Governor of the Northern Province (review)

Randy Boyagoda’s comic novel, which appeared on the 2006 Giller Prize long-list, is an intelligent and timely satire. It is highly literary, filled with allusions and jokes about Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, L. P. Hartley, Joseph Conrad, Robertson Davies, and John Buchan (in his capacity as Governor-General). It is also caustic and unsparing about both politics in the abstract and specific political conditions in Canada today. For instance, the Liberal Party is described as “the PRI of the north” (131); this jab comparing the Grits to the once-hegemonic Mexican colossus is sharp, yet not totally wide of the mark.

Boyagoda brings together a duo of unlikely connivers. One is Jennifer Ursula Thickson, a middle-class girl from rural Ontario who yearns for political “possibilities” (53) as an antidote to the mediocrity and awkwardness her social milieu ascribes to her (she loses a contest for high school class president to “None of the Above”). Another is Bokarie, a former politician from the fictional African nation of Atwenty, whose political ambitions in his home country are thwarted by the willingness of the president to dispose of him in order to maintain his public image after Bokarie had attempted to cultivate him by committing atrocities in his name. Bokarie steals a Canadian passport, kills a man on shipboard—he is no innocent waif—and forges an identity as a refugee in a Canada willing to show refugees abstract pity. He stumbles onto Jennifer, who is already using causes to advance her cause, utilizing the drowning of a young girl, Little Caitlin to mount a “Think Pink” campaign that takes “Think Globally, Act Locally” truisms and encases them in layers of cutesy schmaltz. Jennifer indulges in hypocrisy not unlike Mrs. Jellyby’s faux African humanitarianism in Dickens’ Bleak House. Paradoxically though, Jennifer tries to evade these castigations by insisting that she only espouses causes by which she has been personally touched — thus the relevance of Little Caitlin, or of Bokarie himself, as a specific index of the problems of African refugees. As Bokarie is a fraud, proponent and cause have been ideally matched, though Jennifer is, for most of the book, unaware of Bokarie’s true provenance.

Boyagoda, who has written for The Walrus and other general-interest publications, studied religion and literature at Boston University and the University of Notre Dame, and now teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto. Though some (not all) of his associations suggest rightward political leanings, the satiric wrath vented in Governor of the Northern Provinces is delightfully even-handed. Indeed, the satire is not so much on political positions, but on the bravado of people who try to reinvent themselves and the credulity of those who accept these insincerities because they find them comforting. Bokarie, for instance, both in Africa and Canada, uses religion to buttress his moral credibility, renaming an African boy Jesse in order to impress his superiors with his ”fine scriptural elocution” (119); elsewhere in the narrative, he uses the same skills to ingratiate himself with a born-again Canadian car dealer.

The sense of an African exile attaining an ambiguous new life in Canada is reminiscent of M. G. Vassanji’s In-Between World of Vikram Lall, despite Boyagoda’s greater lightness and buoyancy of tone. When Bokarie comes to Ontario, the tone of the book becomes reminiscent of those aspects of John Updike’s The Coup (1979) in which Hakim Felix Ellelou, Updike’s African dictator, goes to college in Franchise, Wisconsin, or of similar cultural incongruities in Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk. Boyagoda’s satire still leaves space for a sensitive, if “flat,” characterization of rural Ontario. Boyagoda inducts his reader into a conspiracy of two where each chortles at the absurd incongruities of the contemporary social landscape.

Yet the major characters, for all their loathsomeness, are not totally two-dimensional. The reader understands why the class and cultural limitations placed on Jennifer render her so desperate to get to Ottawa, and Bokarie is allowed a...