Category: Reviews

Nothing like a good story – especially one set in Ottawa, where you can recognize the people and the places if you live here too.

Terry Fallis creates some memorable characters in “The Best Laid Plans”: the crusty Scots engineering professor who never planned to get into politics; the ragtail set of students who helped get him in, and what happened when he got there.

The book is a satire on Canadian politics, especially the current Ottawa version which is sometimes funny enough all by itself. Terry Fallis runs a public relations agency in Toronto, but writes with an intimate knowledge of a small eastern suburb of Ottawa, as well as downtown and up on Parliament Hill. The satire covers all aspects of life in the hallowed halls of Parliament including some unexpected after-hours drama.

The publication of the book is a story in itself. Fallis got tired of trying to find a publisher, and so recorded a reading of his novel and brought it out chapter by chapter as a podcast. He then published the book on his own. After that it won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. It is indeed very clever, very well written and very funny. “Brisk and humorous”, says the Ottawa Citizen.

Review by Anne McDougall

For anyone who knows the detective Maisie Dobbs, The Mapping of Love and Death will be a welcome addition to the highly successful detective series. For newcomers, the London investigator comes as a real treat to read.

Set in the U.K. between the wars, i.e. l932 to begin, the story follows the murder of a young American map-maker who left the U.S. in l9l4 to join up and fight for the country his father had come from, England. Jacqueline Winspear is an English writer who has lived for a long time in California. The result is that she has very keen feelings for both countries. From the sunny warmth of her new home, she writes vividly of the wet smog of London on winter afternoons, and the endless cups of tea and scones in everyone’s homes.

Maisie herself is a bright young woman who once worked as a maid on a large estate before she was trained to be a public investigator. She has a natural charm that enables her to slip between the class barriers and get the information she seeks.

The narrative is ingenious and sometimes horrifying in its ramifications but written in a low-key British way that takes you very close to the families concerned and makes for a page-turning read. This is the seventh book in this series that Winspear has produced, many of them winning prizes.

Review by Anne McDougall

Ensign Marc Edwards of England had hardly taken up his post at the garrison of tiny Fort York in Toronto when he gets a call from the Governor, Sir John Colborne, to investigate a murder in the hamlet of Crawford Creek, near Cobourg.

Sporting his flaming red coat, Edwards sets off for what becomes a hectic week in the farming suburbs. The time is l836. While Edwards was expecting a dull time in the colonial backwater, what he finds is a population chafing under British rule, angry at the Family Compact in Toronto, upset by the Clergy Reserves, sympathetic to the Reform Party, as well as fighting off American immigrants who are trying to introduce republicanism into Canada, and a powerful smuggling ring which may or may not have been responsible for the murder.

The Canadian author, Don Gutteridge, taught English at the University of Western Ontario. He has also done a great deal of research on this period of Canadian history before he started up the Marc Edwards mystery series. The second book is called “Solemn Vows”. What we get in “Turncoat” is the spirit of the period and the political tensions that led to the Upper Canada Rebellion of l837. There is a thrilling episode when young Edwards rescues William Lyon Mackenzie from an angry town hall meeting. The book is very well-written and its fast pace gives a fascinating picture of early Canadian history.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is really the story of two men – both “operators” in their own way.

Set in England, it follows the career of a businessman from a privileged class who has risen to the position of greeter for an investment firm. After time in the army, as well as working for Security Offices, he uses his connections to get to the top of his position in a world where everyone seems to have money to invest.

Alongside this success story runs the life of a much lower entrepreneur, called Charlie Summers. Whether in London, or in small English towns, every enterprise he undertakes, with such high hopes, seems to capsize beneath him, leaving him more and more destitute as the book goes on. The story throws these two men together over a series of coincidences, starting in the south of France and continuing in England.

As things turn out, and as we have been watching in the financial news these last years, the investment world rather suddenly turns upside down, leaving the wealthy greeter not only out on the street, but in a difficult position facing AlQaeda representatives who abruptly reveal their true colours. In a startling ending, Charlie Summers once again turns up. This time, as the “Financial Times” writes, he attains “real pathos at the end of this affecting, skilfully crafted novel”.

Paul Torday made his mark on the literary scene with his first novel, “Salmon Fishing on the Yemen” in 2006. This is his fourth novel and shows the same fine writing and deft and likeable comedy.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is the very exciting story of a wife who joined her husband on harrowing adventures at sea during the last days of the Age of Sail off Canada’s Atlantic coast.

This was the l860’s. Azuba Bradstock had married Nathaniel and presumed she would stay with him when he took the next cargo abroad. He refused to take her with him, and she spent months in Whelan’s Cove overlooking the Bay of Fundy, looking after her young daughter and hating the life of captains’ wives left at home. The next trip she and young Carrie joined the ship.

The writing and descriptions of their adventures is breath-taking. These trips covered the whole map: over to England, with gala days in London, then down to South America with excruciating days in The Doldrums, food running low, wild storms that almost prevented their rounding Cape Horn and a mutiny en route to San Francisco. By the time they got home, Azuba accepted her husband’s views, and skipped the next trip. She would make one more voyage, complete with a new baby and nurse-maid and this time she stepped in to save her husband’s life when pirates boarded their ship and beat up the crew.

This book goes way back before “women’s lib” but it does raise, in a tumultuous way, a woman’s place in a world where the husband has to make wrenching decisions in the face of an ever-demanding sea. Beth Powning lives in New Brunswick and writes brilliantly about this world. She has written four earlier books.

Review by Anne McDougall

John Ralston Saul believes the government of LaFontaine and Baldwin laid the foundations of Canada at its best.

In this book from the Extraordinary Canadians series, Ralston Saul shows how these two leaders of Lower and Upper Canada respectively worked together to give us the democratic federation we have today. The dates of their success were l848-l85l – not l867 as we are accustomed to celebrate. What they achieved did not reach most Western countries until about a century later. Ralston Saul describes the struggle both Lafontaine and Baldwin faced as power in the new land of Canada gradually passed from the old elites of Whig and Tory to a new Reform party that would give the citizens Responsible Government, free from a governor of the British Empire. It made Canada the first Responsible Government in any colony in imperial history.

Lafontaine and Baldwin were each distinguished leaders in their parts of Canada. They had witnessed the failures of the l837 uprisings, and each had decided on restraint as the only possible way of getting together. The added element was the genuine liking and respect they had for each other and this is a very charming part of the book.

In l840 LaFontaine addressed the electors of Terrebonne saying “no privileged caste beyond and above the mass of the people can exist in Canada.” Baldwin replied: “Reformers of Upper Canada are resolved to unite with their Lower Canadian brethren cordially as friends.”

The book is written clearly and well and explains why Ralston Saul’s thirteen works have been translated into twenty-two languages in thirty countries. It also gives a clear, succinct picture of part of our history that a lot of us wish we had been taught at school !

Review by Anne McDougall

It’s a brand new way to see Europe – travelling by elephant.

The renowned novelist, Jose Saramago, has written an enchanting story about a true journey, taken in l55l. King Joao lll of Portugal wanted to give a special wedding present to his cousin , Maximilian, Archduke of Austria. He had an elephant and his keeper in his possession and felt it would be an appropriate gift. How to get it to him?

Behind a commanding officer, a convoy of soldiers and labourers, with an oxcart to carry water and forage set out with the elephant and keeper, or mahout, by foot to go from Lisbon to the city of Valladolid in Spain. Here they were met by the archduke and his new wife and continued, to much consternation and celebration along the way, as well as threats from wolves in the surrounding hills. The elephant, called Solomon, has his name changed to Suleiman, and the keeper, called Subhro, becomes Fritz. Originally from India, the keeper has interesting exchanges with his Christian travelers about the Hindu religion which has an elephant head for one of its gods, Ganesh.

