Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)

I'm right now reading Thomas Jerome Seabrook's Bowie in Berlin, a book that has nothing at all to do with Canadian literature. The next up on deck is The Great Gatsby, which I'm in the habit of rereading every three, four or five years. Given this busy season, it's doubtful that I'll read another Canadian book before year's end. And so, the time has come for my annual reading obit, beginning with the three out-of-print books most deserving of reissue:

The Thread of Flame
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1920

The first novel the reverend wrote after the Armistice, this is the story of a man who, suffering from shell shock, loses his identity and memory. Essential reading for anyone studying the depiction of PTSD in literature.

The Empty Sack
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1921

A tale of two families, both trying to make sense of the post-Great War world. Murder features, rather unexpectedly. I dare not spoil, but I have reason to think that it influenced Ben Hecht's The Front Page.

Blencarrow
Isabel Mackay
Toronto: Allen, 1926

The last of five novels penned by a woman known more commonly as Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, its depiction of failed promise and domestic abuse had me wondering how it is that she is so forgotten.

Between this blog and my Canadian Notes & Queries column, I read and reviewed twenty-five forgotten and/or neglected Canadian books this year, five of which are actually in print:

It's rare that I let a year go by without tacking a Grant Allen novel. Miss Cayley's Adventures is one of the most popular, but not with me. Oh, I liked it well enough... but there are much better. In the midst of reading the novel I posted a list of my ten favourite Grant Allen novels. Revising that list, I would place Miss Cayley's Adventures at number eight, between The British Barbarians and Recalled to Life.

What fun! Last year, Robert Barr's Revenge! made my list of three books most deserving of a reprint. The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont would've been a shoe-in for this year had it not been available from the good folks at Gaslight Crime of Harpenden, Herts. Their edition features "The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs" and "The Adventure of the Second Swag," two Sherlock Holmes parodies not included in the original. The most entertaining read this year.

The Invisible Worm, Margaret Millar's 1941 debut had been long beyond both my financial reach and that of Ontario's interlibrary loan system. At long last, I was able to read it thanks to Syndicate Books' Collected Millar. Or is it called The Complete Margaret Millar? Either way, I'm appreciative. Collectors should take note that a copy of the first UK edition (above left), published in 1943 by John Long, is still available from Dacobra Books, Belleville, NSW, Australia. Price: US$520.

The Lively Corpse is Rose's Last Summer under another name. Margaret Millar's tenth novel, it closes The Dawn of Domestic Suspense, the second volume in the Collected Millar. The third volume is titled The Master at Her Zenith. This is Millar ascending.

The author's second novel, The Box Garden was published fifteen years before The Stone Diaries made her a household name. I'm embarrassed to admit – yet I must admit – that it is the only Carol Shields novel I've ever read. On the other hand, does her work really have a place in a blog devoted to forgotten, neglected, and suppressed writing?

This year I was involved in returning John Buell's Four Days to print. The author's second novel, it isn't so well known as his debut, The Pyx, but I think it is his best (and here I acknowledge that I haven't yet read his 1976 novel Playground). A Ricochet Book from Véhicule Press, the new edition features an introduction by Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow).

I didn't publish a book this year, but did contribute a few photos, ticket stubs, and a handbill to my friend Jim Dooley's Red Set: A History of Gang of Four. This is what comes from being a pack rat.

Praise this year goes to American Frank L. Packard scholar Michael Howard, who has begun reissuing the Jimmie Dale/Grey Seal novels in annotated editions.

The next, featuring The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale and Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue, will be released in the New Year. True labours of love, they can be purchased through American online booksellers.

Resolutions, I have a few:

• I resolved last year to read more books by women. And I did! Eleven of the twenty-five I reviewed were by women writers. Let's see if I can't improve on that number.
• I resolved last year to read more books by French language writers... and failed miserably. What I'd thought was an all-time low in 2017 – one! – was surpassed with a zero count in 2018. I hang my head in shame.
• I resolve to finish one of the two books I'm currently writing.
• Finally, as always, I resolve to continue kicking against the pricks.

How 'bout you?

Related posts:

The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

The Adventures of a Globe-Trotting Girton Girl
Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten
Grant Allen Tells It Like It Was
Mister Allen Writes a Murder Mystery
The Unexpected Robert Barr
A Conceited, Entirely Likeable Private Detective

Margaret Millar Makes Something of Herself
A Margaret Millar Mystery Spoiled
In 1977, I Hope I Go to Heaven

A Man Forgets His Identity (but not his manners)

The Great Canadian Post-Great War Novel?

