This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 by Norman N. Feltes (review)

460 letters in canada 1999 Grove scholars, one may well wonder if this chapter could not have been translated into English, too, turning the volume into a bi- rather than a trilingual enterprise. Still, even though the letters included here are of course repetitive, and even though the reader soon grows tired of Greve's eternal self-stylization as being `en tout hâte, comme toujours,' one cannot help being impressed by the sheer volume of Greve's translations, by his vigour and his energy trying to establish Gide as a writer and himself as a translator on the German literary scene. (MARTIN KUESTER) Norman N. Feltes. This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 University of Toronto Press. xviii, 208. $40.00 Those who write about glaciers B I am garbling Nietzsche B become them. A happy fate in this case for Norman Feltes. This Side of Heaven's tracing of the roots of Ontario's Donnelly murders extends backwards enough in time to consider the effect of glaciation on the location of the crimes. The author's learning B profound and comprehensive B gives a glacial force to his argumentation. This weight crushes any hesitations on the reader's part about the aetiology of the historical killings. This account explains through materialist analysis what classical tragedy moralizes into Fate. Overlay This Side of Heaven's analysis of historical determination with the tragic agon that James Reaney's The Donnellys unfolds. Following the interplay between two alternative modes of assessing historical wreckage proves an enlightening encounter. This is not a book for Donnelly buffs or true-crime addicts. Nor is it for those in search of Reaney's mythic resonance. This Side of Heaven deals with historical process. The individual response to that process, Feltes's understated style leaves to the reader. Where Reaney's drama locates the Donnellys within a cycle of death and rebirth, Feltes's analysis places them within the specificity of the advent of agricultural capitalism in Sowesto. Diesel engines work because the pistons generate enough pressure in the cylinders to force into ignition a low-grade fuel injected into those cylinders. Feltes describes a social version of this process, resulting in a group of neighbouring merchants and farmers in central Canada dividing itself into killers and victims. Feltes leaves the murders themselves and their circumstances to the already voluminous writing on the subject, presenting instead an assemblage of forces compressing Biddulph Township near Lucan, Ontario, 1880 into a volatile state. Something, as Al Purdy's magisterial `Wilderness Gothic' concludes, is about to happen. What are those forces B like geological formations in their might B thrusting this tiny marginal social formation towards collective violence? Among those acutely analysed by Feltes: natural forces carving rich agricultural land out of glaciation's leftovers; imperial forces imposing certain varieties of land settlement and ownership upon that space; humanities 461 colonial forces enforcing certain locations for road-making; commercial forces engendering certain grain-marketing practices; political forces exploiting ethnic allegiances. Struggling within those often masked, rarely understood, and mostly implacable currents, drifts a group of transplanted Irish peasants scapegoating their neighbours. Such a situation, and its potential for producing disaster, can be described, Feltes often points out, as over-determined. Volumes have trundled along on the amount of reading underpinning a single chapter here. Railway routes and financing, agribusiness's requirements for bulk product shipping, Colonial Office schema for settlement, the cultural tilt of British jurisprudence as translated into the statutes of Ontario, an agricultural depression that has thus far not made it into any other Upper Canada history that I've looked at: the author surveys in authoritative detail these and a host of other features of the historical terrain that he has marked out. Not everyone will agree with Feltes's analysis, but no reader will be able to grumble about its presentation . Every argument proceeds step by step, every process undergoes methodical examination. We cannot demand that Feltes tramp north Tipperary as thoroughly as he has Sowesto, but we still need a historical examination of the violenceridden rural Ireland from which the Donnellys and their neighbours fled. Reaney's drama (and his DCB entry...