In 1949, Joseph Smallwood became the first premier of the newly federated Canadian province of Newfoundland. Predictably, and almost immediately, his name retreated to the footnotes of history. And yet, as Wayne Johnston makes plain in his epic and affectionate fifth novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Smallwood's life was endearingly emblematic, an instance of an extraordinary man emerging at a propitious moment. The particular charm of Johnston's book, however, lies not merely in unveiling a career that so seamlessly coincided with the burgeoning self-consciousness of Newfoundland itself, but in exposing a simple truth--namely, that history is no more than the accretion of lived lives.

Born into debilitating poverty, Smallwood is sustained by a bottomless faith in his own industry. His unabashed ambition is to "rise not from rags to riches, but from obscurity to world renown." To this end, he undertakes tasks both sublime and baffling--walking 700 miles along a Newfoundland railroad line in a self-martyring union drive; narrating a homespun radio spot; and endlessly irritating and ingratiating himself with the Newfoundland political machine. His opaque and constant incitement is an unconsummated love for his childhood friend, Sheilagh Fielding. Headstrong and dissolute, she weaves in and out of Smallwood's life like a salaried goad, alternately frustrating and illuminating his ambitions. Smallwood is harried as well by Newfoundland's subtle gravity, a sense that he can never escape the tug of his native land, since his only certainty is the island itself--that "massive assertion of land, sea's end, the outer limit of all the water in the world, a great, looming, sky-obliterating chunk of rock."

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams bogs down after a time in its detailing of Smallwood's many political intrigues and in the lingering matter of a mysterious letter supposedly written by Fielding. However, when he speculates on the secret motives of his peers, or when he reveals his own hyperbolic fantasies and grandiose hopes--matters no one would ever confess aloud--the novel is both apt and amiable. Best of all is to watch Smallwood's inevitable progress toward a practical cynicism. It seems nothing less than miraculous that his countless disappointments pave the way for his ascension, that his private travails ultimately align with the land he loves. This is history resuscitated. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly
"As lived our fathers, we live not,/Where once they knelt, we stand./With neither God nor King to guard our lot, We'll guard thee, Newfoundland": so rings the resigned, ironic patriotism practiced by the inhabitants of the bitter-cold northerly territory in Johnston's (Human Amusements) grand and operatic novel, a bestseller and literary prize nominee in Canada. Treating the history of Newfoundland as a bad jokeAwhose punch line is finally delivered on April 1, 1949, when the in-limbo British territory joins in confederation with CanadaAJohnston's most compelling character (in a book that teems with eccentrics, drunks, swindlers and snobs), Sheilagh Fielding, writes a condensed version of the classic History of Newfoundland. The terse and mordant chapters of this masterwork, to which she devotes all her energies (when not scribbling furiously in her epistolary diary or eking out the columns of her daily political satire, "Field Day") are interleaved in the narrative to great effect. The bulk of the book comprises the autobiographical musings of historical figure Joe Smallwood, whose rise through local socialist activism to international political eminence culminates in his orchestration of the treaty with Canada. It is dwarf-sized Smallwood's tireless ambition, as well as his crippling romantic insecurity, that keep him forever at arm's length from his childhood love and best friend Fielding. In their hometown of St. John's, in Manhattan's downtown tenements, in the desolate railroad man's cabin where Fielding holes up with a typewriter and a bottle of Scotch, Smallwood and Fielding torment and intrigue one another, each harboring the shame and fury of a secret from their school days that has gone unresolved. In a book of this magnitude and inventivenessAsome of Fielding's quips are hilarious, and Johnston proves himself cunning at manipulating and animating historical factAit is perhaps the device of this lifelong secret that most tests the reader's faith: that full disclosure resolves all the complicated mysteries of this book is slightly disappointing. Nonetheless, the variety provided by Fielding's writings is delightful, and this brilliantly clever evocation of a slice of Canadian history establishes Johnston as a writer of vast abilities and appeal. BOMC and QPB selections; author tour. (July) FYI: Johnston's comic novel, The Divine Ryans (not published in the U.S.), will be released by Anchor in August to coincide with the film version, starring Pete Postlethwaite.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Angela's Ashes meets Moby Dick meets All the King's Men! Famed and f?ted in Canada, this fictional biography of Joe Smallwood, Liberal first premier of Britain's former colony of Newfoundland, and his longtime (fictional) love, Shelagh Fielding, is sure to set off sparks here. Smallwood governed for 23 years; the story of how he achieved his elevated position after a childhood of poverty and want, and what he surrendered along the way, is mesmerizing. The central scenes of class warfare are preceded and followed by a beautiful and horrifying set piece about a sealing voyage. Joe's story is interspersed with hilarious excerpts from the Condensed History of Newfoundland by Shelagh Fielding, easily one of the more original characters in fiction. Carrying a "purely ornamental" cane since girlhood, almost constantly sipping from a flask of Scotch, she is a TB victim, a political writer with no visible principles, and a railroad worker who won't join a union to keep her jobAand ends up being fascinating whatever she does. Johnston's first novel to be published here, this is recommended for all fiction collections.-AJudith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Luc Sante
The very human story of Smallwood and Fielding and its historical counterpoint may both appear inauspicious, even contrived, at first, but as the book proceeds they and their pairing gather momentum to achieve a mesmerizing inevitability.

