From Amazon
Winner of the 1996 Governor General's Award for fiction,
The Englishman's Boy is an extraordinary achievement. It's a story within a story--a shimmering romance about the myth of movie-making in Hollywood in the 1920s and an account of a real-life massacre of First Nations people in Montana in the 1870s. Linking these two very different stories is Shorty McAdoo, an aging cowboy, who as a young man acted as a guide for the American and Canadian trappers who perpetrated the massacre and who is now going to be the subject of a no-holds-barred blockbuster set to rival D.W. Griffith's epic
Birth of a Nation. Vanderhaeghe attempts to break the spell of Hollywood as mythmaker, expose the terrible tragic reality that lurks behind this particular myth, and make readers look again at why we have bought into this mythos, both of the idealism of the American West and Hollywood.
--Jeffrey Canton
From Library Journal
In alternating chapters, two narratives?one set in the American West, the other in Twenties Hollywood?gradually unfold and intersect. The Western saga centers around a boy who, after his English employer succumbs to a fever, attaches himself to a band of wolvers making their perilous way through hostile Indian territory into Canada. Fifty years later, in Hollywood, Saskatchewan native Harry Vincent is taken in hand by Rachel Gold, a so-called "new woman," as a scenarist for a studio headed by the mysterious and elusive Damon Ira Chance. Chance dreams of producing an epic Western in the tradition of his hero, D.W. Griffith, that will stand as a landmark of cinematic history. To this end, he hires Vincent to track down an old-timer whose story he is sure will lend itself to his purpose. This winner of the Governor General's award for fiction, Canada's top literary prize, has a sweeping scope and an evocative sense of time and place. We have Ludlum's spy stories, Grisham's legal thrillers, and Patrick O'Brian's sea tales, but on the quality literary front so dominated by fiction written by and appealing to women, it is a rare pleasure to be able to recommend one for the boys.?Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
