Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Johnston)

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Wayne Johnston, 1998
Knopf Canada / Knopf Doubleday
592 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385495431


Summary
A mystery and a love story spanning five decades, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is an epic portrait of passion and ambition, set against the beautiful, brutal landscape of Newfoundland.

In this widely acclaimed novel, Johnston has created two of the most memorable characters in recent fiction: Joey Smallwood, who claws his way up from poverty to become New Foundland's first premier; and Sheilagh Fielding, who renounces her father's wealth to become a popular columnist and writer, a gifted satirist who casts a haunting shadow on Smallwood's life and career.

The two meet as children at school and grow to realize that their lives are irreversibly intertwined, bound together by a secret they don't know they share. Smallwood, always on the make, torn between love of country and fear of failure, is as reluctant to trust the private truths of his heart as his rival and savior, Fielding—brilliant, hard-drinking, and unconventionally sexy. Their story ranges from small-town Newfoundland to New York City, from the harrowing ice floes of the seal hunt to the lavish drawing rooms of colonial governors, and combines erudition, comedy, and unflagging narrative brio in a manner reminiscent of John Irving and Charles Dickens.

A tragicomic elegy for the "colony of unrequited dreams" that is Newfoundland, Wayne Johnston's masterful tribute to a people and a place establishes him as a novelist who is as profound as he is funny, with an impeccable sense of the intersection where private lives and history collide. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 22, 1958
• Where—Goulds, Newfoundland, Canada
• Education—B.A., Memorial University of
   Newfoundland; M.A. University of New
   Brunswick
• Awards—Charles Taylor Prize for Nonfiction
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Ontario


Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. After a brief stint in pre-Med, Wayne obtained a BA in English from Memorial University. He worked as a reporter for the St. John's Daily News before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing.

En route to being published, Wayne earned an MA (Creative Writing) from the University of New Brunswick. Then he got off to a quick start. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, published when he was just 27 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel award for the best first novel published in the English language in Canada in that year.

Subsequent books consistently received critical praise and increasing public attention. The Divine Ryans was adapted to the silver screen in a production starring Academy Award winner Pete Postlethwaite—Wayne wrote the screenplay. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoir dealing with his grandfather, his father and Wayne himself was tremendously well received and won the most prestigious prize for creative non-fiction awarded in Canada—the Charles Taylor Prize.

Both The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York spent extended periods of time on bestseller lists in Canada and have also been published in the US, Britain, Germany, Holland, China and Spain. Colony was identified by the Globe and Mail newspaper as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced (for both fiction and non-fiction).

Wayne has always been something of a natural athlete—for example, he was once part of a championship ball-hockey team. Luckily (in retrospect) when he was still in the formative stages of considering future career paths, his ice hockey equipment, which was carefully stowed in a garbage bag in the basement was accidentally put out with the trash. The world of literature benefited; is is possible that the National Hockey League lost a star in the process? (From the author's website & Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[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.
Richard Bernstein - New York Times


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.... A novel of cavernous complexity that nevertheless doesn't overwhelm the reader, who can repose in pure narrative without second thoughts—[an] eloquent anti-epic.
Luc Sante - New York Times Book Review


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.
Ron Charles - Chistian Science Monitor


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...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....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.
Publishers Weekly


Angela's Ashes meets Moby Dick meets All the King's Men! Famed and feted 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 job—and ends up being fascinating whatever she does. Johnston's first novel to be published here, this is recommended for all fiction collections.
—Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Library Journal


The subject of this immensely satisfying neo-Victorian 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. Johnston's rich narrative is presented in three forms: Joe Smallwood's own detailed recall of his life is punctuated by excerpts from the Journal of Shelagh Fielding, his lifelong friend and enemy...and also by snippets from her hilarious Condensed History of Newfoundland, a mock-heroic and episodic chronicle.... Smallwood is a wonderfully convincing tragicomic figure, and Fielding an even better one: an embittered alcoholic enslaved to a secret she withholds throughout the pair's 40-year love-hate relationship. Only in the parallel secret harbored by Smallwood...does Johnston's superb plot deviate from its overall power and originality. As absorbing as fiction can be and a marvelous introduction to the work of one of our continent's best writers.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Both Joe and his father suffer from the fact that their last name adorns a large iron boot hanging at the entrance to the harbor, advertising the family shoe store. Why is the boot so oppressive that both Joe and his father sometimes dream about it? Why does Joe finally take it down?