The New York Times, Richard Bernstein
...this prodigious, eventful, character-rich book is a noteworthy achievement: a biting, entertaining and inventive saga.... a brilliant and bravura literary performance by Johnston.

From Booklist
The Colony, already a best-seller in Canada, is the fictional biography of Joe Smallwood, one of Newfoundland's most controversial political figures, and focuses on his early years and arduous rise to power: union organizer, newspaperman, socialist turned liberal, and Newfoundland's first premier after confederation with Canada in 1949. Writing from Smallwood's perspective, Johnston voices a deep longing on the part of the scrappy and mostly hapless schemer to do something historically significant, "commensurate with the greatness of the land itself." Intensely powerful passages of amazing sensitivity paint another side of Smallwood, that of a caring champion of poor people in a land of unrelenting hardship. Always in perfect counterpoint are the views of Smallwood's lifelong friend, Sheilagh Fielding, as set forth in her acerbic newspaper columns, personal journals, and irreverently entertaining Condensed History of Newfoundland. The paths of Smallwood and Fielding cross early and often during their lives, linking them in youthful scandal, ongoing intrigue, and a tender but stilted affection. Sweeping historical drama, hilarious satire, mystery--this story is big both in length and in scope. Grace Fill

From Kirkus Reviews
The subject of this immensely satisfying neo-Victorian (its Canadian authors fifth novel and first to appear here) is the province of Newfoundland, whose complex political history is incarnated in memorable human form. The story is the generously imagined fictional biography of a real historical figure, Joseph Smallwood, the self-styled Father of Confederation who shepherded the former British dominion into full union with Canada in 1949. Johnstons rich narrative is presented in three forms: Joe Smallwoods own detailed recall of his life is punctuated by excerpts from the Journal of Shelagh Fielding, his lifelong friend and enemy (and, in an odd way, lover), a feisty independent newspaper columnist, and also by snippets from her hilarious Condensed History of Newfoundland, a mock-heroic and episodic chronicle that provides sardonic undercurrent to Smallwoods candid account of his checkered career. The tale begins with Smallwoods childhood in an embattled family dominated by his eternally drunken, Dickensian father Charlie and born again mother Minnie May; takes a critical turn when an anonymous letter falsely attributed to Smallwood causes his expulsion from the tony private school where he meets Fielding (which is how they address each other thereafter); and embraces Joes flirtation with socialism (at home and in America), efforts to unionize fishermen, rise to power (as interim premier under Confederation), and betrayal by the hired Latvian economist who involves his administration with men who wound up . . . all but destroying the country I had sought them out to save. Smallwood is a wonderfully convincing tragicomic figure, and Fielding an even better one: an embittered alcoholic enslaved to a secret she withholds throughout the pairs 40-year love-hate relationship. Only in the parallel secret harbored by Smallwood (too nakedly derivative of a similarly crucial incident in Robertson Daviess Fifth Business) does Johnstons superb plot deviate from its overall power and originality. As absorbing as fiction can beand a marvelous introduction to the work of one of our continents best writers. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Early in Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, the young narrator, Joe Smallwood, meets D. W. Prowse, the author of A History of Newfoundland. The aged Prowse advises: "You know what I would do if I had time, boy.... I would write about one man, like Rousseau did, like Boswell did, one representative Newfoundlander.... I would follow him around and write down everything he said and did and everything other people said about him." In Johnston's novel, Smallwood does just that, honestly and hilariously chronicling his own development — from poor schoolboy and union organizer to "Father of the Confederation" (with Canada) and beyond.

