Trade Paperback
608 Pages, 5.15 x 8.04 x 1.29 in
September 8, 1999
Knopf Canada
0676972152
9780676972153
From Our Editors
Joe Smallwood has defied all the odds, clawing his way up from
obscurity to become Newfoundland's first premier. His only problem
is Sheilagh Fielding, a popular newspaper columnist and gifted
satirist who casts a haunting shadow over Smallwood's life and
career. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
is both a mystery -- and a love story --spanning five decades.
From the Publisher
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a
Canadian bestseller, is a novel about Newfoundland that centres on
the story of Joe Smallwood, the true-life controversial political
figure who ushered the island through confederation with Canada and
became its first premier. Narrated from Smallwood''s perspective,
it voices a deep longing on the part of the Newfoundlander to do
something significant, "commensurate with the greatness of the land
itself". The New York Times said, "this prodigious,
eventful, character-rich book is a noteworthy achievement: a
biting, entertaining and inventive saga.... a brilliant and bravura
literary performance".
Smallwood, born in 1900, is the first of thirteen children raised
from the 'scruff' of Newfoundland, as opposed to the 'quality'. The
colony is seen as an unworthy and negligible place: as his teacher
from England says, "The worst of our lot comes over here, inbreeds
for several hundred years and the end-product is a hundred thousand
Newfoundlanders with Smallwood at the bottom of the barrel."
Smallwood, who still weighs only 75 pounds at the age of 20, seems
an unlikely hero to fulfil what he sees as his mission: to
transform the 'old lost land', with its lack of identity, into 'the
new found land'; and meanwhile to rise "not from rags to riches,
but from obscurity to world renown." With perseverance and
determination, he sets about the task, becoming a journalist for a
socialist newspaper in New York and then a union leader, at one
point walking the 700-mile railway track across the island to sell
memberships to the section-men living in shacks. He sees beyond his
unpromising background, the cold and unrelenting hardship and
isolation, envisioning a proud and great destiny. Eventually, a
politician full of wild moneymaking schemes, he is swept into a
world of intrigues and the machinations of the power elite, just as
Newfoundland must decide whether to become an independent country
or to join Canada.
In counterpoint to the earnest endeavours of Smallwood, champion of
the poor and the workers, is the Dorothy Parker-like figure of his
lifelong friend, Sheilagh Fielding. Their paths first cross at the
private school from which Smallwood is expelled, falsely accused of
writing a letter critical of the school, and thenceforth their
lives are inextricably intertwined. Fielding becomes an acerbic
newspaper columnist, a hard drinker with a sharp tongue who shares
a strange love-hate relationship with Smallwood. Her cynical
columns and personal journals are interspersed among Smallwood's
account, along with her irreverent and satirical Condensed
History of Newfoundland.
In writing a work of the imagination in part inspired by historical
events, Johnston wanted "to fashion out of the formless infinitude
of 'facts'…a work of art that would express a felt, emotional
truth... Adherence to the 'facts' will not lead you safely through
the labyrinthine pathways of the human heart." Johnston was 19 when
he met the real Joe Smallwood; he was just starting out as a
journalist, and Smallwood was less than complimentary about
Johnston's reporting. Although the politician died only in 1991,
little was written about his life before the age of fifty, allowing
Johnston some license to imagine his formative influences.
"I wanted to write a big book about Newfoundland in scope and in
vision. I couldn''t think of a bigger character whose life touched
on more themes, involved the whole of Newfoundland more completely
than Smallwood did." Smallwood saw Newfoundland in terms of
"unrealized talent and unfulfilled ambition"; his life was somehow
emblematic of the land. Moreover, says Johnston, "He was so prone
to making mistakes and so fallible, and he combines so many
contradictions in his personality. His quest, like that of many
great literary figures of the past century, is to overcome these
divisions." The completely invented character of Fielding,
meanwhile, "is like me", says Johnston. "I share her view of
Newfoundland."
The title of the book, Johnston says, evokes "the nostalgia
Newfoundlanders have felt for the possibilities of the island, and
that they still have for the future. Joe is always searching for
something commensurate with the greatness of the land itself, but
he can''t find it, and it''s driving him mad…Newfoundland is that
kind of place. It makes you want to live up to the landscape, but
on the other hand it offers you no resources to do so. There''s
always this constant yearning that at least for my part helped me
to start writing."
Smallwood's chronicle of his development from poor schoolboy to
Father of the Confederation is a story full of epic journeys and
thwarted loves, travelling from the ice floes of the seal hunt to
New York City, in a style reminiscent at times of John Irving,
Robertson Davies and Charles Dickens. Absorbing and entertaining,
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams provides us with a
deep perspective on the relationship between private lives and what
comes to be understood as history and shows, as E. Annie Proulx
commented, "Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer."
About the Author
Wayne Johnston was born in Newfoundland in 1958 and grew up in
Goulds, a small community a few miles south of St. John''s. When he
was a boy, he couldn't imagine a world beyond the island. "The only
outside world I ever saw was on television, and I didn't really
even believe that world existed." People were still divided over
the Confederation with Canada, which had happened only in 1949. His
family had a habit of moving around to different neighbourhoods and
his schooling was 'hyper-Catholic', traits which would feature in
his autobiographical first novel.
He graduated with a BA (Hons) in English from Memorial University
of Newfoundland, and worked from 1979 to 1981 as a reporter at the
St. John''s Daily News. Being a reporter was a crash course in how
society works, but he realized he didn't want it as a career. "I'm
not that outgoing of a person and you have to be in order to be a
good reporter." He moved away from Newfoundland, firstly to Ottawa,
and took up the writing of fiction full-time. In 1983 he graduated
with an MA from the University of New Brunswick. His first book,
The Story of Bobby O'Malley, was published shortly
after, and won the W.H.Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He
followed this success two years later with The Time of
Their Lives, which won the Canadian Authors'' Association
Award for Most Promising Young Writer.
His third novel, The Divine Ryans, again a
portrait of Irish Catholic Newfoundland, centres on a nine-year-old
hockey fanatic, whose father dies and whose family goes to live
with relatives who once had money but are fast declining. Time
Out has called it "achingly funny, needle sharp…with heart,
soul and brains". One of Johnston's most comic novels, it earned
him the title of 'the Roddy Doyle of Canada'. The Divine
Ryans won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction
Prize and has been adapted into a film starring Oscar-nominated
actor Pete Postlethwaite. Johnston wrote the screenplay himself for
this and also for the adaptation of his next novel, Human
Amusements, also optioned for film.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston's fifth
novel, in 1998 was shortlisted for the most prestigious fiction
awards in Canada, the Governor General''s Award and the Giller
Prize, the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and the Rogers
Communication Writers Trust Fiction Prize; it won the Thomas
Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and the Canadian Authors Association
Award for Fiction. A glowing New York Times Book Review
cover story caused the book to leap to the upper ranks of the
Amazon.com top 100 selling books of the day. It has been called a
'Dickensian romp of a novel', which uses the career of
Newfoundland''s first premier to create a love story and a
tragi-comic elegy to an impossible country.
Published across North America and Europe in several languages, the
novel caused some controversy in Canada among those who recalled
the real Joey Smallwood, a man who was hated by many
Newfoundlanders, including Johnston's own family, for bringing the
island into Canada. Although his strongly anti-confederate family
could barely bring themselves to mention Smallwood's name, Johnston
read a biography of the politician when he was 14.
Johnston considered carefully the different ways of establishing
'fictional/historical plausibility' in the novel. Re-reading Don
Delillo''s novel Libra, he observed how "Delillo
gave himself the freedom to invent scenes, incidents, conversations
as long as they seemed plausible within the fictional world that he
created." He also considered Salman Rushdie's Midnight''s
Children, where, in spite of the magic realism, India
still gains independence in 1948, and political figures are elected
or assassinated under the same circumstances as their real-life
counterparts. He decided he would not change or omit anything that
was publicly known. "I would fill in the historical record in a way
that could have been true, and flesh out and dramatize events that,
though publicly known, were not recorded in detail. Most
importantly, I would invent for Smallwood a lover/nemesis (Sheilagh
Fielding) who could have existed (but didn''t) and wove her and
Smallwood''s story into the history of Newfoundland. This would be
my plausibility contract with the reader."
In 1999 he published Baltimore''s Mansion, his
first non-fiction book, a family memoir that also became a national
bestseller and won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary
Non-Fiction. Johnston uses the stories of his own childhood and his
father and grandfather to cast light on Newfoundland's struggle
over relinquishing independence in 1949. A National Post
reviewer concluded that it was a 'non-fiction novel' drawing on all
Johnston's narrative powers to "shape the materials of real life
into a work of astonishing beauty and power". In another review,
Quill and Quire said "I began to smell the smells, hear
the lilt, and experience a sense of the fierce attachment
Newfoundlanders feel to their home province no matter where they
live," commenting that Newfoundland geography, history and culture
permeates Johnston's books.
Johnston has lived in Toronto since 1989, although he has to date
written exclusively about Newfoundland. "I couldn''t write about
the island while I was there," he says. "Life was too immediate. I
was too inundated by the place and its details. I''d write about
something and see it when I walked across the street the next day."
A "benign homesickness" has become a kind of fuel for writing about
the island. He talks of Newfoundland as being too "overwhelmingly
beautiful and substantial" to capture. To write with any kind of
objectivity, "I need distance to get that sense of what is
important and what is significant and what is not."
Bookclub Guide
1. The New York Times said Newfoundland asserts itself
as a setting in the novel "to the point of claiming a character
role"; also that "the profound but…doomed love between [Fielding]
and Smallwood is the novel's heart and soul". To what extent do you
think the novel is about Smallwood and Fielding, and to what extent
is it about Newfoundland?
2. How do Fielding and Smallwood's views of Newfoundland
differ?
3. "There is no reason for us to be so much in the thrall of our
historical figures that we cannot suspend our disbelief when
writers of fiction ring variations on their lives," wrote Johnston
in The Globe and Mail, after a journalist complained that
Joey Smallwood was too much "within reach of memory" to be a fit
subject for a novel. How might a reader's knowledge (or lack of
knowledge) about the real Joey Smallwood affect the reading of the
novel?
4. Can you compare The Colony of Unrequited
Dreams to another novel of Newfoundland - or to a
novel by John Irving or Charles Dickens?