The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

The colony of the title is Newfoundland, which from the early 1600s to as recently as 1948 was a British colony. Then at a referendum its sturdily independent inhabitants had the choice between outright independence or confederation with Canada. They chose the latter, by a whisker, and the man who led them in that decision was Joe Smallwood, the subject of this book. Although there is a lot of history here, this is emphatically a novel, richly imagined and enormously entertaining. Joe Smallwood has a tumultuous life: raised by a drunken, larger-than-life father, (who likes to cry out that Newfoundland should have been called Old Lost Land), everything seems to go wrong for Joe, from being wrongfully expelled from school to a succession of disastrous career moves, and plenty of sheer bad luck. "Up to the age of forty-six," he wryly observes, "I would have been voted by those who knew me to be the man last likely to warrant a biography". Yet this is a biography of sorts, by turns funny, moving, satirical and mysterious. It also beautifully evokes the harsh landscape of the colony itself, "the Elba of the North Atlantic". There's no doubt about it: Wayne Johnston is up there with Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, and E. Annie Proulx. Another testament to the extraordinary strength of the modern Canadian novel. --Christopher Hart


Genre: Literary Fiction