In this forceful, complex memoir, Wayne Johnston returns to the setting of his 1999 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Johnston doesn't just come from Newfoundland, remotest of Canada's provinces; he comes from the Avalon Peninsula, the most isolated portion of Newfoundland (and confused in young Wayne's boyish imaginings with the mythical Avalon, where King Arthur sailed to be healed of mortal wounds). It's an apt metaphor for a land that "was the edge of the known world, and looked it." Avalon's natives fiercely resented the 1948 referendum that joined Newfoundland to the Canadian Confederation--especially Johnston's father, the memoir's central character, who keens for lost independence in a manner highly reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus's father in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Indeed, parallels with Ireland are evident throughout, not just because the Johnstons are descended from Irish immigrants but because the Newfoundlanders exhibit a similar passionate insularity and zest for feuding among themselves. Johnston's muscular, plainspoken prose bears little resemblance to that of James Joyce, but his themes of exile and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and an ancient culture's ambivalent relationship with modernity resonate with the great writer's most urgent concerns. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Returning to the Newfoundland trenchantly chronicled in his acclaimed recent novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston has crafted a sensitive, occasionally elusive memoir centered on three generations of men in his family. As in the novel, Newfoundland's "thirty thousand square miles of bogs and barrens" prove an affecting backdrop. His grandfather eked out a living as a blacksmithAa dying profession in the tiny town of FerrylandAwhile his father, Arthur, trained as an agricultural technician but became a "fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man" who took a job as a codfish industry inspector for the Fisheries of Canada. Striking passages recount Arthur's routine days spent tasting cod in a laboratory, returning home unable to bear the sight or smell of fish, and his travels around the province shutting down revoltingly unkempt processing plants. Johnston remains preoccupied with the fierce debates over the former British colony's 1948 confederation with Canada, a stinging defeat for his father and others who yearned for an independent Newfoundland nation. That bitterly contested vote, which saddled the province with billions of dollars of debt and hastened the demise of its rich, insular culture, also gives rise to this memoir's central mystery: an enigmatic family secret that darkened the relationship between Johnston's father and grandfather. Apparently a dispute over loyalty to Newfoundland, this betrayal-tinged affair seems somewhat contrived as the book's emotional touchstone and remains a disconcerting false note in an otherwise skillfully composed reminiscence. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Unfortunately, Johnston's memoir--covering Newfoundland's unforgiving terrain, awful weather, and the generations of his Newfoundland family who fought against union with Canada--follows hard upon The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, his fiction dealing with many of the same topics. A reader unfamiliar with that brilliant novel might find more entertainment in this mellow and sedately paced true story. Neither the close vote that united Newfoundland with Canada nor the endless variety of bad weather endured by the region's inhabitants is sufficiently interesting to keep this volume from being slow going, except to those who are present or expatriate Newfoundlanders. Johnston's vivid and often lovely writing, however, does entice. A word about the title: Lord Baltimore, one of the first New World colonists, arrived at his newly built mansion in the 1620s. After narrowly surviving one winter, he and other survivors sailed back to England, leaving his mansion to decay. A metaphor? Probably. Select this with care. It is beautiful, inoffensive, and intelligent but not very exciting.---Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
A beguiling combination of family history and autobiography, this first nonfiction work from Ontario novelist Johnston (The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, 1999) forms a revealing appendage to his own fictional works.We are given the experiences of three generations of Johnstons in a carefully shaped narrative that blends together chronological history, the adult Johnston’s backward looks at his own childhood, and fictionalized reconstructions of quietly climactic moments in the lives of Johnston’s paternal grandfather Charlie and father Art. The former was a blacksmith and fisherman in “Ferryland,” the original name of the colony founded in the 1620s by England’s Lord Baltimore (the site of whose mansion, long since destroyed, is still sought by archaeologists and scholars). Art was a better educated, more opinionated sort who went away to college vowing to escape the hardships that had claimed Charlie, but ended up a “fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man” who would become a federal fisheries inspector. Their episodic stories are unified by the Johnstons’ (most especially Art’s) ongoing hatred of the “Confederation” (with mainland Canada, accomplished in 1947) and its avatar—the resourceful politician Joseph Smallwood—a theme echoed in such vivid sequences as young Wayne’s train journey across the province (in protest against “the first trans-island paved road” and the advent of buses) and a wistful description of the author’s leavetaking from home (for college, and the hope of becoming a writer). The book climaxes with Johnston’s movingly imagined re-creation of the “final days,” during which Charlie and Art separately (and dourly) await the dawning of Confederation, and with it the loss of their country’s independence and their awareness of their own powerlessness and mortality.Johnston is a master of understatement wringing honest nostalgic emotion from simple declarative sentences. Here he offers a rich display of the rhetorical skills and heartfelt cultural recall that make his novels so enchanting and rewarding. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Praise for The Colony of Unrequited Dreams:

