Synopses & Reviews
National bestseller
Winner of The 1999 Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 1998 Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and Rogers Communication Writers Trust Fiction Prize
One of The Globe and Mail's Top 100 Notable Books of 1998 and Critics' Pick: One of the Year's Top Ten Books
A Maclean's Choice for Best Fiction from Fall, 1998
About the Author
Wayne Johnston was born in Newfoundland in 1958 and grew up in Goulds, a small community a few miles south of St. John's. When he was a boy, he couldnt imagine a world beyond the island. “The only outside world I ever saw was on television, and I didnt really even believe that world existed.” People were still divided over the Confederation with Canada, which had happened only in 1949. His family had a habit of moving around to different neighbourhoods and his schooling was ‘hyper-Catholic, traits which would feature in his autobiographical first novel.
He graduated with a BA (Hons) in English from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and worked from 1979 to 1981 as a reporter at the St. John's Daily News. Being a reporter was a crash course in how society works, but he realized he didnt want it as a career. “Im not that outgoing of a person and you have to be in order to be a good reporter.” He moved away from Newfoundland, firstly to Ottawa, and took up the writing of fiction full-time. In 1983 he graduated with an MA from the University of New Brunswick. His first book, The Story of Bobby OMalley, was published shortly after, and won the W.H.Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He followed this success two years later with The Time of Their Lives, which won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Most Promising Young Writer.
His third novel, The Divine Ryans, again a portrait of Irish Catholic Newfoundland, centres on a nine-year-old hockey fanatic, whose father dies and whose family goes to live with relatives who once had money but are fast declining. Time Out has called it “achingly funny, needle sharp…with heart, soul and brains”. One of Johnstons most comic novels, it earned him the title of ‘the Roddy Doyle of Canada. The Divine Ryans won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and has been adapted into a film starring Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite. Johnston wrote the screenplay himself for this and also for the adaptation of his next novel, Human Amusements, also optioned for film.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnstons fifth novel, in 1998 was shortlisted for the most prestigious fiction awards in Canada, the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize, the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and the Rogers Communication Writers Trust Fiction Prize; it won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. A glowing New York Times Book Review cover story caused the book to leap to the upper ranks of the Amazon.com top 100 selling books of the day. It has been called a ‘Dickensian romp of a novel, which uses the career of Newfoundland's first premier to create a love story and a tragi-comic elegy to an impossible country.
Published across North America and Europe in several languages, the novel caused some controversy in Canada among those who recalled the real Joey Smallwood, a man who was hated by many Newfoundlanders, including Johnstons own family, for bringing the island into Canada. Although his strongly anti-confederate family could barely bring themselves to mention Smallwoods name, Johnston read a biography of the politician when he was 14.
Johnston considered carefully the different ways of establishing ‘fictional/historical plausibility in the novel. Re-reading Don Delillo's novel Libra, he observed how “Delillo gave himself the freedom to invent scenes, incidents, conversations as long as they seemed plausible within the fictional world that he created.” He also considered Salman Rushdies Midnight's Children, where, in spite of the magic realism, India still gains independence in 1948, and political figures are elected or assassinated under the same circumstances as their real-life counterparts. He decided he would not change or omit anything that was publicly known. “I would fill in the historical record in a way that could have been true, and flesh out and dramatize events that, though publicly known, were not recorded in detail. Most importantly, I would invent for Smallwood a lover/nemesis (Sheilagh Fielding) who could have existed (but didn't) and wove her and Smallwood's story into the history of Newfoundland. This would be my plausibility contract with the reader.”
In 1999 he published Baltimore's Mansion, his first non-fiction book, a family memoir that also became a national bestseller and won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Johnston uses the stories of his own childhood and his father and grandfather to cast light on Newfoundlands struggle over relinquishing independence in 1949. A National Post reviewer concluded that it was a ‘non-fiction novel drawing on all Johnstons narrative powers to “shape the materials of real life into a work of astonishing beauty and power”. In another review, Quill and Quire said “I began to smell the smells, hear the lilt, and experience a sense of the fierce attachment Newfoundlanders feel to their home province no matter where they live,” commenting that Newfoundland geography, history and culture permeates Johnstons books.
Johnston has lived in Toronto since 1989, although he has to date written exclusively about Newfoundland. “I couldn't write about the island while I was there,” he says. “Life was too immediate. I was too inundated by the place and its details. I'd write about something and see it when I walked across the street the next day.” A “benign homesickness” has become a kind of fuel for writing about the island. He talks of Newfoundland as being too “overwhelmingly beautiful and substantial” to capture. To write with any kind of objectivity, "I need distance to get that sense of what is important and what is significant and what is not."
Reading Group Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams—at once a mystery and a love story spanning five decades and an epic portrait of passion and ambition set against the beautiful, brutal landscape of Newfoundland.
1. Both Joe and his father suffer from the fact that their last name adorns a large iron boot hanging at the entrance to the harbor, advertising the family shoe store. Why is the boot so oppressive that both Joe and his father sometimes dream about it? Why does Joe finally take it down?
