Book Notes: Livermore on William McDougall

(Continuing my series of notes on books I have been neglecting to get to.  And this one I actually have read.)

During the 150th anniversary of confederation 2017, a group of Toronto historical societies got together to commission public lectures on each of the Toronto area Fathers of Confederation. (I know. Times have changed, haven't they?) I was asked to do the one on William McDougall.  Which I did, and it was well received, but there were limits to what I could present in a brief talk.

McDougall proved fascinating, however, a real piece of work. I was struck by how little had been written about him.  Even his moment of maximum notoriety in 1869, when he tried to become Lieutenant Governor of Red River and was sent packing by Louis Riel and the Red River Council, has not produced a lot of in-depth examination of his career. An in-depth biography?  Nottachance.

(Once again is confirmed the maxim that there is no subject in Canadian history about which the statement "Too little has been written about X" is likely to be false.  Almost any Father of Confederation -- but one -- might be called a Forgotten Father, n'est-ce pas?)

Anyway, I recently learned that there is a novel about William McDougall: Wandering Willie: The Memoirs of William McDougall, 1822-1905: Canada's Forgotten Father of Confederation. It is not a hoax being passed off as the real thing. Daniel Livermore the author is upfront about having created a fictional memoir. He has done a lot of research, too. The novel includes a lengthy bibliography, probably the most detailed I've ever seen on McDougall, plus detailed references to archival collections of McDougall papers, which include the draft of a start to an actual McDougall memoir. Daniel Livermore is a Ph.D in history and a retiree from the Canadian foreign service. 

Livermore reports in his introduction that he wrote a novel in order to explore "the shadowy spaces of McDougall's career" and his mode of thinking, and that in other respects the book is history and biography. I have to admit that, while I admire the effort, I rather wish that since he chose the novel form, he had made it more of a novel.  McDougall, it seems to me, had massive blind confidence in his own intellect and not much respect for anyone else's and did exactly what he wanted throughout his career. He fought with everyone. And made just about everyone annoyed with and distrustful of him.

But in the novel "McDougall" and his author are trying to rehabilitate McDougall, perhaps. So the first person McDougall is constantly trying to show himself reasonable and moderate, not a troublemaker at all, and often giving a version of events around him that sounds rather like history books written long afterwards. 

Well, perhaps the real McDougall would also have striven to justify himself if he had actually completed the memoir he started. But a storming, pontificating, egomaniacal McDougall might have been a lot more fun to read.  And I wonder if that might not have been truer to his character. 

Anyway this is a valiant effort to give the public (willing or not) at least one booklength account of the guy.  I wonder how many people will neglect the author's notices and assume it really is the memoir of William McDougall. 

Book Notes in the CHR and young Muslims in love

Browsing through the latest Canadian Historical Review, (subscribers only), I was gratified to see really enthusiastic and admiring reviews of Canadian Spy Story by David Wilson and In Search of W.P.M. Kennedy by Martin Friedland.  

It's not just that I have read both books and share the approving sentiments. But I can claim that the authors of both books are friends of mine, and it's pleasant to know your historian friends are the smart ones writing the good books.

And, to switch to books that are not exactly histories, and by an author I do not know at all: Are there some good historical takes on Muslim communities and cultures in Canada, locally or nationally? I don't know. Suggestions? 

In the meantime there is a novelist who offers a pretty good substitute -- and a decent beach/cottage read as well. Usma Jalaluddin, sometime teacher, sometime columnist for the Toronto Star, has written three lively novels set among Muslims and in Toronto. These are all essentially rom-coms of young Muslims in love, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the target readership at all. But when I happened across her first book, Ayesha At Last, a few years ago, it told me more than I'd ever known about daily life among my Toronto Muslim neighbours.  And her reimagining of Pride and Prejudice in the Toronto suburbs was pretty clever and funny.

I'm not the first person to admire these novels. The actor Mindy Kaling is associated with a project to film one of them.  Anyway, Jalaluddin's third novel Much Ado about Nada is now out.

