Historical fiction continues its run as the dominant prose form in Canadian literature. As these three recent arrivals demonstrate, imagining the past raises questions unexpectedly relevant to the contemporary world.
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Casualties by Terrence Heath begins with the death of banker Peter “Chuck” Stemichuk and his widow Clara’s discovery of a murder confession in his jacket pocket. The note is signed “Thomas Pennan.” As Clara searches for Thomas in the present, a narrative set in the past follows Thomas’ and Chuck’s friendship in Regina during the Depression years. After the Regina Riot, the main characters travel to Spain to join the international volunteer brigade fighting Franco. In the meantime, the part of the story set in the contemporary world describes Clara’s sleuthing expeditions to Vancouver, Regina, and eventually England in search of their story.
Generally, the characters in this novel behave erratically, not because of the pressures that plot events or the history in which they participate put on them, but because they are inconsistently drawn. Thus it can be difficult to know what to make of the narrative’s treatment of various social issues. The story seems at one point inexplicably to conflate race and class. When a friendly uniformed Mountie helps Clara with her suitcase at the Regina Airport, she observes that “this one, if she was not mistaken, was actually an Indian, or aboriginal, or whatever they called themselves now.” The only other time Clara encounters any Native people is shortly afterwards, as she walks through a rundown Regina neighbourhood. Since her experience there challenges a stereotype running through her mind, one wonders whether these episodes are meant to suggest some imminent expansion of her consciousness to include people ordinarily invisible to (or possibly not tolerated by) her. They may be, but if so, why does she never question her own casual racism, or for that matter critique her own snobbery and relentlessly patronizing attitude? Readers never learn just what the connection between race and economic hardship, which seems implicit in the second encounter, is supposed to be, nor do they learn what this “whatever they called themselves now” is supposed to mean.
More than the imagined pasts that these novels portray, I find myself thinking about the imagined readers whom they address. Because it involves the past so deeply in its narratives, historical fiction often emphasizes the phenomena of change and growth. In two of these novels, the real insight may be that some ideas remain dishearteningly constant.
