Books On Beechwood

This novel is indeed an unlikely story of how to resolve human relationships. But it is original and highly entertaining.
The reader follows Harold Fry closely from the moment he sets out to walk from his house in Kingsbridge in the southern tip of England on the English Channel, to a hospice in the very north of England in Berwick-upon-Tweed at the Scottish border.
For one thing, Harold Fry is a loveable character – unsure of almost everything he ever did, except falling in love with his wife and then, at this point in time, deciding to make this walk. There are family tragedies that became more than he could live with. When an old friend from work wrote from the hospice, he was struck by the idea that walking to see her would keep her alive. It did more than that. His wife came back from her own private hell of misery and drove up to see him. Many hundreds of people along the way heard of his walk, and came out to confess their own stories and in fact join in the pilgrimage. It remains Harold’s private story, however, and Rachel Joyce does a brilliant job of making it believable.
Joyce has spent twenty years in an acting career as well as writing award-winning plays for the BBC Radio 4. She lives on a farm in Gloucestershire with her husband and four children and is now working on her second novel.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a rather grim historical novel, very well written by the Nobel prize winner, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

It tells the story of Roger Casement, a member of the British diplomatic corps, who spent his life revealing and trying to improve the desperate plight of oppressed peoples in countries such as the Congo and the Amazon. Born in Ireland in l864, in a Dublin suburb, he spent a number of years in Africa before being asked to report on the rubber plantations. Here he discovered the abuse and torture suffered by the Africans as they were forced to gather rubber for the big Belgian company.

His second assignment was to examine another big rubber company, this time in Amazonia and run by the British. If anything the conditions were worse. As he reported on these things, Casement often thought of his own country, Ireland, and what he considered the oppresssion of the British. It was the middle of the First World War when he decided to try to help with an uprising in Ireland, to push the British back. His activities were considered treason, and he was put in prison, refused pardon, and hanged. This book in fact is written from his prison cell, with his ruminations on a life dedicated to helping others and ruined by an unacceptable decision of his own.

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru’s foremost writer and won the Nobel Prize in 20l0. This book is well translated by Edith Grossman. It brings a controversial man to life and also gives some insight into the troubles that still plague the Congo.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a small but fascinating book about three well-known figures in political history. Lord Beaverbrook and the Kennedys were famous in both Britain and the United States. But it is in New Brunswick, Canada, that they came together in a most unusual way.

Telling the story is James Downey, a Newfoundlander and professor of English who once taught at Carleton University but then, as he says, “fell from grace into academic administration” and became president of Carleton, the University of New Brunswick and the University of Waterloo, where he is now President Emeritus. It was his l0 years at UNB (l980-l990) that led him to write this book.

The protagonist is Lord Beaverbrook, who grew up in New Brunswick but pursued his business dealings to England where he got into journalism, built the “Daily Express” into one of the most successful newspapers in the world and was also elected a member of parliament and made a peer. Max Aitken became Lord Beaverbrook. One of his friends at this time was Joe Kennedy, American ambassador to the U.K.

In the Second World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made him Minister of Aircraft Production, where he helped greatly in the crucial Battle of Britain. Later, Churchill sent him as a go-between with President Roosevelt to gain support for Britain’s war effort.

The book shows (with good illustrations) how these relationships led to close friendship with the Kennedy family. In later years when first Jack, then Bobby Kennedy were invited to speak at the University of New Brunswick, in spite of their heavy loads at home both accepted. The speeches are reproduced here and Downey points out the rhetorical skill and craft, as well as what he calls “the American tradition of public oratory which they draw upon.”

Altogether we get an up-close look at an endlessly absorbing period of history, of our country as well as the U.K. and U.S. An unusually good book.

Review by Anne McDougall

In Richard Gwyn’s second volume on Sir John A. Macdonald he shows how this charming and wily politician gave Canada our country.

Opening with Confederation in l867, when Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined Quebec and Ontario, he describes Macdonald’s National Policy which stood for government intervention in times of public need. Macdonald believed that in such a fragmented country, Canadians had to look out for each other or they would have no nation at all.

With thorough research and a good journalist’s sense of style, Gwyn tells the story of struggle with the Red River Colony amidst constant pressure from Minnesota annexationists to take this part of Canada; Louis Riel’s two rebellions and controversial death; the battle to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, linking the continent, and the Pacific Scandal that almost sunk the whole project, as well as Macdonald’s government.

Macdonald survived all this even though his home life was not easy (his first wife had died after years of illness and the loss of one son) and his second wife, though devoted, had the handicap of caring for a disabled daughter.

Macdonald had an easy, disarming way of approaching people and they voted him back into office against heavy odds. The book includes many of the talented politicians and others who worked with Macdonald up to the young Laurier, who would be another lion in the leadership of Canada. There are excellent photographs backing the story. Gwyn in fact has done just what he did in the first volume, John A.: The Man Who Made Us. Published in 2007, that book became a bestseller and won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. This one is every bit as good.

Review by Anne McDougall