Emptied, Culloden heath: crows, distant hills full of birches. Dettingen: mud, rubble, my lifelong horror's tender shoot. Ghundy Ghar: from our new trenches fell bones from old wars over the very same land.On September 2, 1752, England followed the rest of Europe in adopting the Gregorian Calendar; causing varying degrees of inconvenience for those who effectively “lost” eleven days. One so affected was British soldier James Wolfe – eventually to be promoted to the level of General and sent to fight the French on the Plains of Abraham – and the lost eleven days that he had planned to spend on leave in Paris so haunted him that today, he annually spends those eleven days haunting Montreal; searching for justice, truth, and understanding for his battlefield misdeeds. Living in a tent on Mount Royal and lurching around the city in the dirty attire of a homeless man (except for when he at last claims his fresh-pressed redcoat from a dry cleaner's), Wolfe encounters those who accept that he is the long dead General made flesh, those who would help him make peace with his past, and those who abuse him as the bum he appears to be. Lost in September is gorgeously written: beautiful sentences that capture both a painful inner journey and a hugely pivotal period in Canadian history (about which I know I wasn't taught enough in school), and has much to say about family, love, duty, and the toils of war on the battlefield soldier; whether the year is 1759 or 2017. I loved just about everything about this book. It would be easy to spoil this read for others, so I'll just record some general observations.
I hear a man hail a taxi shouting old French slang for a chariot – Montrealers mangle quaint, backwoods French with chopped American, yet wield baguettes and bottles of Bordeaux like Parisians.Lost in September is delightfully specific about its Quebec setting: from the backstreets of Montreal to the tourist-crawling areas around the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, this book totally captures La Belle Province on the page. It visits the Gaspé Peninsula, the Mordechai Richler Gazebo, La Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy; notes the Dollaramas, Vachon cake trucks, Jean Coutu pharmacies. Anyone who has visited Quebec will recognise the references; the people. And it is also specific about the historical period in which General Wolfe made his way up the St Lawrence – burning down homesteads and slicing fishermen's nets – and recounts a rueful narrative of the daybreak raid on General Montcalm's camp. This book is worth a read for just the historical detail.
How long scalped Canadians caterwaul depends on how much blood they lose before you peel 'em. I've seen a yowl fit to wake the Duke of Cumberland's dead father rise out of a completely skinned head. Sound travels slower than death.And this is the story of a soldier – a General who obeyed orders and achieved his objectives and who, even so, was probably suffering from PTSD long before there was a term for it. Little wonder he haunts the present: demanding his lost leave, wanting to tell the truth of his history, struggling with the memory of his too-clinging mother. There are several letters between mother and son quoted in this book, and I would love to know if they are historically accurate; if the following is actually excerpted from a letter Wolfe's mother wrote to her son's commander on the battlefield:
I am in my son and my son is in me. I bleed by any blade stropped in a room where he dwells. Cold wind near him blows my skin like the membrane enclosing peeled onion or egg: the cloudy layer silken under the carapace. If he perishes, I will with joy abandon my own so-called life: I'll clench and break beyond this wooden agony into freedom. So summon my son to death, if is your plan for him, but know that in doing so you condemn his mother to the same bliss.The only thread I didn't really like was about the writer who was confronted by Wolfe as she was researching his history for a book she intended to pen. Perhaps this was meant to be an ironic representation of author Kathleen Winter herself in these pages, but her search for his “emanations” – whether reading tarot cards, throwing runes, or having his handwriting analysed – felt a bit flakey and ended the book on a sour note. Even so, I thought that this was a beautifully written, interesting, and weighty examination of many important themes and I think it should have wide appeal.
- All the Beloved Ghosts by Alison MacLeod
- Lost in September by Kathleen Winter
- The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan
- Uncertain Weights and Measures by Jocelyn Parr
- We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night by Joel Thomas Hynes
Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.
*****
And in the kind of synchronicity of experience that feeds my solipsism: When Kennedy and I were on our recent trip to Italy, one of the other families in the tour was a husband-wife-young-adult-son-unit. After asking Kennedy what she did, and being underwhelmed by her answer, "I just graduated with a Theatre degree", Kennedy asked the son what he was up to, and he replied, "I'm working on my PhD in Philosophy". Kennedy replied that she has a friend whose boyfriend just finished his Masters in Philosophy and is currently looking for a suitable Doctorate program in Europe, and at this, the son looked at his mother and said, "Oh, maybe that'll be a good idea for me, too." That sounded funny to Kennedy -- if you say "I'm working on my PhD", doesn't that mean you're already in your Doctorate program? -- and at her confusion, the son said, "I have six more years to go." Which to us would mean he has finished two years of undergrad (which he confirmed; at a local community college). Funny way to have put it, but since his father has a PhD in Physics (and sounds like he has a cool government job developing AI), "working on a PhD" likely means something a little different in their family.
So on the bus one day we noticed that the Dad had a French for Beginner's workbook out, and he did a few exercises as we drove along. That evening at dinner, he said that he thought he'd get a PhD in French (which we thought was a joke, but after he repeated it, I guess it wasn't), and he had some questions for us about French as it's used in Quebec vs. France. Kennedy and I answered what we could -- the other Canadian on the tour, Stacey, was able to answer that at her bank, all Quebec-based contracts are written in formal Parisian French -- and we got to talking about the language police in Quebec (they found it hilarious that a few years ago, Italian restaurants in Montreal were forced to change the names of menu items from the familiar Italian to awkward French equivalents [I remember something about a suggestion to change "spaghetti" to the French for "string noodles"]), and while on the one hand I like to join in laughing about such things, I also added a sympathetic voice about how nearly impossible it is to maintain a separate culture in the middle of a sea of English.
And after Stacey started talking about transfer payments, our expensive and useless system of Bilingualism, and the intermittent threats of Quebec separation that we Anglos find a drag on the national project, I made some flippant remark about how General Wolfe beat Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham two hundred and fifty years ago; that that made all of Canada a British colony and that it was only through British largess that Quebec was afforded the right to keep their language and their culture. What I said was meant to be taken in the broad strokes of ancient history (as any Canadian would recognise), but the Dad we were talking with -- the would-be French PhD from Baltimore -- interjected with, "Wait? What? What happened on the Plains of Abraham?" And I had no specifics -- I knew there had been a battle which the British Wolfe won, even as he lost his life, but I could only lamely reassert the bit about France losing (I couldn't even add the bits about Wolfe being lucky and desperate and Montcalm having been abandoned by France as they pursued European conquests as detailed in Lost in September), and as if only then suddenly realising that I was speaking to a PhD who likely expects a conversation to be fact-filled, I felt like a bit of an underinformed flake.
And then the universe provided me with Lost in September -- I had no idea it would be about Wolfe and Montcalm and the Plains of Abraham -- and it gave me a beautifully nuanced picture of the men and their pivotal battle. I wasn't going to write about our encounter with this family -- we found them to be lovely people (especially the Mom), but this "I've got six years left on my PhD" was bizarre to me and Kennedy, so I decided not to write about them -- and indeed, I didn't mention them at all when I wrote briefly about our tour -- but something about reading this book, filling in my knowledge, made me think that the universe also wanted this story told. (Yes, I'm as flakey as an author looking for "emanations"; reading tarot; casting runes; analysing handwriting at the universe's behest.)
