The novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a book that gleefully uses canards to make you think it is about one thing when it is really about something else. You think it’s about Joey Smallwood. You think it’s about Newfoundland. You think it’s about the business of Newfoundland joining the Canadian confederation.
You would be right and you would be wrong at the same time. It is about those things in a functional way. They provide the skeleton of the story. But the book is about something else.
What is that something else?
Fielding. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is about Sheilagh Fielding. The real question is, “Who or what is Fielding?”
Questions
For me, the best books leave us asking questions. This is one of those books. It leaves us with oodles of them, the biggest one being Fielding. The book is about her, but what is she? Does she represent something? Or is she just Fielding, a fascinating enigma that holds us in her grip?
I’m glad I’ve never met the author, Wayne Johnston. I’m glad I know next to nothing about him. All I really know is that he’s from Newfoundland.
My ignorance allows me to create Wayne Johnston. My Wayne Johnston is fictional, of course. But mine is a writer who takes great pleasure in those canards I mentioned above. It delights him to imagine his readers trying to align his Joe Smallwood with theirs, and trying to reconcile their idea of Newfoundland with what he has imagined. He knows history is fiction without the balls to call itself fiction, so he plays with it.
And he takes huge pleasure in seeing us circle all around the heart of his story, Fielding, without ever recognizing the book is about her.
And perhaps he despairs, just a bit, that in not recognizing her we can’t see what she is.
Yes, everyone thinks she is a great character. But they don’t see her as the story. I can’t help but wonder if the equation is this: It’s about Fielding. But it becomes a book about Newfoundland because Fielding is Newfoundland. That’s just speculation, however.
Smallwood
And in a way, it is about Smallwood because he cannot exist without her. He spends his life seeking her, questioning her, wanting her to do one thing while she insists on doing the other. When he gets glimpses of the real Fielding, he runs from her. He imagines stories to placate the uproar she creates within him. He’s in love with her. He doesn’t want to be. He refuses to acknowledge it.
All the actions of his life are really about running away from the truth of his life; the essential one. Fielding. And the way he runs away from it is by running into it. He escapes into Newfoundland without knowing what it is he’s running into. As he does with Fielding, he discovers it by increments, though he never really quite understands it.
He finally finds the real Fielding, just as he finds the real Newfoundland. Neither is what he imagined.
In the end, the book dismisses him, almost as if it is bored by what he becomes. It focuses on what it has been concerned with all along: Fielding. She begins the book; she ends it. But what is she?
I don’t know. But she does seem to be the only character truly aware of Newfoundland’s history, its contrarian nature, its love and hate of itself; proud and ashamed at the same time. Perhaps that is why Fielding is a writer; someone focused on her work, serious and proud of her work, yet always hobbled by self-doubt, publicly always couching her meaning in irony; privately, in her journals, saying what she really wants to say.
Newfoundland and Canada
I remember Joey Smallwood. I was born about seven years after Newfoundland joined with Canada. Smallwood’s image, with those perpetual glasses, is very distinct for me. But I’m not a Newfoundlander.
I grew up on the mainland. I’ve never been in Newfoundland. So perhaps it is easy, and perhaps erroneous, for me to say I don’t think the sense of size and isolation of Newfoundland that is communicated in the book, and genuinely experienced, is all that different from other places in Canada. It is a big country. Most of us cluster in cities in the south where we dispel isolation with the anonymity of crowds.
But is the sense of size and isolation in Newfoundland substantially different than that of the plains of Saskatchewan, Alberta, or the miles of unpopulated landscape in Manitoba? Is the solitude different than that felt in the north, Nunavut perhaps? Is the climate more harsh?
I don’t think so. I do, however, think the histories are different. Canada has a million histories, all of them bullshit, all of them this person’s or that person’s perspective. In The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, I find it noteworthy that Fielding is writing a history of Newfoundland, a condensed, irony rich history, a history of all of the island’s benefactors who buggered it. Smallwood becomes one of Newfoundland’s benefactors.
Physically crippled by tuberculosis, emotionally by her self-disregard, and fueled by unrequited love, Fielding is the heart of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Maybe it is in this way she is Newfoundland.
I don’t know.
Here’s what I do know: This is a great book. Read it.