The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams

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.

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."

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."

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?