2. Joe is haunted by the sense of his own insignificance: "It seemed to me that unless I did something that historians thought was worth recording, it would be as if I had never lived, that all the histories in the world together formed one book, not to warrant inclusion in which was to have wasted one's life" [p. 454]. Why does he feel this way? What is the relationship between the ambitions of Joe Smallwood and his paternal heritage of small-time shopkeeping, alcoholism, and failure? How do his experiences at Bishop Feild school affect his ideas about himself?
3. Johnston has created the structure of the book by interspersing Joe Smallwood's first-person narrative with excerpts from Fielding's journal, her History of Newfoundland, and her "Field Day" newspaper columns. What is the effect, as you read, of the interplay of these parts?
4. Smallwood's conversion to socialism takes place after his haunting vision of the frozen bodies of the sealers who died on the ice. Would you say that his walk across the island to unionize the men is Smallwood's most heroic act in the novel? How does the rest of his career compare with the scale of this exploit?
5. Returning to Newfoundland after five years in New York, Joe says, "It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions. . . . A kind of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no object and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn't" [pp. 211-12]. Why is this such a painful moment for him?
6. Johnston has given Joe Smallwood the role of protagonist and the main first-person narrative, but some reviewers have expressed the opinion that Sheilagh Fielding is a more compelling character. Is Fielding ultimately more admirable than Smallwood? Whose life story is more interesting?
Joe Smallwood is not mentioned in Fielding's History, which ends in 1923 when Sir Richard Squires is prime minister. Why does Fielding end her history there?
7. Why does Smallwood's marriage proposal to Fielding go awry? When he next sees her, she tells him with her customary irony that she has been "reduced to hermiting because you broke my heart" [p. 228]. How true is this statement? Why does Smallwood marry Clara Oates and not Fielding?
8. Freezing to death on the Bonavista branch line, Smallwood imagines his own obituary [p. 225]. What makes this scene so touching and so comical? Joe is saved by Fielding, who here as at other crucial moments makes herself indispensable. Does Smallwood perform the same function in her life? Is their relationship, on the whole, reciprocal in terms of giving and receiving?
9. Sir Richard Squires tells Joe, "Power is what you want, though I'll never get you to admit it. You picked socialism because you thought it was your best way of getting ahead. . . . You're not an artist, you're not a scientist, you're not an intellectual. All that's left to you is politics" [p. 270]. How accurate is Sir Richard's assessment of Joe's character? Joe responds that "the distinguishing characteristic of the true socialist...was selflessness" [p. 271]. Do selflessness and self-interest necessarily conflict?
10. Some Canadian readers have been troubled by the liberties that Wayne Johnston has taken with the life of Newfoundland's first premier. Is the book more purely fictional, and therefore more purely enjoyable, for American readers, for whom Smallwood is not a known entity? It appears, for instance, that Johnston created the character of Fielding wholly from his own imagination. Why do you suppose he decided that Fielding was needed as a counterpart to Joe Smallwood? What would the novel have been like without the presence of Fielding? What are the particular complications and pleasures of fiction that is based on, but not entirely true to, historical reality?
11. The mystery of the anonymous letter to The Morning Post is not solved until the end of the novel, and it keeps Smallwood in the dark about some of the motivations of Fielding's character as well as her true feelings for him. How satisfying is the resolution of this issue? Does the revelation about Fielding's father highlight aspects of her character, or explain in part why she has conducted her life as she has?
12. Why does Joe bring Judge Prowse's A History of Newfoundland with him to New York City? What is the symbolic significance of this book for various characters in the novel?
13. Why does Johnston wait until late into the novel to reveal Fielding's secret about what happened when she was sixteen? How does this revelation affect your understanding of Fielding's character and her motivations up to this point? Would you say that Fielding is a selfless character?
14. Is confederation a defeat for Newfoundland? Would it have been possible for such a bleak and economically unpromising land to survive as an independent nation? Was Smallwood right to think that, since socialism had failed, confederation was the only way to improve the lives of the outlanders?
15. How would you compare the political ideals of the young Smallwood to those of the man who becomes premier of the island after confederation? Has his character changed? What about his core ethical beliefs? Why is he so susceptible to people like Valdmanis?
16. Several reviews have commented on the skill with which Johnston has succeed in creating a novel that is reminiscent of the work of Charles Dickens. If you have read David Copperfield or Great Expectations, how does The Colony of Unrequited Dreams compare with them? What aspects of this book make it so compelling and so memorable?
1. The
New York Times said Newfoundland asserts itself as a setting in the novel “to the point of claiming a character role”; also that “the profound but…doomed love between [Fielding] and Smallwood is the novels heart and soul”. To what extent do you think the novel is about Smallwood and Fielding, and to what extent is it about Newfoundland?
2. How do Fielding and Smallwoods views of Newfoundland differ?
3. “There is no reason for us to be so much in the thrall of our historical figures that we cannot suspend our disbelief when writers of fiction ring variations on their lives,” wrote Johnston in The Globe and Mail, after a journalist complained that Joey Smallwood was too much “within reach of memory” to be a fit subject for a novel. How might a readers knowledge (or lack of knowledge) about the real Joey Smallwood affect the reading of the novel?
4. Can you compare The Colony of Unrequited Dreams to another novel of Newfoundland — or to a novel by John Irving or Charles Dickens?