Fiction

304 FICTION stone, and the plot of a charade: perhaps poetry too might be approached with some tolerance for the convention as well as evaluation for the achievement. n. FICTION Claude T. Bissell One of the difficulties facing the Canadian novelist is that he lives in a society that does not, as yet, have a clearly defined shape, with the result that he is unable to focus sharply and confidently on the problems of that society. If he chooses, or is compelled by economic reasons, to live outside Canada for long periods of time, then the difficulties in writing about Canadian society are intensified. One sees this, during the nineteenth century, in such literary expatriates as Sara Jeannette Duncan Cotes, who gradually abandoned her novels with a Canadian setting, and Gilbert Parker, who, although he did not abandon Canadian subjects , turned away from contemporary settings to find a romantic security in the past. In this century, it might be argued that the angiophiJe haze enveloping Jalna was thickened by Miss de la Roche's long sojourns in Great Britain. And our most recent and most successful expatriate, Mr. Lionel Shapiro, has not as yet chosen a Canadian setting or even given us a full-scale Canadian character. Mr. Shapiro does not want us to think, however, that he no longer belongs to the Canadian scene. Indeed, he has contended in a recent article in Maclean's that the Canadian novelist should not try to immerse himseH in his own environment and traditions, but should look out at the big shining world that lies beyond. The distinctive Canadian role, he seems to argue, is in literature as in international affairs, that of the honest broker. His latest novel, The Sixth oj June (Doubleday, 351 pp., $4.75), is, he suggests, a demonstration of this national gift. Its sympathetic and. impartial presentation of both English and American characters, he seems to be saying, could have come only from a Canadian. The Canadian may be a dull fellow himseH, but he can form a shrewd appraisal of his gayer and more colourful cousins. The Sixth oj June may afford us some shrewd appraisals of English and American types, but it is not successful in creating individual characters . The American hero is another version of the man of action softened by thought whom we met in Mr. Shapiro's two preceding novels, The Sealed Verdict (1947) and Torch jor a Dark Journey LETTERS IN CANADA, 1955 305 (1950). The English hero is almost a parody of God's Englishman: sensitive, but with an almost inhuman control of the emotions; delicate, almost effeminate in appearance, but with a physical courage that beggars description. Mr. Shapiro's English heroine is a distillation of all the conventional romantic attributes of young English womanhood; she derives in equal parts from the domestic idylls of Lord Tennyson and from such exercises in sentimental patriotism as Noel Coward's Cavalcade. The strength of The Sixth of June-and it is a highly readable novel -does not lie in its characterization or in its international insights, but in its quality of superior journalism. This is a novel about England --chiefly London-in the years immediately preceding the D-day of the Second World War, with its emotional climax neatly coinciding with the actual D-day landing. Mr. Shapiro was there, and he observetl carefully and perceptively. He can write about external details and about the big mass emotions with eloquence and verve. And he has the wit to see that for thousands of his book-of-the-month club readers, members of the armed services who trained in England in the early 'forties, he is writing about the great romantic experience of their lives. He knows that for them the tedium of service life has long since been forgotten , and that what remains is the beauty of the countryside, the gaiety of London, and the courage and bonhomie of their island hosts. It may be a sort of negative reflection of Mr. Shapiro's Canadian origins and upbringing that he has been 'able to see these war years romantically, that he has, for instance, given his love affair a charmingly platonic...