The Promise of a Man, a Mother in So Much Pain
Four Days in Darkest Quebec
A Teenage Rock Photographer Between the Covers

A Conceited, Entirely Likeable Private Detective

The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont
Robert Barr
Harpenden, Herts: Gaslight Crime, 2015
303 pages

Eugène Valmont is Robert Barr's most enduring character. As evidence, I point to the fact that the volume bearing his name stands as the lone Barr book – he wrote twenty-three – currently in print. Valmont's adventures were first published in 1904 and 1905 numbers of Pearson's and Windsor Magazine; Americans enjoyed them through The Saturday Evening Post. This gathering of Valmont stories – eight in total – was first published in 1906 by Collins (London) and Appleton (New York). Other editions by Hurst & Blackett (London, 1912), Remploy (London, 1978), Dover (New York, 1985), and Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1997) followed. In this way, The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont has done far better than any other Barr book, including his 1900 travelogue The Unchanging East and the remarkable 1896  Revenge!, which made last year's list of three out-of-print books I felt most deserved reviving.

It's now nearing the end of October. As temperatures head into a tailspin, thoughts turn to year's end. This may explain why it is that I finished The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont thinking it just may end up as my most enjoyable read of 2018. Valmont has everything to do with this opinion. Once "chief detective to the Government of France," he now lives in self-exile, working as a private investigator from his London flat. How this came to be so, is detailed in "The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds," the first short story in this collection:

I may admit from the outset that I have no grievances to air. The French Government considered itself justified in dismissing me, and it did so. In this action it was quite within its right, and I should be the last to dispute that right; but, on the other hand, I consider myself justified in publishing the following account of what actually occurred, especially as so many false rumours have been put abroad concerning the case.

With no Watson, it is left to Valmont to recount his own adventures. He does so with sophistication, charm, elegant turns of phrase, and exactitude. I never once suspected the French detective of being an unreliable narrator, but will understand why others might. "The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds" can be read as an attempt to defend the actions in the case that brought about his dismissal by the French government. And yet, so many of his other adventures are likewise tales of failure.

This is the beginning of "The Absent-Minded Coterie," the most anthologized Valmont story:

Some years ago I enjoyed the unique experience of pursuing a man for one crime, and getting evidence against him of another. He was innocent of the misdemeanour, the proof of which I sought, but was guilty of another most serious offense, yet he and his confederates escaped scot-free in circumstances which I now purpose to relate.

Valmont's triumphs are few, though significant: the recovery of a lost inheritance, the rescue of an imprisoned man, and the thwarting of an anarchist bombing. In "The Clue of the Silver Spoons," the private detective achieves his client's objective, the return of stolen bank notes, but only with the help of the man he'd wrongly believed guilty of the theft. My favourite story in the collection, in the telling Valmont reveals that he very nearly didn't take the case:

The name of Bentham Gibbes is familiar to everyone, connected as it is with the much-advertised pickles, whose glaring announcements in crude crimson and green strike the eye throughout Great Britain, and shock the artistic sense wherever seen. Me! I have never tasted them, and shall not so long as a French restaurant remains open in London. But I doubt not they are as pronounced to the palate as their advertisement is distressing to the eye. If, then, this gross pickle manufacturer expected me to track down those who were infringing upon the recipes for making his so-called sauces, chutneys, and the like, he would find himself mistaken, for I was now in a position to pick and choose my cases, and a case of pickles did not allure me. "Beware of imitations," said the advertisement; "none genuine without a facsimile of the signature of Bentham Gibbes." Ah, well, not for me were either the pickles or the tracking of imitators. A forged check! yes, if you like, but the forged signature of Mr. Gibbes on a pickle bottle was out of my line.

Valmont is one of Canadian literature's greatest snobs (though, I remind, he is not Canadian). He disdains much about the land that has afforded him refuge. English justice and methods of policing are targets of his most biting most criticism. "I have had my failures, of course," he acknowledges in "Lady Alicia's Emeralds":

Did I ever pretend to be otherwise than human? But what has been the cause of these failures? They have arisen through the conservatism of the English. When there is a mystery to be solved, the average Englishman almost invariably places it in the hands of the regular police. When these good people are utterly baffled; when their big boots have crushed out all evidences that the grounds may have had to offer to a discerning mind; when their clumsy hands have obliterated the clews which are everywhere around them, I am at last called in, and if I fail, they say:
     "What could you expect; he is a Frenchman."