Turn-of-the-century Newfoundland, as an unwanted colony of England, severely lacked a sense of identity. Smallwood, training himself to draw a map of the island from memory, admits that "it was the map of England I saw when I closed my eyes." Fittingly, he also has difficulty defining himself. Born into the "scruff" (as opposed to the "quality") of society, the diminutive Smallwood manages to enter Bishop Feild College, a "training ground for snobs." Shortly after his arrival, he is falsely accused of writing a letter critical of the school and sending it to the newspaper. He is forced to leave. Despite his shortened tenure, Smallwood's experiences at the Feild, and the people he meets there, continue to affect the shape and color of the rest of his life.

He sets out from the Feild, "[I]ll at ease in [his] own world and in other worlds unwelcome." This description is courtesy of Sheilagh Fielding, a student attheadjoining girl's school; Fielding plays a mysterious role in Smallwood's expulsion and is a continuous presence throughout the novel. Cynical, alcoholic, wielding a sharp cane and a sharper tongue, she serves as a friend, confidante, and thorn in Smallwood's side. Their strange relationship serves as the narrative's emotional framework, and the friction between them provides the novel's most electrical moments. As Smallwood seeks causes to champion and believe in, Fielding exults in exposing the weakness and hypocrisy of such causes. "She was called a fence-sitter and was challenged to defend herself," Smallwood recalls, "which she did by saying the accusation might or might not be true." While Smallwood and Fielding (thankfully) never do come to a peaceful understanding, their lifelong attraction is fascinating and propulsive. The energy and perspective Fielding's character provides is multiplied by the inclusion of her writings — columns, letters, journals, and the brilliantly caustic Condensed History of Newfoundland.

Smallwood's mixture of patriotism and insecurity first finds its outlet in journalism, then in politics. While writing an article about a sealing voyage, he witnesses a disaster in which several sealers are lost in a storm. This affects him deeply, and he decides he must somehow champion the cause of workers against those who exploit them. He becomes a socialist and eventually attempts to organize the section-men of the cross-island railway. Walking almost 700 miles along the tracks, he relishes the landscape ("the unfoundland that will make us great some day") and the isolated people who inhabit it. His love for Newfoundland grows, as does his desire to bolster a sense of national pride and identity.

The novel, a combination of real people (as was Smallwood), historical facts, and fictional manipulations, is a sprawling and powerful entertainment. At times, such as the sealing disaster and the cross-island walk, the politics of Smallwood are made personal and emotional in a way that some of the later, more formally political developments are not; however, his character is so well drawn, and his early years so vivid, that their energy carries over and infuses all that follows. And Johnston's prose, especially in describing the Newfoundland landscape, is breathtakingly sharp and deeply wise — it makes concrete the basis of Smallwood's inspiration: "There was a beauty everywhere, but it was the bleak beauty of sparsity, scarcity and stuntedness, with nothing left but what a thousand years ago had been the forest floor, a landscape clear-cut by nature that never would recover on its own. It was a beauty so elusive, so tantalizingly suggestive of something you could not quite put into words that it could drive you mad and, however much you loved it, make you want to get away from it and recall it from some city and content yourself with knowing it was there."

