The Englishman's Boy: A Novel

The book tells two stories. In one, the Swan Hills Massacre looms as Caandian settlers head out into the West, following "horse thieves." Among them is the Englishman, from the point of view of whose servant-- the Boy, Shorty McAdoo-- the action unfolds. The other story tells of Damon Ira LaChance, Hollywood mogul, who wants to make an epic D.W. Griffiths-inspired Western. La Chance's producer seeks out the reticent McAdoo and the narative alternates between the Hollywood and Wild West stories.

ALthought the characters remain opaque, Vanderhaghe is on sure fictional footing here. One of the novel's points is that history ironically becomes less knowable the more it is interpreted. The horror of the events that McAdoo will witness is both the subject of LaChance's film and the simple fact that makes it necessary for the film to "misintepret" the events it portrays. So it is with the characters: we see actions and words, but motivations are strangely absent, as is interior character development. It is as if the narrator knows that his own story is a re-creation (and not recreation) whose limits-- a hundred and twenty years after the "fact"-- are acknowledged in his refusal to make up yet ANOTHER story about the men's interior lives. Perhaps, as some have suggested, this is the flaw in Vanderhaeghe's novel; perhaps it is his subtle nod to the Hollywood tradition within which the novel must work.

The book is an edge of the seat thriller, a philosophical question-poser, and often oddly beautiful, its nostalgia shot through with a bitter self-consciousness. Like all great Westerns (Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, The Shooting, The Great Northfield Minnesota Gang, High Noon), The Englishman's Boys is about the death of the imagined West and, sadly, the death of the real, complex but strangely opaque people who once lived there.


The best book ever written!   April 22, 2005
 1 out of 6 found this review helpful

Guy is my cousin and I am very proud to say that. This is the best book that I have ever read and for those of you who say it sucks because it is confusing, clearly you are just uneducated and you don't deserve to read this book.


Why you should go to Canada   April 2, 2004
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

When I occasionally get to Canada, I always search out the bookstores, as you can find great Canadian novels like this one that are practically unknown in the US. The characters and storylines in this novel ring historically true and are at the same time unique. The book intriguingly weaves together the not so familiar old West of Canada (at least to readers in the US) with prohibition-era Hollywood. The writing is plain, direct, and superb. This is great literature with important things to say, delivered in the form of a compelling and engrossing story.