's game in which two participants lying flat on their backs at opposite ends of a bed, with their hands behind their heads, place the soles of their bare feet together and 'pedal' each other like bicycles, the object of the game being to pedal one's opponent off the bed, though my premier and the Latvian are so evenly matched that neither can budge the other and they pedal themselves into a state of mutual exhaustion, then fall asleep."Constantly struggling with his connection and aversion to the sea, this is beautiful."On such nights, the whole island seemed to me a glorified out-port, so hemmed in that to own a car was pointless, absurd, a mere reminder of your confinement. For the first time in my life, I understood how a man might be attracted to the sea, even prefer it to the land, especially an island. The land was secondary, a temporary elevation of the ocean floor over which the waters would close someday."Good observation. I think about how this is true so often. It seems like things have changed based on a new experience and yet they haven't. As far as road signs go, it is definitely true when you go from one province to another, and especially when you go over the border to the US. It is useful to see how Johnston uses this observation to make a point, to further Smallwood's character. It's just one paragraph but it provides insight."Cape Breton was much like Newfoundland, yet everything seemed slightly off. Lights, colours, surface textures, dimensions--objects like telegraph poles, fence posts, mail boxes, when you would think would be the same everywhere, were bigger or smaller or wider by a hair than they were back home. That I was able to detect such subtle differences made me realize how circumscribed my life had been, how little of the world I had seen."This is stunning, a weaving together of myth and magick, land and sea, and faerie. I love that although the sea is the really danger, they are afraid of the land:"I could out my map to see if I could fix exactly where we were. It struck me more forcefully than it ever had before that virtually the whole population lived on the coast, as if ready to abandon ship at a moment's notice. The shore was nothing but a place to fish from, a place to moor a boat and sleep between days spent on the sea. Of the land, the great tract of possibility that lay between them, beyond their own backyards, over the farthest hill that they could see from the windows of their houses, most Newfoundlanders knew next to nothing. Just as I, who knew nothing about it, feared the sea, though I believed my fear and ignorance to be more justified than theirs. I knew grown men who hurried home from trouting or berry-picking in a panic as the sun was going down, for fear of being caught out after dark and led astray by fairies. My mother had often told me stories of people from Gambo who, fairy-led, were found weeks later at the end of a trail of clothing that in their trance, they had discarded. They had been led in a dance by fairies until they flopped down dead from sheer exhaustion, my mother believed, and no appeal of common sense or any amount of scorn could change her mind. Yet these same fairy-feeble men would go out on the sea at night in the worst weather to rescue a neighbour who boat was going down. Here was all this land and they had not claimed an inch of it as theirs, preferring instead to daily risk their lives, hauling fish up from a sea that never would be theirs, and to kill seals walking on ice that could not, like land, be controlled or tamed."The sea, the endless sea, and the rock, both important images of Newfoundland and Johnston describes them both so beautifully."I had never liked to think of myself as living on an island. I preferred to think of Newfoundland as landlocked in the middle of some otherwise empty continent, for though I had an islander's scorn of the mainland, I could not stand the sea. I was morbidly drawn to read and re-read, as a child, an abridged version of Melville's Moby Dick, a book that, though I kept going back to it, gave me nightmares. Ishmael's notion that the sea had some sort of melancholy-dispelling power mystified me. Whenever it was a damp, drizzly November in my soul, the last thing I wanted to look at was the sea. I was not just drowning in it I was afraid of, but the sight of that vast, endless, life-excluding stretch of water. It reminded me of God, not the God of Miss Garrigus and the Bible, whose threats of eternal damnation I did not believe in, but Melville's God, inscrutable, featureless, indifferent, as unimaginable as an eternity of time or an infinity of space, in comparison with which I was nothing. The sight of some little fishing boat heading out to sea like some void-bound soul made me, literally, seasick."I wonder how much of this imagined story are true. Some facts have to be, while others clearly are not - Fielding for instance, who is written about in another of his books and which I will love to read.I have had partridge berries on pancakes and they were delicious. When I returned from Newfoundland, I searched for them everywhere here, but of course, they weren't to be found, not when we have blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, luscious and plenty. Partridge berries are grown in Newfoundland for a reason."...The hill was carpeted with unripe, red-and-yellow partridge berries. They needed almost no soil, grew on sod that was draped like a ragged carpet over rocks..."Smallwood tells only Fielding about his experience on the sealing ship and the death of so many men in the storm. Fielding offers some philsophy and consolation, in response to his assertion that he didn't know (what happened, what it means, whatever):"'I don't know either,' Fielding said. 'Things happen to you, or you see things, and you change. And soon you can't remember how things were before you changed. That's the strangest part, I think. You know things used to be different, but you can't remember how. I don't think it happens to everyone. Some people stay the same no matter what. Or maybe they just seem to. I don't know.'"The narrator tells of finding the men on the ice floe who are frozen to death. From a distance, they look like they might be alive like the previous group they had found. This is just one of many frozen tableaus."One man knelt, sitting back on his heels, while another stood behind him, his hands on his shoulders, as if they were posing for a photograph."This is delightful and a surprise. I am deliberately choosing not to find out what the books on the CBC 100 Novels list are about. I just want to read them; I want it to be random. So, when I read something so wondrous that I can't imagine it (even though it is long), I am thrilled. This is a fictionalized account of Joey Smallwood's life. I would not have thought it would have been so delightful.Here's an example in the history section at the end of each chapter:"Vaughan, meanwhile, known for his writerly reclusiveness, is nowhere to be found, though it is later discovered that he is writing The Newlander's Cure [1623], a tract of advice for settlers about how to survive the perils of life in Newfoundland, which, though he has never experienced, he, being a writer, is able to imagine so vividly that other people who have been been to Newfoundland find the book convincing and it sells quite well."