Stumbling, always striving, Smallwood attempts (and often fails) at further organizing, at writing an encyclopedia of Newfoundland, at hosting a radio show. Finally, surprising even himself, he becomes a politician on the national stage, just as Newfoundland must decide whether to become an independent country or to join Canada. It is here, in the book's later sections, that Wayne Johnston's skills as a novelist are most startling. Loose ends — minor characters, various (seeming) digressions, the secrets of what happened at the Feild — all unite to tangle and illuminate Smallwood's life.

Perhaps most satisfying is the extent to which Smallwood realizes the task set for him by D. W. Prowse. Describing himself near the end of the novel, he says: "A politician should believe that the welfare of his people depends on his success. Everything I do for me I do for them. And so the day may arrive when to tell the difference between selfishness and selflessness becomes impossible." Smallwood's attempts to understand and promote Newfoundland ultimately help him to define himself; in the process, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams provides us with a deep perspective not only on a fascinating character and his homeland but on the close relationship between private lives and what comes to be understood as history.

—Peter Rock

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" is Newfoundland - that vast, haunting near-continent upon which the two lovers and adversaries of this novel pursue their ambitions. Joey Smallwood, sprung from almost Dickensian privation, is a scholarship boy at a private school, where his ready wit bests the formidably tart-tongued Sheilagh Fielding. Their dual fates become forever linked by an anonymous letter to a local paper critical of the school - a letter whose mysterious authorship will weigh heavily on their lives. Driven by socialist dreams and political desire, Smallwood will walk a railroad line the breadth of Newfoundland in a journey of astonishing power and beauty, to unionize the workers - and make his name. Fielding, now a popular newspaper columnist, provides - in her journalism, her diaries, and her bleakly hilarious "Condensed History of Newfoundland" - a satirical and eloquent counternarrative to Smallwood's story. As the decades pass and Smallwood's rise converges with Newfoundland's emerging autonomy, these two vexed characters must confront their own frailties and secrets - and their mutual (if doomed) love.

FROM THE CRITICS

Roger Gathman - Salon

The literature of empire keeps floating up from the verges of the British Commonwealth like buoys marking some drowned leviathan. It's writing that plays on two counterpoised registers: the nostalgia of the native for the pre-colonial land, and the nostalgia of the colonizer for the mother country. From the former, the writer draws enveloping fantasies; from the latter, an elegant melancholy. You can see these forces at work in the novels of Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey and V.S. Naipaul, and you can see them, too, in Wayne Johnston's new novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Johnston is a Newfoundlander. Newfoundland -- or, as one of Johnston's characters calls it, perhaps more appropriately, Old Lost Land -- is the oldest British colony, a hardscrabble island that for centuries was subject, as the book makes quite clear, to the idiocy of various crown schemes. It's as much a character in the novel as India is in Midnight's Children, and to invest it with this status, the author needs a figure commensurate with the history of the place. By using Joe Smallwood, a historical personage, as his narrator, he finds a way of weaving a dreamlike course between fact and fiction.

Smallwood, who led Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation in 1949, was to Newfoundland what Huey Long was to Louisiana: a power-happy populist and a local legend. He came from a family famous in the area for making boots. A black boot-shaped sign inscribed with the word "Smallwood" hung from a cliff in the harbor of St. Johns, the capital, where he was born. As his father, a windy drunk, is wont to point out during the first hundred pages (which constitute a virtuoso treatment of the family's downshifting circumstances), this is a boot on the neck of the family's dignity.

Johnston intersperses Smallwood's story with the journals and sardonic jottings of one Sheilagh Fielding, a sort of Newfoundland version of Dorothy Parker -- acerbic, unhappy in love, ungainly, affecting a silver-headed cane as though she were an Edwardian dandy. Smallwood, on the other hand, is preternaturally little and light: a mere 95 pounds at the age of 25. Their respective heights suggest a familiar literary couple, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; but Fielding and Smallwood, one feels, should couple in the carnal sense. The dark comedy of the book is that they don't. Frozen by pride, each avoids the wound to self-esteem that fucking would risk.