2. Joe is haunted by the sense of his own insignificance: "It seemed to me that unless I did something that historians thought was worth recording, it would be as if I had never lived, that all the histories in the world together formed one book, not to warrant inclusion in which was to have wasted one's life" [p. 454]. Why does he feel this way? What is the relationship between the ambitions of Joe Smallwood and his paternal heritage of small-time shopkeeping, alcoholism, and failure? How do his experiences at Bishop Feild school affect his ideas about himself?

3. Johnston has created the structure of the book by interspersing Joe Smallwood's first-person narrative with excerpts from Fielding's journal, her History of Newfoundland, and her "Field Day" newspaper columns. What is the effect, as you read, of the interplay of these parts?

4. Smallwood's conversion to socialism takes place after his haunting vision of the frozen bodies of the sealers who died on the ice. Would you say that his walk across the island to unionize the men is Smallwood's most heroic act in the novel? How does the rest of his career compare with the scale of this exploit?

5. Returning to Newfoundland after five years in New York, Joe says, "It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions.... A kind of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no object and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn't" [pp. 211-12]. Why is this such a painful moment for him?

6. Johnston has given Joe Smallwood the role of protagonist and the main first-person narrative, but some reviewers have expressed the opinion that Sheilagh Fielding is a more compelling character. Is Fielding ultimately more admirable than Smallwood? Whose life story is more interesting?

7. Joe Smallwood is not mentioned in Fielding's History, which ends in 1923 when Sir Richard Squires is prime minister. Why does Fielding end her history there?

8. Why does Smallwood's marriage proposal to Fielding go awry? When he next sees her, she tells him with her customary irony that she has been "reduced to hermiting because you broke my heart" [p. 228]. How true is this statement? Why does Smallwood marry Clara Oates and not Fielding?

9. Freezing to death on the Bonavista branch line, Smallwood imagines his own obituary [p. 225]. What makes this scene so touching and so comical? Joe is saved by Fielding, who here as at other crucial moments makes herself indispensable. Does Smallwood perform the same function in her life? Is their relationship, on the whole, reciprocal in terms of giving and receiving?

10. Sir Richard Squires tells Joe, "Power is what you want, though I'll never get you to admit it. You picked socialism because you thought it was your best way of getting ahead.... You're not an artist, you're not a scientist, you're not an intellectual. All that's left to you is politics" [p. 270]. How accurate is Sir Richard's assessment of Joe's character? Joe responds that "the distinguishing characteristic of the true socialist...was selflessness" [p. 271]. Do selflessness and self-interest necessarily conflict?

11. Some Canadian readers have been troubled by the liberties that Wayne Johnston has taken with the life of Newfoundland's first premier. Is the book more purely fictional, and therefore more purely enjoyable, for American readers, for whom Smallwood is not a known entity? It appears, for instance, that Johnston created the character of Fielding wholly from his own imagination. Why do you suppose he decided that Fielding was needed as a counterpart to Joe Smallwood? What would the novel have been like without the presence of Fielding? What are the particular complications and pleasures of fiction that is based on, but not entirely true to, historical reality?

12. The mystery of the anonymous letter to The Morning Post is not solved until the end of the novel, and it keeps Smallwood in the dark about some of the motivations of Fielding's character as well as her true feelings for him. How satisfying is the resolution of this issue? Does the revelation about Fielding's father highlight aspects of her character, or explain in part why she has conducted her life as she has?

13. Why does Joe bring Judge Prowse's A History of Newfoundland with him to New York City? What is the symbolic significance of this book for various characters in the novel?

14. Why does Johnston wait until late into the novel to reveal Fielding's secret about what happened when she was sixteen? How does this revelation affect your understanding of Fielding's character and her motivations up to this point? Would you say that Fielding is a selfless character?

15. Is confederation a defeat for Newfoundland? Would it have been possible for such a bleak and economically unpromising land to survive as an independent nation? Was Smallwood right to think that, since socialism had failed, confederation was the only way to improve the lives of the outlanders?

16. How would you compare the political ideals of the young Smallwood to those of the man who becomes premier of the island after confederation? Has his character changed? What about his core ethical beliefs? Why is he so susceptible to people like Valdmanis?

17. Several reviews have commented on the skill with which Johnston has succeed in creating a novel that is reminiscent of the work of Charles Dickens. If you have read David Copperfield or Great Expectations, how does The Colony of Unrequited Dreams compare with them? What aspects of this book make it so compelling and so memorable?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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