"The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an indispensable masterpiece.  It reshapes and animates history with luminous verisimilitude. Every page of Wayne Johnston's stunning novel displays the highest regard for his reader's intelligence and for the art of writing itself...Mr. Johnston has genius in him, and I think haunting, unmitigated, uncanny vision and grace."
--Howard Norman

"This splendid, entertaining novel is both a version of David Copperfield transposed to twentieth-century Newfoundland and an evocation of vanished ways of life in a place caught in tumultuous political changes. Rich and complex, it offers Dickensian pleasures."
--Andrea Barrett

"A novel of cavernous complexity that nevertheless does not overwhelm the reader, who can repose in pure narrative."
--Luc Sante, New York Times Book Review

"As absorbing as fiction can be-and a marvelous introduction to the work of one of our continent's best writers."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Wayne Johnston is a brilliant and accomplished writer, and his Newfoundland--boots and boats, rough politics and rough country, history and journalism--during the wild Smallwood years is vivid and sharp."
--Annie Proulx

"Grand and operatic...this brilliantly clever evocation of a slice of Canadian history establishes Johnston as a writer of vast abilities and appeal."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A mighty accomplishment:  Here's a novel that is as much a tale of two people as it is a history of the harsh, odd, and ultimately fascinating land from which they hail.  There is indeed more to Newfoundland than salt cod and tundra, and Johnston brings it all to life."
--Chris Bohjalian, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"A long, impassioned, absorbing novel...bravura storytelling."
--Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

"A capacious, old-fashioned summer hammock of a book--the kind you fall into, enchanted, and hate to leave...I wouldn't have missed the trip for anything."
--Dan Cryer, Newsday


Book Description
In this loving memoir Wayne Johnston returns to Newfoundland-the people, the place, the politics-and illuminates his family's story with all the power and drama he brought to his magnificent novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Descendents of the Irish who settled in Ferryland, Lord Baltimore's Catholic colony in Newfoundland, the Johnstons "went from being sea-fearing farmers to sea-faring fishermen." Each generation resolves to escape the hardships of life at sea, but their connection to this fantastically beautiful but harsh land is as eternal as the rugged shoreline, and the separations that result between generations may be as inevitable as the winters they endure. Unfulfilled dreams haunt this family history and make Baltimore's Mansion a thrilling and captivating book.