History of the historical novel

 In a recent New Yorker essay, British novelist Zadie Smith proposes that all English novels become historical novels, and all English historical novels are trapped under the shadow of Dickens. Well, maybe, but she also bemoans how much work a historical novel is:

Generally speaking, I don’t make notes. I sit down. I write a novel. But already this non-novel that I was refusing to write had generated a drawer full of notes and a shelf of books. I said to myself: my studying days are over. I said to myself: if you let this happen it will play to your worst, your most long-winded, your most Dickensian instincts.

Zadie, just make it up, I'd say. It's a novel, you are allowed to. That's what a novel is.  All it has to do is feel true, and you are home free.

Okay, maybe that's the hard part. 

The secret dreams of historians UPDATED

There's a podcast called Tides of History, hosted by an American, Patrick Wyman, that I hear sometimes. It follows the host's interests, but tends to come back to the ancient past, mixing historical and archaeological evidence. Multi-hour examinations of the Polynesian Expansion or of the Bronze Age Collapse, for instance. Its shows tend to be pretty deep dives, featuring longish interviews with scholars you have never heard of.

The other day I was surprised to see an announcement of a freestanding episode in the series with the teaser line:

Every historian I know has a secret dream of writing historical fiction, but few ever do it. Dan Jones, a longtime friend of Tides of History and an outstanding historian, has actually done it: Essex Dogs, his fantastic debut novel about a group of soldiers during the Hundred Years' War, is out now. I talk to Dan about writing historical fiction and what it can...

They do? (Have that secret dream, I mean.) Can't say I do. And if I were to write a novel (I won't), I imagine it would be contemporary and not historical. 

 (Have not listened to the podcast or read the novel mentioned. May do yet.)

Update, March 2:  Helen Webberley responds from Australia:

I would like to offer the opposite position. I was writing a historical blog post (on Canada as it happens), drawing on primary sources as is appropriate for proper historians. But the events were so improbable, I actually thought I had written historical fiction.

Update, March 9:  Russ Chamberlayne:

Your March 1 (sorry, March 01) post on historians writing historical novels seemed to doubt that many do. Could there be more of them that write creative non-fiction instead?

Creative non-fiction has been a literary genre for so long that many practitioners will be aware of the grant money. But for those who aren't, here's the web site of the $40,000 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, from the New-York-based Whiting Foundation. It's for those already in possession of a contract (or will be by the April 25 grant application deadline) with a Canadian, U.K. or U.S. publisher. Other grant possibilities (contract or no) are listed at the bottom of the page.

"Creative non-fiction refers to all non-fiction and mixed genre writing shaped by literary sensibilities, devices, and strategies."  -- Betsy Warland, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing. I'd be okay with historians doing more of that, sure.  

Jane Austen on history

But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. ... I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs—the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.”

Northanger Abbey is not my favourite Jane Austen novel, but I do smile at how this discussion of history in Chapter 14 predicts so much of current discussions about history versus fiction, about  history "dying," and about the rivalries between political and social historians.

Be clear: this is not exactly Jane Austen speaking her mind. In her novels, it is not always immediately obvious just who is being teased. Certainly Catherine Morland, the speaker here, is not Austen. Indeed, she is very much an innocent abroad here, one whose mind has been influenced by too many Gothic romances. But she is also dismissed out of hand by the men she is talking with because, as Austen puts it, 

Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

History and the novel

I admire Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall immensely. I'm less admiring of some recent claims of hers that seem to suggest it is both a novel and something other than a novel.  

Historians have previously expressed concern that the books are seen as fact by some of their students.

It is not a worry Mantel has much time for. “I stick as closely as I can to the historical record. You won’t go far wrong if you want to know about Thomas Cromwell by reading those books.

“It is not a locked box to which only historians have the key. ...

Historians, Mantel suggested, had done a poor job until Diarmaid MacCulloch’s “great biography came along as a sort of complement to the work I’ve done in fiction.”

The implication seems to be that novelists and nonfiction writers are doing much the same thing, that a historical novel, done well, can also replicate what a nonfiction treatment of the same subject can do. 

