The Englishman's Boy (Paperback)

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.

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.

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.