“Who told men that women want them to be heroes?” Maude said. “Not their mothers.”Broken Ground was recommended to me as an underrated classic of Canadian literature, and I have to admit that it meets that unhappy description. When you look at the book's cover and see that it has pictures of both WWI soldiers going “over the top” from the trenches and a farmer following a team of horses with a primitive plow, you might be tempted to say, “Oh, broken ground, that's kind of a heavy-handed metaphor, eh?”, but here's the thing: this dramatic irony is exactly what happened. The same young men who dug the trenches in Normandy and survived their forays into no man's land came back to the “reward” of free land that only needed to be cleared and settled; often the most stump- and rocked-filled, unprofitable and far-flung wastelands that the government was hoping to establish outposts in by the sweat of the veterans' brows. For King and Country and all that jazz. (My husband's great uncle Ivan lost an arm at Vimy Ridge but was granted a hundred acres of land in Saskatchewan upon his return that proved too poor to farm but adequate for cattle ranching – and the exhumation of long-buried dinosaur bones.)
In the book, we are introduced to the residents of Portuguese Creek: a small settlement on Vancouver Island ringed by giant cedars which provided ready cash employment with the lumber company and impossible-to-remove stumps in the new farmers' fields. The men, for the most part, are veterans of the Great War who choose never to speak about their experiences over there, and their wives are stiff-upper-lippers whose own mothers knew the niceties of metropolitan living and modern conveniences. When a stranger rides into town with scorched clothes and a muddy mare, events are set into motion that will change the community forever.
Broken Ground is told from many shifting points-of-view, and there was often not enough difference in the voices for me to keep the characters separate in my mind. There were also some needless time shifts that didn't really serve the story, but overall, I admire what author Jack Hodgins achieved here. The first section outlines the early daily life in Portuguese Creek. The second section is the war time experiences of one of the main characters. The third returns to Portuguese Creek to resume the action, and also includes flash-forwards to today when the last surviving settlers gather to watch a movie that has been made of their early days. I didn't really believe in Taylor's abiding devotion (or Nora's rejection of him), or see the necessity of Elizabeth's origin story, or understand Tanner's delinquency...but on the other hand, I was mesmerised by Corbett's court martial (and Matt's shifting memory of his role in it), I was charmed by the middle-of-the-night theft of the church, and the scenes of the forest fire (and especially the search for Elizabeth) had me on the edge of my seat –
Burning limbs were rolling across the fields now, bouncing and leaping and turning and dropping all around us. Sparks were landing. Small flames ignited on the chicken coop. An apple tree hissed and exploded into furry grey smoke. The wind was so loud you couldn't tell if you were hearing it or not. It was nearly as dark as night. Every fence post was on fire, like candles marking out the borders of the fields. The cows were bawling, running back and forth not knowing where to go, tails high with runny manure flying behind them, trampling Mother's garden into a chopped-up terrible mess.But most especially, I was intrigued by the overall themes of memory and storytelling and how we agree collectively on history. When returning soldiers refuse to share their experiences, can future generations be blamed when they get their history from Hollywood movies (made, by the way, by Americans who entered WWI four years and thousands of deaths after we Canadians did)? When the movie premieres that was made about the early days of Portuguese Creek, Charlie marvels at how it centers on a person that he had thought peripheral to the community – and recognises that we all think of ourselves as the main characters in our own lives; as central figures in history itself.
I wondered what effect this movie would have upon future accounts of the War's survivors and the Fire of '22. Was this the “true” story we were witnessing in this world of popcorn and rustling candy wrappers? Would it become the true story, erasing from our memories the versions we'd heard a thousand times from those who'd been there and from those whose parents had been there? Had we been honoured and celebrated and immortalized by celluloid, or had something been stolen from us that we would never get back?Overall, Broken Ground might suffer from some unsuccessful literary tricks, but the story is intriguing and important and the bones of it ought to be a part of every Canadian's education.
