King John of Canada [Hardcover]

One of the things that a Canadian isn’t supposed to think, let alone say, is: “Maybe the rest of Canada should hold a referendum on whether or not Quebec can stay in the confederation.” This sort of outrageous proposal is off limits for polite Canadians, and unimaginable in the mouths of our politicians. Even if, secretly, very secretly, and with a burning sense of shame, a good number of Canadians might think such a referendum wouldn’t be a bad idea. And, after all, why not? Why should Quebec get to decide, on its own time table, the fate of the country, while the rest of the provinces sit back and wait?
Starting with this big, thick Canadian scab, Scott Gardiner’s novel, King John of Canada, picks away at cherished Canadian beliefs and long-held agreements about what is proper and what is not in the political life of the country. He also lets flow a torrent of what ifs: what if someone with charm, a good heart, and an intolerance for moral compromise came along, with regal power, and shook up Canada? What if, with sheer common sense and the credo, “the best way to protect against a punch in the nose, is a punch in the nose,” that same person was able to fix all of the problems our polite earnestness keeps us from addressing? It wouldn’t be just the problem of Quebec that would be dealt with, but also the gun registry, Toronto’s fiscal crisis, Indian Affairs, the CBC, our relations with the USA and Saudi Arabia, and the health crisis. What if Canada had a king?
King John of Canada is a political satire, a rare thing in Canadian literature. With the death of Mordecai Richler, there are few sharp pens in the country to make us laugh and yell at the same time. We’ve got our television satirists, but our literary landscape is clear, almost completely, of politics. So Gardiner’s funny book is a welcome addition-one which, if he’s done his job right, will inspire equal measures of laughter, anger, and actual thought about how things are and how they might be.
The central conceit of the book is that a smart, no-nonsense Torontonian named John, ends up-through a mazy combination of political crises and media instigation-the winner of a lottery whose prize is kingship of Canada. It’s a repatriated and independent monarchy, with John in the throne. Once this happens, the fun begins; Gardiner, through the king and his narrator, starts taking aim at everything in sight. He dings Albertans (a surprising number of whose premiers “were Baptist Creationists or former CFL linebackers”), Newfoundlanders and Cape Bretoners (“where it was argued that since many families had refused to learn anything but fishing or mining for ten generations, they had the necessary discipline for a successful career in monarchy”), MBAs (whose programs “should really be administered by the athletic departments of their universities, rather than the academic ones . . . what they delivered was far more in the nature of conditioning than education”), Quebec (“[t]he thing about Quebec is that it sucked the money out of Canada”), meek Torontonians (“[t]he thing about Toronto is that it pumped the money straight back in”), and the Canadian business community (“[w]hen it comes to the lure of tax cuts, the business community’s reaction is . . . textbook Pavlovian. Ring the bell of tax reduction . . . and they’ll slobber to heel every time.”). Authoresses, pompous newspaper barons, environmental activists, official bilingualism, Christian conservatives, and Toronto culture snobs all get a licking too; while the Canadian Football League, the army, buffalo skins, the city of Toronto, geese, Norwegian princesses, and common sense all come out on top.
The narrator of this tale is King John’s old friend and right-hand man, a transplanted American nicknamed Blue. He writes while holed up in a Muskoka cabin in the middle of winter, burning scavenged wood, furniture, and finally books in an effort to stay alive.The king is dead, and Blue is determined to tell his story. It would not be fair to list the outrageous things Blue and his king do and say that cross the line: that’s what satire is supposed to do, after all, and Gardiner should be happy to know he’ll succeed in boiling some blood.
There are some problems with the book. Chiefly, this isn’t so much a novel with characters in it as a series of intriguing policy discussions. King John, the subject of the novel, never emerges as much more than an outline of a character-we get reports of his doings rather than a sense of the man himself.
We hear about how the king solves various policy conundrums mainly through descriptions of the policies themselves. One section of 20 pages covers gun control, Catholic schools, environmental activists, goose hunting, and the neglected development of Toronto’s harbourfront, and though the policy descriptions are often funny and astute, there’s little in the way of character presence throughout the section. It reads like a Maclean’s article from an off-kilter universe, which will entertain political junkies, but leaves King John something of a mystery. Two thirds of the way through the book, Blue reports that King John “was in every way the opposite to what you’d think of as an army type, but John got soldiers. And soldiers got John.” This leaves one with many questions. First, how exactly is one supposed to think of an “army type”? More importantly, what is it about King John that would make him the opposite of such a type? We are told that John is politically shrewd, charming, honest, and beloved by women. But otherwise, he’s a blank slate, with only a few details to direct the reader, such as his house in Muskoka, his love of the Globe and Mail (and, one presumes, his Upper Canada College education).
Gardiner has written an audacious book, no doubt. It is as infuriating as it is amusing. Perhaps the most infuriating thing is that in the end, Toronto gets its way. The king is Torontonian, after all. In the novel, this in itself creates a minor constitutional crisis: the whole country, and especially Toronto, is aghast that such an unthinkable (and insulting!) thing should come to pass. Toronto’s lot is to support the country financially, and to be hated-but not to govern, and certainly not to rule. Most certainly, it was never meant to rule with the absolute power of a monarch. In the real world, I suspect King Gardiner of Toronto is smiling from his throne as his non-Torontonian readers suffer the same reaction to his book. “You see,” he’s likely saying, “that just proves my point. You don’t know what’s good for you.”
Hugh McGuire (Books in Canada)

Praise for The Dominion of Wyley McFadden:

“A rich, dark and highly accomplished debut.”
— Ottawa Citizen

“[Gardiner’s] wry descriptions of motels, diners, truckstops and the eccentrics who inhabit them evoke Steinbeck in his hard-travelling days.”
— Globe and Mail

“Gardiner’s writing is tight and sure.”
— Edmonton Journal