But the jobs are incompatible. The novelist imagines a reality, and tries to evoke it so vividly that it seems real. If that is successfully done, if the novel feels true, it succeeds. A great novel imagines reality brilliantly. You can judge if a novel is great, but it is a fool's errand to try assessing its evidence, how it weighs its evidence, and its conclusions from the evidence against whatever is known about the real characters and situations it evokes. Novels can brilliantly convey an imagined reality. But it is impossible to test imagination for accuracy. 

I've heard it argued that nonfiction is about facts and fiction about "truth." But fiction is about imagined truths, and nonfiction is not about facts. Nonfiction is always a search for truth, an endless search among slippery possible facts gleaned from incomplete and possibly misleading evidence. You are entitled to form conclusions about a nonfiction work's accuracy and reliability by assessing its sources, the reliability of its interpretations from them, and the credibility of the writer, but a history remains an argument about the past as a novel remains an imagination of it.

As I've said before, Hilary Mantel has written a great novel about Thomas Cromwell in which he is a hero, and Peter Shaeffer wrote a great play about him in which he is a villain. But it's not a question of which of Wolf Hall and A Man for All Seasons is right and which wrong. The greatness of their fictions does not depend on the literal truth or accuracy of their interpretations and arguments. It arises from how they evoke scenes and characters. Even if you want to judge its accuracy, fiction by its nature doesn't provide the materials for the task. 

If you want to seek the truth of events, study events. If you seek ways to imagine realities, read (or write) fiction. They are both worthwhile endeavours, but not interchangeable.

I still think Wolf Hall is a terrific novel (I was less struck by its sequel Bringing Up the Bodies, perhaps because Wolf Hall seemed entirely original, and the sequel more of the same. I have not read The Mirror and the Light yet.) If I wanted to pursue some conclusion about the hero/villain status of Thomas Cromwell and his antagonist Thomas More, I should probably start with the MacCullough biography Mantel recommends,

 

 

Netflix history: chill out, it's television drama

(The CBC National News, also confused about fiction and nonfiction)

British journo Simon Jenkins is again furious that the television series "The Crown" is behaving as if it were a drama or something.

The royal family can look after themselves, and usually do. I am less sure of history, and especially contemporary history. The validity of “true story” docu-dramas can only lie in their veracity. We have to believe they are true, or why are we wasting our time?

Spoiler alert. We don't have to believe they are true. We have to believe they are fiction. Because they are. "The Crown" is a drama, the imaginative creation of its writer (Piers) Peter Morgan, its directors, and its actors. They are not documenting reality. They are creating a story and putting all their efforts to making it feel true. That's what fiction is: an imagined reality.

Evidence-based documentarians, including journalists and historians, need to stop complaining that fictions are "untrue", and start insisting on the difference between fiction and nonfiction.  Fiction is the genre that creates imaginary realities, and if it does so well, it succeeds. Nonfiction is the one that explores what's true and what's not, by presenting evidence and arguments for (and against) what's likely true -- arguments a reader can engage with and assess. Nonfiction isn't simply truth, for truth ain't that easy to find. But it's a search for truth. Imagining possible truths -- that's fiction's strong suit. 

"The Crown" is either a triumph of the imagination, or it isn't. And if it is, it's time well wasted, as they say. But squabbling about whether it is true or not demeans the truth itself.

If I may quote myself from the last time I read Simon Jenkins indulging in the same confusion:

Jenkins needs to reread Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" along with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. One is a great play in which Thomas More is a hero and Thomas Cromwell is the darkest of villains, and the other is a great novel in which Thomas Cromwell is a hero and Thomas More the darkest of villains. They cannot both be true, and we should not expect either of them to be. But they can both be literature.

Jenkins, however, doubles down, holding up Wolf Hall as the model of true fiction.

Most novelists go to great lengths to verify their version of events, as Hilary Mantel does. 

Umm, no. Hilary Mantel goes to great lengths to make her version of events feel true.  Which it is why it's a terrific novel. 

 

 

 

 

Listing CanHisting

Frank Rockland sends along a link to a list of 174 "historical novels set in Canada" that Goodreads has assembled.  It's a grand and glorious melange, from soaps to serious lit, and one could surely have a hundred more titles added and still be nowhere close to a comprehensive bibliography of the field. Also, it led me to explore a little -- and determine that the list of "Canadian history" also on Goodreads runs to 251 titles -- with the same qualifications applying -- to the max.