The last Eugène Valmont story, I consider "Lady Alicia's Emeralds" the detective's most humiliating failure. Does Valmont? This reader came away convinced of his abilities and delighting in his humour:

Many Englishmen, if you speak to them of me, indulge themselves in a detraction that I hope they will not mind my saying is rarely graced by the delicacy of innuendo with which some of my own countrymen attempt to diminish whatever merit I possess. Mr. Spenser Hale, of Scotland Yard, whose lack of imagination I have so often endeavoured to amend, alas! without perceptible success, was good enough to say, after I had begun these reminiscences, which he read with affected scorn, that I was wise in setting down my successes, because the life of Methuselah himself would not be long enough to chronicle my failures, and the man to whom this was said replied that it was only my artfulness, a word of which these people are very fond; that I intended to use my successes as bait, issue a small pamphlet filled with them, and then record my failures in a thousand volumes, after the plan of a Chinese encyclopaedia, selling these to the public on the instalment plan.

Would that there were more Valmont stories; I would happily spend more time with the man. As it is, I'm left looking for another Barr character with whom to pass my evenings. This young lady looks most promising:

Trivia: In 1973, the BBC aired "The Absent-Minded Coterie" as an episode The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Screenwriter Alexander Baron – known for his adaptations of Austen, Sicken, Thackeray and, yes, Doyle – took some liberties. Charles Gray played Valmont.* Suzanne Neve played Miss Mackail, a character that does not feature in the original story.

Object: A trade-size paperback with two introductions – to Gaslight Crime and the novel itself – both by Gaslight Crime series editor Nick Rennison. The final page features an advert for the two other Gaslight Crime books: Israel Zwangwill's The Big Bow Mystery and The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes.

This edition also features two stories not found in the original: "The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs" and "The Adventure of the Second Swag." First published in the May 1892 number of The Idler, the former is an early Sherlock Holmes parody. The second will appeal primarily to readers familiar with Arthur Conan Doyle's life and the magazines of late-Victorian London.

I found them both brilliant.

Access: Library and Archives Canada aside, The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont isn't to be found in our public libraries. This is a disgrace. I expect the librarians of Windsor Public Library, which serves the city in which Barr was raised, to hang their heads in shame.

Having lapsed into public domain in 1963, the book has long been at the mercy of print on demand vultures. Since beginning this blog, I've come under attack from these filthy scavengers (See: Tutis Classics), but have always been ready to provide a perch. Dodo ain't all that bad.

Need I provide more evidence that the vultures should be ignored? If so, here 'tis:

Buy the Gaslight Crime edition.

Those with deeper pockets will be discouraged to find that editions from Barr's own time aren't cheap. A Yankee bookseller tops the list of online offerings by asking US$750 for the 1912 Hurst & Blackett. The Appleton first American edition goes for US$475.

The 1906 Collins, which I believe to be the true first, is nowhere in sight.

Again, buy the Gaslight Crime edition.

As may be expected expected, The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont has been translated into the French: Eugène Valmont – L'Intégrale. I trust Jean-Daniel Brèque's translation is better than the cover. No Chinese characters feature in the novel, nor does Valmont visit any area that might be described as "Chinatown." Other translations include: Italian (I Trionfi Di Eugène Valmont), Portuguese (Os Triunfos de Eugène Valmont), Korean (위풍당당 명탐정 외젠 발몽), and Japanese (ウジェーヌ・ヴァルモンの勝利).

* Coincidentally, Gray also played Mycroft Holmes, a character created by Barr's friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1988), and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994).

Related posts:

Through the Unchanging East With Robert Barr

Women of the Unchanging East

The Unexpected Robert Barr (w/two queries)

The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2017;

Featuring Three Books Deserving Resurrection

The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2017; Featuring Three Books Deserving Resurrection

I finished reading my last book of the year yesterday afternoon; there is no way the I'll reach the end of the next before January. And so, the time has come for the annual recap of the best dusty books reviewed here and in Canadian Notes & Queries.

Twenty-seventeen was an unusual year for the Dusty Bookcase. Roughly twice as many books were covered in the first half as in the second. Promotion of the Dusty Bookcase book, The Dusty Bookcase: A Journey Through Canada's Forgotten, Neglected and Suppressed Writing, had something to do with it, but so too did other projects. The sad result is that just nineteen books were reviewed in 2017... and here I include that for the book I finished yesterday, which has yet to be written and posted. Either way, it is an all-time low.

Happily, despite the relatively small number – nineteen! – it was very easy to come up with this year's list of three books deserving a return to print:

Revenge!
Robert Barr

Barr stands with May Agnes Fleming and Grant Allen as one of our three most interesting Victorian novelists, and yet we ignore them all. This 1896 collection of twenty short stories delves into the darkest, deadliest areas of the soul.

Behind the Beyond
Stephen Leacock

First published in 1913, this is one of titles dropped in the New Canadian Library's bloody post-Ross purge. It stands amongst Professor Leacock's best collections. Interested publishers should consider the sixteen A.H. Fish illustrations featured in the first edition.

