- Paperback
- Publisher: Picador (1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312195443
- ISBN-13: 978-0312195441
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 15.4 x 4.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 499 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #891,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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First Sentence
Even from such a distance Fine Man could smell their camp, the fried-pig stink of white men. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Even from such a distance Fine Man could smell their camp, the fried-pig stink of white men. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An annual favourite,
By C Dixon (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Englishman's Boy: A Novel (Paperback)
I have read this novel three times in the past three years and every time that I have completed it, my admiration for Vanderhaeghe's astounding writing talent has grown. It is impossible not to feel as though you are a bystander watching the events, which Vanderhaeghe describes, unfold. You can taste the dust of the Canadian West, you can hear the brimming cacophony of 1920's Hollywood and you can sense the pain of the characters. This brilliant novel is only one title from Vanderhaeghe's fantastic literary history. I have read all of his pieces of fiction and I highly recommend each and every novel or short story. On more than one occasion, one of his novels has forced me to cancel whatever I planned for that day in favour of finishing that work. He is clearly one of best writers that I have ever read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
impossible to put down,
By
This review is from: The Englishman's Boy (Paperback)
Guy Vanderhaeghe has crafted a masterful novel about the Canadian WIld West and 1920s Hollywood which starts as a riveting thriller and turns into a meditation on quetions of identity (personal and national), the role of memory in historical reconstruction, and the value (or is it futility?) of remembering and retelling the past.The book tells two stories. In one, the Swan Hills Massacre looms as Caandian settlers head out into the West, following "horse thieves." Among them is the Englishman, from the point of view of whose servant-- the Boy, Shorty McAdoo-- the action unfolds. The other story tells of Damon Ira LaChance, Hollywood mogul, who wants to make an epic D.W. Griffiths-inspired Western. La Chance's producer seeks out the reticent McAdoo and the narative alternates between the Hollywood and Wild West stories. ALthought the characters remain opaque, Vanderhaghe is on sure fictional footing here. One of the novel's points is that history ironically becomes less knowable the more it is interpreted. The horror of the events that McAdoo will witness is both the subject of LaChance's film and the simple fact that makes it necessary for the film to "misintepret" the events it portrays. So it is with the characters: we see actions and words, but motivations are strangely absent, as is interior character development. It is as if the narrator knows that his own story is a re-creation (and not recreation) whose limits-- a hundred and twenty years after the "fact"-- are acknowledged in his refusal to make up yet ANOTHER story about the men's interior lives. Perhaps, as some have suggested, this is the flaw in Vanderhaeghe's novel; perhaps it is his subtle nod to the Hollywood tradition within which the novel must work. The book is an edge of the seat thriller, a philosophical question-poser, and often oddly beautiful, its nostalgia shot through with a bitter self-consciousness. Like all great Westerns (Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, The Shooting, The Great Northfield Minnesota Gang, High Noon), The Englishman's Boys is about the death of the imagined West and, sadly, the death of the real, complex but strangely opaque people who once lived there.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quietly Beautiful,
By
This review is from: The Englishman's Boy: A Novel (Paperback)
THE ENGLISHMAN'S BOY tells two connected stories: the first is about a band of cowboys heading north to Canada on the trail of the Assiniboine Indians who stole their horses; the other is a tale of the early days of Hollywood, following a film writer as he interviews an old cowboy to use his story to make the great American movie. Both stories end unhappily, and the fate of the Englishman's boy is at the heart of each.I think what I appreciated most about this book was the soft, subdued way in which the stories unfolded. The writing was clean and unaffected, and Vanderhaeghe let the weight of his stories speak for themselves, rather than gum them up with flashy language. Though the two stories were set about forty years apart, the similarities between the cutthroat nature of Hollywood and the old west are apparent. The Englishman's boy serves in both stories as their spiritual center--true goodness, surrounded by flawed, selfish individuals.
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