Landscapes of War and Memory: The Two World Wars in Canadian Literature and the Arts, 1977–2007 by Sherrill Grace (review)

Landscapes of War and Memory demonstrates that what Canadian society has decided to forget about both world wars is not forgotten. Remembering and forgetting are given equal focus as Grace encourages the reader to engage with the past and to consider the question posed by Frederick Varley in his famous painting of 1918, For What? Grace’s study begins in 1977 because this marks the publication of Timothy Findley’s The Wars and Can You See Me Yet? and Heather Robertson’s A Terrible Beauty: The Art of Canada at War. She takes 2007 as her end date because it marks the restoration of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial near Arras, France, as well as the release of Brian McKenna’s film The Great War. Grace poses two questions: Who remembers? And to what end do we engage in remembering the two world wars? She argues that now is the time to answer these questions because the immediate pain of war has dissipated and the passage of time allows for greater objectivity as well as freedom of critical analysis.

Part one explores the landscapes of war and of memory. In part two, ‘Remembering the Nation in the First World War’, Grace discusses novels, theatres of war, film, and autobiography. Part three, ‘Intermission between the Wars’, explores the notion of living in a haunted world. Part four, ‘Testing the Nation in the Second World War’, focuses on the Second World War in the Pacific, the extent to which Canada had been depicted as a promised land, and the aftermath of the war. And in the final part, Grace addresses the search for peace in twenty-first-century art. Each of the chapters reinforces Grace’s main claim that readers and viewers of post-1977 Canadian war narratives bear witness to history. This is a deeply personal process as it connects us to trials and traumas that Canadians today have never known but which haunt society in powerful and yet subtle ways. ‘If war has taught us anything it is that battles and battle fronts never stay put over there or back then. The ghosts cannot simply be pushed aside’ (p. 457), argues Grace. In the final chapter, ‘Remembering War; Finding Peace?’, Grace draws attention to the difference in representation between the first and second world wars. Representations of the latter are less celebratory than the first, as evidenced in such works as Obasan, None is Too Many, The Ash Garden, and The Wreckage, as well as in the documentary film The Valour and the Horror. This has important repercussions because such works influence and shape the Canada of today.

Landscapes of War and Memory is intended for scholars, students, and all interested in literature, theatre, and art that addresses the memories of the two world wars. Elegantly written, beautifully illustrated, with copious notes and a detailed bibliography, Grace’s comprehensive study is a scholarly achievement of considerable magnitude.