I read and
enjoyed Kathleen Winter’s debut novel, Annabel,
so I was excited to read her second novel.
In
present-day Montreal, Jimmy, a young man who bears a striking resemblance to
General James Wolfe, visits the city for 11 days. General Wolfe died September 13, 1759, on the
Plains of Abraham in a pivotal battle in Canadian history, but Jimmy seems to
have Wolfe’s memories. In 1752, Wolfe
lost an 11-day leave in Paris because of the switch from the Julian to the
Gregorian calendar; now Jimmy takes that leave in Montreal.
The
mystery, of course, is who Jimmy is.
Surely he can’t be who he claims to be, and there are hints and clues
that suggest Jimmy is very much a contemporary man. Wolfe fought battles at Culloden and
Dettingen, but he wouldn’t have been in Ghundy Ghar which Jimmy mentions in the
first few pages. The best description of
Jimmy is as a figure on a Tarot card: “The
man does not appear to know where to go or how to move beyond loss.” At the beginning, Jimmy speaks of his
“waiting for the crater that might jolt me properly into being in the present
instead of floating in the past.” It is difficult to believe that Jimmy is Wolfe,
but it becomes clear that he is certainly a veteran damaged by his experiences
in war; he describes himself as having “no shield against reliving war in
Technicolor, all night, every day.”
Obviously,
the book focuses on the futility of war.
If a soldier were able, in the future, to return to the battlefield on
which he died, would he find that his sacrifice had been worthwhile? Wolfe won Canada for England and had believed
“there would grow a people here, out of our own little spot in England, to fill
this space and become a vast Empire, the seat of power and learning,” but Jimmy,
during a visit to Costco, concludes, “It is as if England has had a nightmare
in which the Empire’s crowning achievement has been to inflate the size of material
goods.” Wolfe hoped “boys who became
soldiers with me . . . I really thought the New World was supposed to give them
a chance at a parcel of ground” but Jimmy finds only “the old, weary bondage”
because “the poor toil here unexalted as ever.
As for the well-provided, their banal crowing echoes the clang of
trussell on planchet under every New World moment: a relentless strike of metal
into coin.” Jimmy concludes that it is “ludicrous
to call the land owned, conquered, taken by one small group of men who do not
even plan to stay on it.”
The time
and place of a war is unimportant: “I
have surveyed moor . . . desert . . . does the terrain’s name matter? Land outspans army and king. It outlives us, and will outbreathe us. Does the year of any given campaign –
Dettingen, Culloden, Quebec, Ghundy Ghar – do its dates mean a thing? I dig up human bones everywhere – no matter
where we fight a war, that land holds bones in it from previous warriors.” And history has not had a paucity of
battlefields: “’There have been a lot of
enemies in a few well-chosen hellholes.’”
The suggestion is that war and soldiers have always been with us and
always will be: “All warriors descend
from a single, ancient Council of War forged at the dawn of manhood.” It is easy to draw men into war: “How little deception is needed when men
believe so fervently in bits of bright cloth.”
And the result is always the same:
broken men.
There is
some commentary about contemporary life in la
belle province. Jimmy is aghast at
how little English he encounters since Wolfe won the country for England in
1759. In Quebec City, Jimmy sees the
monument shared by Montcalm and Wolfe and makes a telling observation: “It came to me then, that every monument,
every object in the plains museum, every rose and bleeding heart nodding its
head in the Joan of Arc garden bejewelling the Plains of Abraham, every citizen
and every ship and bird and fish in and on the river, attest to the continued life
in Quebec of the people of Wolfe and Montcalm, standing on the same ground but,
like the names on the plinth overlooking the river, never seeing each other.”
I knew
little about General James Wolfe other than what I was taught in high school Canadian
history classes so many years ago. It is
obvious that Kathleen Winter did considerable research. I advise readers to do some reading about the
man before reading the book; even the Wikipedia article would be helpful in
explaining some of the references. Look
at Benjamin West’s painting entitled “The Death of General Wolfe” (https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/-/MQGJPSKUj9ySHg?hl=en)
to appreciate Jimmy’s comment: “a
literary person called Margaret Atwood claimed West made me appear like a dead,
white codfish, and I had to agree.”
At first I
struggled with the book. It is sometimes
difficult to know what is real and what isn’t.
Jimmy is the narrator and his thoughts wander so a reader may find
him/herself confused at times. After
finishing the novel, I went back to the beginning and did a quick second
reading. This book is the type that
needs a re-reading to highlight Winter’s accomplishment. Images and symbols clarify themselves. The book
is not perfect because it does drag at times and some of the events are
predictable, but it has much to recommend it:
the protagonist, the setting, and the themes are all
well-developed.
Note: I received an eARC of this book from the
publisher via NetGalley.
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