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Reprinted from Canadian Literature, Spring 1998.

Things As They Were?
Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Englishman’s Boy. McClelland & Stewart.

Reviewed by Julie Beddoes

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s work has been consistently well-received and widely reviewed since his first publication, the short-story collection Man Descending, won the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 1982 as well as a prize in Britain. All three of his novels have been similarly recognized; My Present Age, 1984, was nominated for the Booker Prize; Homesick, 1989, won the City of Toronto Book Award; The Englishman’s Boy won him a second Governor-General’s in 1996. His stories and plays have also won awards and his work is frequently translated and published in Europe. In view of this, it is strange to find that Tony Horava’s recent bibliography (for Essays on Canadian Writing) lists so little that can be considered scholarly analysis. I can only guess that this is because his work has been read as squarely in the tradition of prairie realism; this will probably never lose favour with reviewers and readers though it is understandable that scholars may find that most of what can be said about it has been said already.

There have been exceptions, however, and Constance Rooke, reviewing Homesick, found it “almost an experimental novel in disguise.” The Englishman’s Boy, whether or not it can be called experimental, no longer disguises what may turn out to have been Vanderhaeghe’s project all along. By explicitly discussing the techniques of realism (one character says, “The truth of small things leads to confidence in the truth of large things”), it invites a rereading of his stories about small-town eccentrics and ne’er-do-wells, the ineffective and the marginalized, as discussions of the way Canadian realist writing has both mythologized and conventionalized such characters. They recur, after all, in the work of many Canadian writers, including two as different from each other as from Vanderhaeghe, Timothy Findlay and Alice Munro. This invitation to reassess has already been issued in the title story of Things As They Are?, Vanderhaeghe’s last book but one, in which a blocked writer’s obsession with Chekhov’s ability “to see clearly” and accept “things as they are” prevents him from understanding the story of a tragically deluded young man he befriends. Read in this way, Vanderhaeghe’s books become an anatomy of Canadian fiction: a metafictional examination of the way the stories told in our fiction have become part of our national myth. This latest novel adds the adjective “historiographic” to my preceding sentence.

First of all, The Englishman’s Boy is a hugely entertaining page-turner; its layers of narrative are both so absorbing and so skilfully intertwined that the transition from one to the other is always a shock but a shock that dramatizes rather than distracts. I will give away as little of the plot as possible so as not to diminish the pleasure of a first reading.

In fact, the book has three narratives. Its present is 1953 in Saskatoon whence the elderly narrator recalls his short career in Hollywood in 1923, and it is this earlier story which is told in present tense, an often used realist “reality effect.” Interwoven is a third-person story of the Wild West in 1873 told from the point of view of the Englishmans’ boy. I guessed the connection between the two embedded stories early in the book but that did not reduce the dramatic tensions of following them to their point of intersection. Only on a second reading did the parallels and resemblances between the stories of the two young men in situations they couldn’t handle come to seem a little obvious.

The Saskatonian narrator runs a movie theatre. He tells the story of how the myth of the Wild West was being created and of his part in trying to erect a “truthful” counter-narrative. He is commissioned to track down and write the story of an old movie-house-extra cowboy supposed to have an adventurous past. It turns out that the cowboy took part in the events that led to the infamous Cypress Hills Massacre that in turn led to the establishing of the North West Mounted Police, a story from Canada’s legendary west. Critics will argue whether the book as a whole endorses the notion that such “true stories” exist independently of the stories we tell about them; its many reminders of the fascist use of bogus mythologized history suggest that it does. On the other hand, merely to raise the issue threatens the realist position and, furthermore, the book is constructed on a frame of ironies which suggests there is danger in such comforts. The “true story in one of its two main plot lines is to be reduced to the scenario of an epic silent western movie, to be the American Odyssey to D.W. Griffith’s Iliad, The Birth of a Nation. But the climactic event of this founding myth takes place in Canada and is usually written as Canadian history; several of its characters are Canadian and so is the young man hired to write it. The interwoven stories ironise Hollywood’s nationalistic appropriation of the boy’s story by reminding us of the arbitrariness of “The Medicine Line” and the common complicity, contrary to Canadian myth, in acts of savagery against indigenous people on both sides of the border. So when the screen writer, appalled by the bloody consequences of his meddling with the boderlines of myth and truth, goes back home to a comfortable Canadian marginality, it is hard to say whether he is washing his hands or sticking to his guns. Saskatoon may be less mythologized than Hollywood but our hero spends his life there in a movie theatre.

Earlier Vanderhaeghe writing has often seemed overloaded with detail, an overdone “effet du réel.” In this novel, however, the abundance of movie trivia (I don’t know how much is invented, how much historical, which is probably the point) reminds us that Hollywood history is just as much a part of popular myth as the Wild West; it also reminds Canadian readers, as do several recent novels which retell stories of the Canadian West, how much more likely we are to know Hollywood’s version of history than the home-grown version. Perhaps the book’s references to the rise of Mussolini in one of its story-lines and the power of Joe McCarthy in another are its statement that the issue is not that of truth versus myth but of the political necessity both of recognizing myth for what it is and of valuing the homegrown variety.

This novel avoids the weaknesses of Vanderhaeghe’s earlier writing, the excessive detail, the occasional crossing of the line between the moving and the sentimental; it develops its strengths, especially in structure and pace with a concern for integrity, and, with its more adventurous subject matter and more engaging characters (especially for a female reader) brings new stature to its writer.

read a passage from The Englishman’s Boy
read an interview taken in 1998
return to Guy Vanderhaeghe