The embarrassing admission is that I am American. Why do I say that? Well, there are two answers. The first is that because I am American, I don't think I've ever seen a copy of this book during all my years of working in bookstores. I found it recently and I've heard people talking about it recently, so I thought it was a new book. Guys, this book has been on the planet since the late 90s. It hit bookshelves before I was working in bookstores, and I can say I never saw at the library I worked in prior to that either. I think this is because it is a Canadian book, a Canadian author, a Canadian topic, and we don't have those sorts here in the states. (I jest. Sort of.) It's like it just became popular here for some reason.The second is that because I am American, I know a pathetic amount about Canadian history. Like... zero. We learned about all the states we have united down here, all the people who killed a bunch of other people down here, and we learned that Canada shares the continent with us, but that's all we really have in common: North America. A somewhat shared land, but you still have to sign over your life to cross over to Canadia, and then again on the way back (though the Canadian side is usually nicer than the American side, I will say that). Okay, they say. You can go over there, but just for a bit, don't think about getting too comfortable or we'll come back and getcha!So I read this entire book and even questioned out loud on the internet how much of this story was based on real Newfoundland history. All my GR Canadian friends are probably laughing at me. The whole book is based on real Newfoundland history. The Joe Smallwood character? Like one of the most important people in real life Candian history. Guys, I'm dumb. I'm sorry. I'm American. That's all I can say.The other thing I can say to try to redeem myself is that I loved this book. Absolutely. I can see what Canadia wants to keep Johnston to themselves. He writes with a confidence and a beauty that I'm not sure Americans are prepared for. Well, that might be a bit dramatic, but this is a stunning book. That's my first impression, the one I'm putting down here, the one I'll stand by.The story follows Joe Smallwood through his youngun days and up to his premier days. It's a lengthy book, but it reads so smoothly that you barely even notice. Johnston was artful in how he laid the book out, telling you Smallwood's story through Smallwood's eyes, and then a brief chapter out of the history of Newfoundland, some excerpts from Smallwood's condensed history of Newfoundland, and some from his gal-pal-keep-your-enemies-closer, Fielding's account of the history of Newfoundland. And, my favorite bits, pieces from her journal.So let's talk about Fielding a moment. Sheilagh Fielding is her name, an invented character unlike Smallwood himself. She has a limp, uses a cane, and is unlike most female characters in literature you will ever read. I saw mention somewhere of Fielding being a Dorothy Parker-like character, and I think that is as fair an assessment as any. She is a rough, charming, bewitching character, and I would have been fine if the whole story was hers. Which, I guess, it sort of was. If a movie is made of this, they'll probably get Jennifer Lawrence to play Fielding.But it's also Newfoundland's story. (Says the American.) Newfoundland is on every page of this book which makes me want to pack up and move there right now.I know people will read this and think it was too long, or too meandering, or too something. But it worked for me. All of it worked for me. Don't be turned off by the back cover that calls it a "mystery and a love story". There's a little of each, but it's not at all what you would expect. It's just a really good book. Really. Yes, this is coming from someone who knows jack about Canadian history, so someone with real knowledge might have a different assessment. I somehow doubt it, though. Johnston appears to have done his research. He could have actually lived this life for all I know.What I do know is this won't be the last book by Johnston that I read.
Do You like book The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams (2000)?
The best work of historical fiction I have read in a long time. Based on history - that of Newfoundland's entry into Confederation and the architect of that event - Newfoundland's first premier, Joey Smallwood, this is still very much a work of fiction. I'm not sure how much of the Smallwood we read about is real, but he is certainly an engaging, complex and well developed character. His longtime friend/love/nemesis, Sheilagh Fielding is one of my favorite female characters of all time and I'm so glad to hear that Johnston has written another book about her. Wayne Johnston always writes with wit and his word plays are second to none. I can't believe I liked a book about politics this much.
—Gail Amendt
This title fit the book very well.I enjoyed the characters very much and felt that Fielding was essential to the story. I loved the layers of irony and the demonstrations of things simply stated. Eg. Smallwood said he was not a good father or husband and then throughout the book you realize how little the wife and children play a part its incredibly demonstrative of how poor he is at those roles.One of the highlights of the novel is a series of brief interpolated chapters under the rubric of "Fielding’s Condensed History of Newfoundland" in which Johnston revisits various episodes from the island’s past, deploying his wit to provide an historical context—Newfoundlanders having for centuries been cheated, exploited, or at best ignored by those who have power over them—that helps make sense of Smallwood’s Newfoundland.It was a dense book that read fairly slowly but I definitely enjoyed it and will read more by this Canadian author.
—Shannon
This is a fictionalized biography of famed Newfoundland politician Joey Smallwood's early days from childhood up to his early days as Premier of Newfoundland after his campaign to bring it into Canada in 1949. There are two main characters, Smallwood and Shelagh Fielding, a girl he met in the schoolyard and with whom he had a running on again off again friendship. Although they never had a romantic relationship, he did love her after a fashion and she probably loved him. It's portrayed as a long standing friendship where they were often at odds and on opposite political sides but yet connected on a deeper level. Shelagh Fielding was not based on a real person but her story running through the book via her words, her newspaper columns and her journal make this book a lot more interesting. I felt like she was kind of his conscience, where she was usually right and he was intent on proving her wrong. I leaerned a lot about the early 20th century Newfoundland and it's rocky road to being Canada's 10th province and even if much of Smallwood's life has been fictionalized here, I think the basic facts are true and I didn't know much about him before now.
—Diane