It's just a movie: history at the cineplex

Terrific movie, but...

Journalists have some odd ideas. Simon Jenkins in The Guardian online is furious that they make movies about history that are not... exactly historical.

He fulminates against Vice, Brexit: The Uncivil War, The Favourite, and Mary Queen of Scots. Of the latest Churchill movie, he says,  "The embellishments in Darkest Hour would have done credit to Russia’s Mosfilm or Mao’s China." Of The Favourite's assault on "poor, dignified Queen Anne," he laments:

"The director of The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, remarked casually that “some of the things in the film are accurate and a lot aren’t”. What is a history student to make of that?"

Well, that it is a movie! It's a drama. You know, like a story. It's not even a documentary.  If you want to know history, read some history.  Frankly, a history student who hasn't grasped that isn't a history student. Or even literate.

Fiction works by its own rules; it has to work as fiction. It doesn't document reality. It creates a imagined reality. Readers "suspends disbelief" -- which means they know what they read or watch is not true but join the pretence, in search of empathy, of entertainment, of imaginative constructions of human behaviour, whatever.

History and nonfiction and journalism are different:  you get the writer's judgments and arguments about events, and you get the evidence on which they make those judgments. Histories are not the raw truth, either, but they do seek it. You can debate with a history, you can struggle with it, you can at least seek to form a credible account of actual past events.

A novel or drama may be well made or badly made, but arguing about its truthfulness is just missing the point. It's just a movie, Simon.

Jenkins needs to reread Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons along with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. One is a great play in which Thomas More is a hero and Thomas Cromwell is the darkest of villains, and the other is a great novel in which Thomas Cromwell is a hero and Thomas More the darkest of villains. They cannot both be true, and we should not expect either of them to be. But they can both be literature.

Update, January 30:  At History News Network, Bruce Chatwick admires this revival of A Man for All Seasons. Dairmaid McCullough's recent biography Thomas Cromwell: A Life is reviewed here.

More update, same day:  Chris Raible links us to History Today, where 16th centuryist Suzanne Lipscomb argues that the film Mary Queen of Scots, is "no bad" (as my old Scots great-uncle would say, mostly about Scotch whisky):

In fact, when it comes to historical detail – bar a little massaging of the timeline and putting into vision what only happened by letter – it is pretty good. Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are well cast as Mary and Elizabeth, respectively. The broad brushstrokes of the story are correct and most of the details that people will suspect to be historically inaccurate are, in fact, not: the strange attempt by Elizabeth to marry Mary to Robert Dudley; the marriage between Mary and Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, who really was a drunken bisexual, found in bed with musician David Rizzio; the spectacular assassinations – they’re all true.

Lipscomb goes on to suggest sympathy for what infuriates Jenkins: that dramas and novels do tend to flatter contemporary sensibilities: they favour spunky young women confronting patriarchy, heightened gender and racial tolerance, and so on. Where drama builds on empathy, history can explore the profound differences that may alienate us from the past.

And one more update, January 31:  Turns out there is a website, History vs Hollywood, devoted to exploring the differences between Hollywood movies and the historical situations they dramatize.  I'm not endorsing its reliability, but it's a bit of a giggle.

History of fiction bigotry

Steven Beattie offers a vivid example in the Globe and Mail recently:

Fiction and history share a symbiotic relationship. Though the latter provides the raw material for the former, it is often fiction that has the stronger claim on truth, if “truth” is to be understood as emotional or affective, as opposed to baldly factual. Fiction, by definition, traffics in “alternative facts,” and is transformative; by approaching history through the prism of story and technique, the fiction writer is paradoxically able to access deeper wells of understanding about our relationships to the world and to each other.

Alternative facts, really?  A lot of fiction writers will know this is nonsense, I think. They share Roger Ebert's dictum about movies: "it's not what the movie is about, it's how it goes about it."  Film-making or story-making, it is about the craft. Well-made stories persuade us, not to believe, but only to suspend disbelief.  A story is supposed to feel true, but that does not make it True, only persuasive.