The caravan crosses the Mediterranean by ship with no trouble to Italy and then makes its way north through the cities of Genoa, Placenza, Verona, Venice and Trent. Along the way the elephant learns to kneel before authority; at one point he inadvertently kicks a priest. They make a triumphant entry into Vienna. Saramago fills the story with warmth and humour. It’s a gentle, magical tale for Christmas.

Review by Anne McDougall

Barbara Fradkin is a Montrealer who has lived in Ottawa for the past several years and knows both cities well. It gives her Inspector Green series a special flavour. You really feel you are hopping off a bus in Westboro, or driving up Cote des Neiges to a corner of the cemetery on Mt. Royal.

“Beautiful lie the Dead” covers both cities. The plot is intricate but convincing. The families include a leading McGill law professor known as much for his extra-marital affairs as his brilliant lectures. In Ottawa ,a prominent surgeon is two weeks away from his upcoming marriage when an old scandal out of Montreal completely disrupts his plans.

The unflustered Ottawa Police Inspector MIchael Green is well-known to readers of Fradkin’s seven novels before this one. Here, his calm judgment is put to the test by the constant trips and calls back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal. It makes for a highly readable book and keeps Fradkin on the list of active members of Canada’s crime-writing community.

She lives in Ottawa and works as a child psychologist, a profession offering plenty of scope for her writing. Her mysteries have been called “insightful writing that stirs up questions and emotional responses – and the satisfaction felt from a good book”. (The Hamilton Spectator).

Review by Anne McDougall

You don’t connect racial tension with the shores of Lake Erie, in rural southern Ontario. But Jane Urquhart’s new novel tells of unexpected violent trauma on these beautiful shores that colours the lives of the fifth and sixth generations who live there.

The heroine of her story, Liz Crane, is an entomologist whose job is to study the complex routes of the Monarch butterfly as it leaves Sanctuary Research station for points south, and back again. The job gives Crane a chance to leave Toronto and live in the old farm-house she has known all her life as a summer visitor. With the familiar enviroment come back to her memories of her own growing-up days. She remembers the tempestuous, charismatic Uncle Stanley whose disappearance has never been explained. She looks back to the days when the farm lands planted strawberries, cherries, peaches, pears, tomatoes, apples in a strict rhythm of ripening, which was then gradually brought down to orchards only. She recalls the crumbling bunk-houses that used to house the Mexican workers flown up each year. She is on her own in the old farmhouse, with her mother not far away in a suitably named retirement home, The Golden Field. It makes the memories all the more vivid.

Urquhart writes skilfully and moodily about the Butler family’s long-ago life in poverty-stricken Kerry, Ireland and their move to the new world. We are drawn in totally to all generations, one of the latest dramas being the death in Afghanistan of Liz’ close cousin, Mandy.

Jane Urquart is a well-known Canadian writer with a long list of prizes to her name. This is her seventh novel. She was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and now lives in Northumberland County, Ontario, and sometimes Ireland.

Review by Anne McDougall

There have been many books about Nelson Mandela, the South African hero, since his famous walk to freedom and his role in ending apartheid. This one shows another side of the famous man – a man devoid of self-pity and immune to the temptations of self-aggrandisement.

It is compiled from snippets of Mandela’s life, bits of his diary, calendars and letters he saved. Much of the material came from the hours of recordings by Richard Stengel who helped Mandela write his autobiogaphy “Long Walk to Freedom”. It also contains passages from a book Mandela was working on himself. There is a Foreword by President Barack Obama.

Mandela hoarded his notes and letters. Many written in prison make very touching reading, e.g. his request to attend his mother’s funeral, which was turned down, as was his request to go to his eldest son’s funeral after a car accident. But the book gives an upclose look at the prisoners’ feelings. The overthrow of apartheid was a distant dream, yet still one worth fighting for. Prisoner 466/64 could have been freed decades earlier if he had agreed to live in a black “homeland”, but he refused.

It is a very personal account of a very special man. In his last paragraph he writes: ” One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image that I unwittingly projected to the outside world: of being regarded as a saint. I never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

Review by Anne McDougall