Book Review
War Stories
- Dagmar Novak (Author)
Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel. Peter Lang Publishing Group (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Muriel Whitaker (Editor)
Great Canadian War Stories. University of Alberta Press (purchase at Amazon.ca - Muriel Whitaker (Editor)
Great Canadian War Stories (audiotape). University of Alberta Press (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Susan Fisher
Dagmar Novak’s Dubious Glory, a survey of the modern Canadian war novel, will be a useful reference for scholars, for it examines works from both world wars of the twentieth century. She discusses writers such as Basil King and Bertrand Sinclair who have been largely forgotten; she also examines well-known writers such as Ralph Connor whose war novels have been (perhaps deservedly) forgotten.
Her method is serviceable: there is a brief biographical sketch of each author, followed by a plot summary. She proceeds chronologically, not only for obvious historical reasons but also for critical ones. Novak classifies the early works of World War I as romance, in which essentially pure and virtuous heroes descended into the hell of war, emerging either dead or wounded, but certainly not tainted. This mode, so evident in works such as Ralph Connor’s The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land, was succeeded in the late 1920s and the 1930s by the brutal realism of such works as Charles Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed and Philip Child’s God’s Sparrows. According to Novak, works about World War II maintain this realistic mode, but adopt a more sharply ironic tone. Whereas the romances of the first war tend to treat officers as noble creatures, the novels of the second war focus firmly on the "little man" and his experience of the pointlessness of warfare and the bureaucratic indifference of the military.
Novak devotes her penultimate chapter to Findley’s 1977 The Wars, which she regards as the apotheosis of this development. Her discussion usefully links Findley’s novel to the traditions of Canadian war writing she has already outlined: The Wars revisits, albeit in an ironic mode, the "idealistic romance" of much early Great War writing; it also employs the "grim realism" of the war writing that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s; finally, it embodies the "quest for meaning" that Novak describes as characteristic of such World War II novels as Colin McDougall’s Execution. But The Wars needs to be viewed, according to Novak, not only as a culmination of these traditions but also as Findley’s response to contemporary conditions. Accordingly, she devotes several pages to Canada’s involvement in Vietnam. This is interesting enough material, but Novak never explains how it might affect our reading of The Wars.
Her final chapter employs a Frye-inspired schema of historical cycles to explain the evolution from romance to realism to irony. The differences in tone that she describes certainly do exist, but to claim as she does, invoking Frye’s theory of modes, that these differences are the natural outcome of historical cycles will be a bit much for most readers. Novak’s adherence to this diachronic perspective leads her to neglect other aspects of war writing. She does not discuss, for example, the rhetorical problems of representing the horrors of war. Moreover, except in her discussion of The Wars, where she points out Findley’s originality in using photographs and archives, she does not examine the complex links between fiction and other forms of cultural or collective memory.
The rigidities imposed by this critical model perhaps also explain why Novak’s study (apparently completed in 1999) ends with The Wars, and does not include Kevin Major’s No Man’s Land (1994) or Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground (1998). Of course, one can never cover everything, but looking at these novels, which contain very little of the irony so prominent in The Wars, might have caused Novak to modify her critical framework.
Muriel Whitaker’s collection Great Canadian War Stories contains excerpts from a wide range of twentieth-century works. The emphasis in her informative introduction is on the First War, but the selections are fairly evenly divided between the two world wars; there is even a short piece by Hugh Garner on the Spanish Civil War. Geographically, too, the range is wide—from the Western Front to an internment camp in Borneo to a Polish vil lage. Some of the pieces are excerpts from well-known longer works that are still in print: The Wars, Generals Die in Bed, Obasan. But others are taken from works such as Peregrine Acland’s All Else Is Folly and Will Bird’s Sunrise for Peter and Other Stories that are not easy to find, and these are welcome. Some of Whitaker’s choices are excellent: I particularly enjoyed discovering "Winter’s Tale," a short story by Thomas Raddall about the Halifax explosion. A well-selected bit from Turvey is amusing; a whole novel of this sort of thing is tiresome, but this brief excerpt works very well. Rather than excerpting Colin McDougall’s Execution, Whitaker has included "The Firing-Squad," the original short story on which the novel was based; the outcome of the story is completely different from that of the novel. For readers wanting an introduction to Canadian war fiction, including selections from francophone works such as Louis Caron’s The Draft Dodger (L’Emittouflé) and Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories {Les Enfants du bonhomme dans la lune), Whitaker’s collection will be very useful. As an anthology, its value is perhaps limited to high-school or lower-level college courses. Instructors of upper-level courses may prefer their students to read works like Generals Die in Bed and The Wars in their entirety.
An accompanying set of audiotapes presents eighteen of the twenty-two selections. The readings by John Born are, by and large, effective, although his attempts at a Newfoundland accent (for Will Bird’s "Sunrise for Peter") are regrettable. In reading D.A. MacMillan’s "The Newspaper Writer," Born gives one character, a young Canadian pilot, a Midwestern twang. Two pieces have first-person female narrators, yet Born delivers these as well. Despite such flaws, these tapes will be a useful classroom resource, even for instructors who choose not to use the print anthology.
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MLA: Fisher, Susan. War Stories. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 24 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #179 (Winter 2003), Literature & War. (pg. 169 - 171)
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