Beattie, on the other hand, is arguing that if the shells are moved about with enough skill, then the guy who says the pea is under this particular shell must be telling us the truth.

This is a faith, not a critical stance. It's a claim that fiction is the superior form of writing, by definition, and all others are lesser. It is fictionism, not criticism, and it's ultimately a form of bigotry.

Nonfiction, just to be clear, should never expect a reader to suspend disbelief. If it "reads like a novel," you should probably distrust its claims. Nonfiction doesn't achieve truth, but it is the genre where claims to truth can best be compared and evaluated.

I have started collecting examples of this "fiction is true; history/nonfiction is not" ideology.  There must be a million out there, as the fictionist ideology is thriving these days.  Contributions of fresh examples would be welcomed.
 

SF as history, history as SF

Ada Palmer, historian  and

D'jever think that writing history has some affinities with writing science fiction? All that effort to construct from scraps the credible image of a society in which they do things differently -- while also maintaining enough narrative (or something) to hold the thing together.

Ada Palmer goes there. Historian and classicist at the University of Chicago, author of things like Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, she is also an SF novelist of whose new book, Too Like the Lightning, a critic writes:

It does something that I think is genuinely new (or at least, if other people have pulled it off, I haven’t read them). Palmer is a historian (here’s an interview I did with her on her book about Lucretius’ reception in the Renaissance) and approaches science fiction in a novel way. Her 25th century draws on the ideas of Enlightenment humanism, but in the same ways that, say, America draws on the writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. Which is to say that it takes the bits that seem useful, reinterpret them or misinterpret them as new circumstances dictate, and graft them onto what is already there, throwing away the rest. Palmer does this quite thoroughly and comprehensively – her imagined society is both thrown together in the way that real societies are, and clinker-built (in the sense that she has evidently really thought through how this would be related to that and what it might mean).

I'm not sure it's new to build SF from historical analogies. Almost the norm, in fact.  But if you are intrigued by how a working historian would go about it, you might look for her novel.  Or, maybe you'd prefer the Lucretius book, which also sounds like no small feat of imagination.

Facing up to Proulx's New France

I liked The Shipping News, both novel and film, but then I'm not a historian of Newfoundland much. I have been a historian of New France in my time, and the news that one of the anticipated fiction titles of 2016, Annie Proulx's new novel Barkskins, to be published next June, will be set in New France, gives me a certain queasy feeling.  Hey, maybe it will be good and bring interest to early Canadian history. But I can't help thinking that from now on all anyone will know of New France is what they read in Barkskins, taken as canonical because fiction is automatically true, isn't it?

In the late seventeenth century two illiterate woodsmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, make their way from Northern France to New France to seek a living. Bound to a feudal lord, a “seigneur,” for three years in exchange for land, they suffer extraordinary hardship, always in awe of the forest they are charged with clearing, sometimes brimming with dreams of its commercial potential. Rene marries an Indian healer, and they have children, mixing the blood of two cultures.  (from the publisher's announcement)

Actually, judging by an excerpt published in the New Yorker a few years ago, a fair amount of the novel will be set in New England, home of her Proulx family.  And I'm not a historian of New England either.  Maybe it will turn out all right.

History in fiction

Despite occasional requests, we don't follow historical fiction much here, fiction coverage being (relatively) extensive -- and anyway, too often tending to encourage the "no one reads history past high school" attitude among literati who should know better.

An exception, however, for two current publications.

First, from my friends Steve Pitt the writer and Roderick Benns the publisher, a new book in Fireside Publishing's curious series of young-adult novels on the imagined mystery-solving gifts of future Canadian prime ministers.  After previous novels featuring youthful John Diefenbaker, John A. Macdonald, R.B. Bennett, and Arthur Meighen, Fireside launches its first  second future Liberal and "most requested" subject, a young Pierre Trudeau mystery by Steve Pitt called The Wail of the Wendigo: An Early Adventure of Pierre Trudeau. (Update, Nov 25: Roderick reminds me of the 2013 publication of the young Paul Martin story, Showdown at Border Town.)

Second, a new novel by travel writer, historian, essayist Ronald Wright.  Wright came to attention with his Latin-America travel books Cut Stones and Cross-Roads and Time among the Maya, and consolidated his big-history chops with Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress, and all of these were widely published and influential.

In recent years, he has turned to fiction as well, and his new historical novel, The Gold Eaters, has been drawing pretty terrific reviews, as in the New York Times this weekend.

Its protagonist is a young Quechua, Waman, colonized first by the Incas and then by the conquistadors. He observes the Spanish conquest of the Inca world. The novel clearly draw on  the themes of imperial conquest and cultural disaster emphasized in Stolen Continents and much of Wright's nonfiction, and it is pitched as "literary fiction" rather than "young adult," -- though the lines increasingly blur.

Possibilities for your "I only read fiction" children, students, friends?

History of CanLit: Crad Kilodney 1948-2014 (updated below)

Dusty Bookcase posts an obituary tribute from Ruth Bradley St. Cyr for Toronto writer Crad Kilodney, the guy who used to stand on Toronto street corners selling his own self-published works to all comers:  Worst Canadian Stories, Vol. 2, Suburban Chicken Strangling Stories, Pork College.  

I like the story -- without entirely believing it --that he invested sagaciously in the stock market and lived comfortably long after he retired from the book trade.

I saw him the odd time at his work on the street.  Sorry to say I never bought anything.

Update, May 7:  Writer Richard Grayson, friend and colleague to Crad Kilodney, assures me Kilodney's investment portfolio was not invented. Kilodney inherited his Greek-American grandparents' estate, retired from street-selling his works, and got seriously into the investment trade using his real name. Grayson:

I was very skeptical of mining stocks, and told him it was boring and old hat, and suggested he just either put into good index funds or look at high-tech companies -- most of my relatives had only lost money in Canadian mining stocks -- but Crad was pretty sure of himself.  He learned a lot.  I am freaked out, knowing him as I did, by seeing all those photos of him in a suit with people involved in the mining industry.  I think one reason people are keeping his name secret is that he may have been known by his real name as an investor.  I last saw him in the late 80s or early 90s, and had not been much in touch until last year after he told me about his fatal illness, so I can't be sure of this.  But I am certain he was fairly wealthy.

So it seems not to be a clever fictional flourish, but a true life history.

Prize watch: BC award to Kit Pearson

We don't generally cover historical fiction or kids' books much here, but can't help noticing that the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor's award for literary excellence, a career achievement recognition, has gone to Kit Pearson, the admirable writer of historically-based fiction for young readers. Quill and Quire reports:

"In both her fantasies and her historical fiction [Pearson] looks to the past: to Canada’s war guests, to the War of 1812, to Alberta in 1949, and to Mayne Island in the 1930s. She sees children as those residents of the past who are largely overlooked in the story of where we have come from.”

The jury citation further praises Pearson’s “meticulous research, her narrative skill, her imaginative choice of subjects from all across this country, and her clearly crafted prose.

Greer on The Orenda

Allan Greer has read and thought about Joseph Boyden's Jesuits-and-Hurons novel The Orenda. He shares his thoughts here.

You can test nonfiction against evidence, but the test of a novel is different: if it makes a world that feels true, it works.  Since Boyden's fictional project is to reconstruct several 17th century consciousnesses, I'm glad to see Allan Greer mostly engages on that level. Do Bird and Snow Falls and Christopher think like them, he asks, or mostly like us?  See here.

(Image: Penguin Books Canada)

William Stevenson 1924-2013 RIP

He would have called himself a journalist, not a historian, and a lot of historians would not call him a historian at all, but William Stevenson, the author of A Man Called Intrepid, has at least two claims to historical attention.

First, there are quite a few people who think the version of World War II that he provided in A Man Called Intrepid is the history of World War II, that is, that it was won not by armoured divisions and mass production and quite staggering quantities of violent death, but mostly by covert operations, and one man's covert operations at that.

Second, he seems to me notable as the author of the most successful historical novel ever written in Canada (and if you go back to Gilbert Parker and Thomas Costain, we have had quite a few, even without the wave of literary historical fiction of recent decades). A Man Called Intrepid really exemplifies the formula of mass-market historical fiction:  it takes a large, complicated, "romantic" historical event, in this case the Second World War, and organizes it as the experience of one compelling protagonist, so that the fate of the protagonist and the fate of the world become the same thing. We ought to be more interested in the fictionalization of memory, and William Stevenson was one writer who was extraordinarily successful at it.