From the Inside Flap
In this loving memoir Wayne Johnston returns to Newfoundland-the people, the place, the politics-and illuminates his family's story with all the power and drama he brought to his magnificent novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Descendents of the Irish who settled in Ferryland, Lord Baltimore's Catholic colony in Newfoundland, the Johnstons "went from being sea-fearing farmers to sea-faring fishermen." Each generation resolves to escape the hardships of life at sea, but their connection to this fantastically beautiful but harsh land is as eternal as the rugged shoreline, and the separations that result between generations may be as inevitable as the winters they endure. Unfulfilled dreams haunt this family history and make Baltimore's Mansion a thrilling and captivating book.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this loving memoir Wayne Johnston returns to Newfoundland-the people, the place, the politics-and illuminates his family's story with all the power and drama he brought to his magnificent novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Descendents of the Irish who settled in Ferryland, Lord Baltimore's Catholic colony in Newfoundland, the Johnstons "went from being sea-fearing farmers to sea-faring fishermen." Each generation resolves to escape the hardships of life at sea, but their connection to this fantastically beautiful but harsh land is as eternal as the rugged shoreline, and the separations that result between generations may be as inevitable as the winters they endure. Unfulfilled dreams haunt this family history and make Baltimore's Mansion a thrilling and captivating book.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Returning to the Newfoundland trenchantly chronicled in his acclaimed recent novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston has crafted a sensitive, occasionally elusive memoir centered on three generations of men in his family. As in the novel, Newfoundland's "thirty thousand square miles of bogs and barrens" prove an affecting backdrop. His grandfather eked out a living as a blacksmith--a dying profession in the tiny town of Ferryland--while his father, Arthur, trained as an agricultural technician but became a "fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man" who took a job as a codfish industry inspector for the Fisheries of Canada. Striking passages recount Arthur's routine days spent tasting cod in a laboratory, returning home unable to bear the sight or smell of fish, and his travels around the province shutting down revoltingly unkempt processing plants. Johnston remains preoccupied with the fierce debates over the former British colony's 1948 confederation with Canada, a stinging defeat for his father and others who yearned for an independent Newfoundland nation. That bitterly contested vote, which saddled the province with billions of dollars of debt and hastened the demise of its rich, insular culture, also gives rise to this memoir's central mystery: an enigmatic family secret that darkened the relationship between Johnston's father and grandfather. Apparently a dispute over loyalty to Newfoundland, this betrayal-tinged affair seems somewhat contrived as the book's emotional touchstone and remains a disconcerting false note in an otherwise skillfully composed reminiscence. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Unfortunately, Johnston's memoir--covering Newfoundland's unforgiving terrain, awful weather, and the generations of his Newfoundland family who fought against union with Canada--follows hard upon The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, his fiction dealing with many of the same topics. A reader unfamiliar with that brilliant novel might find more entertainment in this mellow and sedately paced true story. Neither the close vote that united Newfoundland with Canada nor the endless variety of bad weather endured by the region's inhabitants is sufficiently interesting to keep this volume from being slow going, except to those who are present or expatriate Newfoundlanders. Johnston's vivid and often lovely writing, however, does entice. A word about the title: Lord Baltimore, one of the first New World colonists, arrived at his newly built mansion in the 1620s. After narrowly surviving one winter, he and other survivors sailed back to England, leaving his mansion to decay. A metaphor? Probably. Select this with care. It is beautiful, inoffensive, and intelligent but not very exciting. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/00.]--Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

A beguiling combination of family history and autobiography, this first nonfiction work from Ontario novelist Johnston (The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, 1999) forms a revealing appendage to his own fictional works. We are given the experiences of three generations of Johnstons in a carefully shaped narrative that blends together chronological history, the adult Johnston's backward looks at his own childhood, and fictionalized reconstructions of quietly climactic moments in the lives of Johnston's paternal grandfather Charlie and father Art. The former was a blacksmith and fisherman in "Ferryland," the original name of the colony founded in the 1620s by England's Lord Baltimore (the site of whose mansion, long since destroyed, is still sought by archaeologists and scholars). Art was a better educated, more opinionated sort who went away to college vowing to escape the hardships that had claimed Charlie, but ended up a "fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man" who would become a federal fisheries inspector. Their episodic stories are unified by the Johnstons' (most especially Art's) ongoing hatred of the "Confederation" (with mainland Canada, accomplished in 1947) and its avatar—the resourceful politician Joseph Smallwood—a theme echoed in such vivid sequences as young Wayne's train journey across the province (in protest against "the first trans-island paved road" and the advent of buses) and a wistful description of the author's leavetaking from home (for college, and the hope of becoming a writer). The book climaxes with Johnston's movingly imagined re-creation of the "final days," duringwhichCharlie and Art separately (and dourly) await the dawning of Confederation, and with it the loss of their country's independence and their awareness of their own powerlessness and mortality. Johnston is a master of understatement wringing honest nostalgic emotion from simple declarative sentences. Here he offers a rich display of the rhetorical skills and heartfelt cultural recall that make his novels so enchanting and rewarding.