Character Parts: Who's Really Who in Canlit (review)

This reference book purports to list the 'inspiration' for some of the characters in Canadian fiction in English and to some small extent in French. There are no entries for drama, films, or poems. The list is arranged alphabetically by characters' names with the title of the novel or story, the original date of publication, and the author cited below that. This is followed by a brief description of the relationship between the character and actual person upon whom the character is based. A small doodle of a pair of spectacles refers the reader either to other characters inspired by the same person or relatives who turn up in other titles. Once in while there are photos of the persons in question. The index is listed by author, and another list of 'Sources' is set down alphabetically by characters' names. There is also a foreword by Bill Richardson which attempts to justify the book's existence, and an introduction by the author in which he sets down the book's limitations and uses.

The 'Sources' are mostly biographies along with a smattering of memoirs and interviews. Scholars interested in testing the accuracy of the listings will have to examine the original biographies rather than any original research in this book. In fact the author takes no responsibility for the linkages in the entries and in some cases he says he does not believe in the connections himself. The character of F in Cohen's Beautiful Losers, for example, was supposed to be inspired by Irving Layton (the source is Dorman and Rawlins's study of Cohen), but Busby does not 'put much stock in the idea' any more than he believes that Reuben Shapiro in Joshua Then and Now is based on Richler's father. Since this is the case, readers are very much on their own in accepting or rejecting the whole premise, contents, and accuracy of the listings. Take the entry 'Mrs. Bridgetower,' for example. Apparently the character was inspired by Davies's mother, Florence McKay Davies. In that entry we are sent to the character Ma Gall, who turns up in A Mixture of Frailties and who was also inspired by Florence McKay Davies. The two characters are so different from each other in every way that one wonders how inspiration is supposed to work. Busby tries to get around the problem by reminding us that only parts of these characters are based on aspects of the originals - hence the title of his book.

For all that, it must be noted that the entries often harbour a kind of fascination of their own. Authors very often insist that all their fictions are fictitious while at the same time they admit in interviews that they had someone in mind at the time they wrote the story. What is the scholar/critic supposed to do with that information? The easiest answer is: nothing. But this takes some of the fun out of reading and in some instances it dilutes the historical context that may be useful in interpreting or understanding the text. If nothing else, a complete reading of this book gives one the sense of how Canadian Canadian fiction really is. The elaborate and sometimes complex family relationships, the responses to Canadian historical events, the very particular and local events that give rise to stories are all on exhibit here. If the individual entries do not help very much (and this depends largely on one's theoretical disposition), the whole book does open up another view of our literature as rooted in our own people and experiences. A number of entries about characters in very obscure novels will send many of us searching for them just to find out how the actual person it is apparently about is treated. Mr Cool, in Alexander Begg's 1871 novel Dot It Down, to cite only one example, was supposed to be modelled on Sir John Christian Schultz, the fifth lieutenant-governor of Manitoba. The little blurb about him...