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A review by weaselweader
The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe
4.0
First-rate Canadian story-telling
When it comes to anti-aboriginal prejudice, no honest, rational person can claim that Canada is without its problems or shameful events in its history. The Cypress Hills Massacre – the slaughter of more than 20 Assiniboine Indians in Saskatchewan by white wolf hunters who had crossed the loosely defined American border on the trail on some stolen horses – is just one of these shameful events, notable in that it generated a national scandal and the creation of the quasi-military force that ultimately evolved into the RCMP.
Shorty McAdoo is The Englishman’s Boy, the servant of an English gentleman, who, after his employer’s death, aimlessly fell in with a nasty group of wolf hunters and horse wranglers. The story of McAdoo’s eventual part in the massacre is unfolded from two different perspectives – first, in third person real-time narration set in 1873 and, second, from a first person perspective as McAdoo reluctantly relates his story as factual support for a silent cowboy movie in 1923 Hollywood.
From a purely historical perspective, The Englishman’s Boy is actually two stories – a horrifying tale of the 19th century Midwest in North America and the development of the silent movie industry in the early 20th century seamlessly melded into a single moving and relentlessly gripping novel. But it is neither pleasant nor easy to swallow. The diversity of topics that a reader is forced to consider is almost dizzying in its scope – xenophobia, anti-aboriginal racism and cultural genocide, anti-Semitism, misogyny, sexual perversion, bullying, the foundations of the American gun culture, the indolence and inane self-centered lifestyles of the wealthy in the USA’s burgeoning capitalist economy, the adulation that is offered to Hollywood stars and more. Snippets of Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant novel will remind readers of a number of popular novels that successfully challenged them on the same topics – Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, for example.
Compelling from first page to last, The Englishman’s Boy is the kind of novel that sticks in your craw and will force you to think about yourself, your country and your history for a long, long time to come. Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
When it comes to anti-aboriginal prejudice, no honest, rational person can claim that Canada is without its problems or shameful events in its history. The Cypress Hills Massacre – the slaughter of more than 20 Assiniboine Indians in Saskatchewan by white wolf hunters who had crossed the loosely defined American border on the trail on some stolen horses – is just one of these shameful events, notable in that it generated a national scandal and the creation of the quasi-military force that ultimately evolved into the RCMP.
Shorty McAdoo is The Englishman’s Boy, the servant of an English gentleman, who, after his employer’s death, aimlessly fell in with a nasty group of wolf hunters and horse wranglers. The story of McAdoo’s eventual part in the massacre is unfolded from two different perspectives – first, in third person real-time narration set in 1873 and, second, from a first person perspective as McAdoo reluctantly relates his story as factual support for a silent cowboy movie in 1923 Hollywood.
From a purely historical perspective, The Englishman’s Boy is actually two stories – a horrifying tale of the 19th century Midwest in North America and the development of the silent movie industry in the early 20th century seamlessly melded into a single moving and relentlessly gripping novel. But it is neither pleasant nor easy to swallow. The diversity of topics that a reader is forced to consider is almost dizzying in its scope – xenophobia, anti-aboriginal racism and cultural genocide, anti-Semitism, misogyny, sexual perversion, bullying, the foundations of the American gun culture, the indolence and inane self-centered lifestyles of the wealthy in the USA’s burgeoning capitalist economy, the adulation that is offered to Hollywood stars and more. Snippets of Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant novel will remind readers of a number of popular novels that successfully challenged them on the same topics – Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, for example.
Compelling from first page to last, The Englishman’s Boy is the kind of novel that sticks in your craw and will force you to think about yourself, your country and your history for a long, long time to come. Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss