Books On Beechwood

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