Johnston has packed this novel with so many brilliant set pieces that in the end they drain the energy out of the plot -- something that doesn't matter as much as you might think. This is one of those books you read to be wrapped in its landscape and its weather: the multiply indented coastline, the perpetually inclement North, the "land-oblivious, sea-generated wind." In archetypal terms, a book is an island, too, a piece broken from the continent, apart from the main; its readers are enthralled castaways, searchers for footprints in the sand. New found land, indeed.

Richard Bernstein - The New York Times

...[T]his prodigious, eventful, character-rich book is a noteworthy achievement: a biting, entertaining and inventive saga....[Its] themes include love and betrayal but also the remorseless contest for power that takes place in both the psychic and the political spheres..... It all adds up to a brilliant and bravura literary performance by Johnston.

Luc Sante - New York Times Book Review

Johnston...has set out to write the definitive Newfoundland novel, and yes, he is well aware of how that phrase will ring in the ears of outsiders....[T]he book has about it an aura of something akin to magic realism, or its northern equivalent — nothing remotely supernatural occurs, and yet...causes and effects often seem to have been paired off by a particularly whimsical deity.

Ron Charles - Christian Science Monitor

Throughout Joe's narrative of his unlikely rise, the author interrupts with selections from Fielding's hysterically sarcastic Condensed History of Newfoundland, her brutal newspaper columns, and her emotional diary. The friction between all these voices generates a tremendous degree of light and heat in this icebound story....Joe says, "Newfoundland stirred in me, as all great things did, a longing to accomplish or create something commensurate with it." Clearly, Johnston has done just that.

Publishers Weekly

"As lived our fathers, we live not,/Where once they knelt, we stand./With neither God nor King to guard our lot, We'll guard thee, Newfoundland": so rings the resigned, ironic patriotism practiced by the inhabitants of the bitter-cold northerly territory in Johnston's (Human Amusements) grand and operatic novel, a bestseller and literary prize nominee in Canada. Treating the history of Newfoundland as a bad joke — whose punch line is finally delivered on April 1, 1949, when the in-limbo British territory joins in confederation with Canada — Johnston's most compelling character (in a book that teems with eccentrics, drunks, swindlers and snobs), Sheilagh Fielding, writes a condensed version of the classic History of Newfoundland. The terse and mordant chapters of this masterwork, to which she devotes all her energies (when not scribbling furiously in her epistolary diary or eking out the columns of her daily political satire, "Field Day") are interleaved in the narrative to great effect. The bulk of the book comprises the autobiographical musings of historical figure Joe Smallwood, whose rise through local socialist activism to international political eminence culminates in his orchestration of the treaty with Canada. It is dwarf-sized Smallwood's tireless ambition, as well as his crippling romantic insecurity, that keep him forever at arm's length from his childhood love and best friend Fielding. In their hometown of St. John's, in Manhattan's downtown tenements, in the desolate railroad man's cabin where Fielding holes up with a typewriter and a bottle of Scotch, Smallwood and Fielding torment and intrigue one another, each harboring the shame and fury of a secret from their school days that has gone unresolved. In a book of this magnitude and inventiveness — some of Fielding's quips are hilarious, and Johnston proves himself cunning at manipulating and animating historical fact — it is perhaps the device of this lifelong secret that most tests the reader's faith: that full disclosure resolves all the complicated mysteries of this book is slightly disappointing. Nonetheless, the variety provided by Fielding's writings is delightful, and this brilliantly clever evocation of a slice of Canadian history establishes Johnston as a writer of vast abilities and appeal. FYI: Johnston's comic novel, The Divine Ryans (not published in the U.S.), will be released by Anchor in August to coincide with the film version, starring Pete Postlethwaite. Read all 7 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

This is a deft and thoroughly engaging fictionalized account of one of the world's least known countries-Newfoundland-and the men who walked its harsh terrain to unite its people.  — Tabatha Henning, McKinzey-White Booksellers, Colorado Springs, CO