The CBC's obit is cautious, describing "Intrepid" by his actual historical role rather than the one Stevenson assigned to "A Man Called Intrepid":

He met another William Stephenson - no relation. This Stephenson was the head of British intelligence operations in the United States, whose code name was Intrepid. Journalist Stevenson immortalized spymaster Stephenson's story in the 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid. 

The Toronto Star pretty much buys the legend:

Stevenson will likely be best remembered for A Man Called Intrepid, his 1976 biography of Sir William Stephenson — the similarity in names is coincidental — a Canadian businessman who set up and ran Allied espionage efforts during World War II.

I know smart people who knew him, and he seems to have been much liked and admired.  

Canadian history still not dead yet

Frank Rockland, author of Fire on the Hill, comments on my post about Canadian journalism's go-to cliche:

I agree about your statement about commentators leading with Canadian history being boring. The National Post has taken a similar vein.
 Shouting from the roof tops that you are not boring or trying to prove that Canadian history is not boring is, I think, not the best approach to solving a problem. If one exsists in the first place. It turns people off and puts them on the defensive because they feel it is now a duty rather than a pleasure. They will not inclined to search for or read Canadian history if they are constantly told how boring it is or worst how not boring it is.
 I do believe that Canadian history is in better shape then most people want to believe. For example, 95% of the Canadian population has never heard about the Ross Rifle and the controversy that surrounded it. However, if you do a web search for the Ross Rifle the results are impressive. Anything from, magazine articles, YouTube videos, discussion forums, web sites, and web pages. One of the web pages is mine by the way. These are ordinary folks who have a passion for the topic and have spent considerable time and effort on it. This is not an isolated case. Canadian history content available on the Web not only from various museum’s, historical, and heritage organizations, professional historians but from amateur historians, history buffs and enthusiasts on various topics truly is astounding.
 Lately I’ve been reading, it is not an easy read, Jerome de Groot’s book Consuming History, Historian and heritage in contemporary popular culture. Most of the elements that he touches on I currently see when looking at Canadian history. The main weakness, and the most visible, is there are very few Canadian historical fiction novels, TV shows such as the Murdoch Mysteries and movies such as Passchendaele.
 This is not an easy gap to fill, especially with TV and movies since they are very expense to produce. Creating novels is less expensive, but you still need to spend years of consistent effort to develop an audience. This takes time, effort, and money to do. To succeed writers need to create Canadian historical novels that would be good reads. The main purpose is to entertain. If the reader learns something great; otherwise, they’ve spent a couple of hours well wasted.

Case of the dithering detective?

Fireside Publishing continues its quirky series of YA novels about crimes and mysteries solved by Canadian prime ministers in their youth. This time, following John A. and John George (Diefenbaker),  it's young Paul Martin, intrepid crime-fighter.

Fireside's youth movement isn't just the subjects. The author here is seventeen.

Hilary Mantel's second historical novel Booker

Thomas Cromwell can now tuck a second Booker Prize under his arm. (With his severed head under the other, I guess.)  Bring Up the Bodies, the second part in Hilary Mantel's vast novel about the 16th century English courtier and politician, just earned her a Booker Prize to match the one she received two years ago for the first part, Wolf Hall.  First sequel to win ever.

The British novelists must be approaching where the Canadian novelists hit about ten years ago: now all their big novels seem to be historically based.  I admired and enjoyed Wolf Hall enormously  Those who dislike it, dislike it a lot, I find, but I was greatly taken both with its strikingly original voice (it's a novel, after all, and that's what matters in fiction) and also with its "theory" of Cromwell, whom it evokes as a "modern" type set against Thomas More as a Medieval fanatic and Henry as the embodiment of everything one fears about autocratic rulers.

Bring up the Bodies struck me as more of the same, and hence a lot less fresh.  And I can't help thinking no matter what Mantel does, the end of the last volume is gonna be a big downer.