In Quest of Splendour
[Pierre le magnifique]
Roger Lemelin
[trans. Harry Lorin Binsse]

Lemelin's third novel, and very nearly his last, this pales beside the sales of the other three, but I think it is his best. Harry Binsse's 1955 translation enjoyed a single printing. Time has come for a new edition.



Three works reviewed this year are in print:

First published in 1902, the oldest is Ralph Connor's somewhat nostalgic, somewhat autobiographical novel Glengarry School Days. Last I looked, the 2009 New Canadian Library edition with introduction by John Lennox was still available from Penguin Random House. For how much longer, I wonder.

Shadow on the Hearth (1950) by Judith Merril is far from the best novel I read this year, but is recommended just the same. A Cold War nightmare, it has as much to do with the H-bomb as state secrecy and control. It features as one of three novels collected in Spaced Out: Three Novels of Tomorrow, published by the New England Science Fiction Society Press.

Wives and Lovers (1954) is generally considered the last Margaret Millar non-Mystery... which isn't to say that there isn't mystery or that its characters don't do some very bad things. The very best novel I read this year, it can be found in The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume in Syndicate Books' Collected Millar.

I was involved in resurrecting only one book this year:

The Pyx
John Buell

The twelfth title in the Ricochet Books series, I consider this the best. A debut novel, first published in 1959 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, it has drawn considerable praise through the decades. This new edition has an introduction by Sean Kelly.



Praise this year goes to Biblioasis' ReSet series. Now, I do recognize the optics – Biblioasis being the publisher of The Dusty Bookcase – but, really, is it not overdue? For six years now, roughly half the life of the press, it has been bringing back some of our most unjustly neglected titles. Early in the New Year, I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, the collected stories of Norman Levine, will be added to the series.

Speaking of the New Year, I don't think it's too early for resolutions. Here are mine:

• I resolve to read more books by women (two-thirds of my 2017 reading were books by men);
• I resolve to read more books by French language writers (In Quest of Splendour was the only one read in 2017);
• I resolve to read and review more forgotten, neglected and suppressed books than I did this past year;
• I resolve to continue kicking against the pricks. 

You?

Related posts:

The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

The Unexpected Robert Barr

Professor Leacock Sets the Stage

The Beautiful, Very Desirable Stephen Leacock

A Novel That Killed a Novelist?

A Novel My Mother Read

A Nuclear Family Nightmare

An 'Other Novel' by Margaret Millar

The Return of The Pyx

The Unexpected Robert Barr (w/ two queries)

Revenge!

Robert Barr

[n.p.]: Dodo, [n.d]

240 pages

A collection of short stories united by a common theme, Revenge! was one of Robert Barr's best received books. This anonymous review from the 26 November 1896 issue of Public Opinion is typical:

Under the comprehensive title of "Revenge," Robert Barr collects a score of the wildest flights of his imagination, which land us in all sorts of places. Horrors dire lie cheek by jowl with the broadest of farces. All tastes are suited save those the readers who wish to derive moral benefit from their literary pabulum, for there is not a scrap of moral to be extracted, although one can be invented to fit almost anywhere.

The first American edition, with illustrations by Lancelot Speed, Stanley Wood, and G.G. Manton, is a thing of beauty. I wanted a copy for years, I searched for a copy for years, and in the end settled for this crummy print on demand thing from Dodo Press. I'm glad I did because Revenge! was not only this summer's favourite read, but it renewed my interest in its author.

Barr was a better stylist than his contemporary Grant Allen, whom I describe in my new book (plug) as Victorian Canada's greatest novelist, but I'd long believed Barr lagged far behind his rival in weaving a good yarn.

I was wrong.

The stories in Revenge! are "wonderfully clever" – I quote Douglas Sladen (Literary Review, 23 October 1896) – the suspense, black humour, and twists remind me of nothing so much as Tales of the Unexpected, which so captivated as a kid.

Revenge! has twenty stories, all of which would've fit well in Roald Dahl's series. The first, "An Alpine Divorce," is one of Barr's most anthologized, which is not to say it is well-known. Because we never read it in school, what follows will likely spoil things.

As the title suggests, "An Alpine Divorce" concerns marital discord. It begins:

In some natures there are no half-tones; nothing but raw primary colours. John Bodman was a man who was always at one extreme or the other. This probably would have mattered little had he not married a wife whose nature was an exact duplicate of his own.

With all divorces one must pick a side. I chose to be with Mrs Bodman (she has no Christian name), but as the tale progressed she fell out of favour.

Things are set in motion when John Bodman books a holiday in the Swiss Alps. Saying nothing, his wife sets about preparing for the journey. At some point – the narrator is unsure as to just when – John gets the idea that a nearby picturesque outlook would be the perfect place to dispose of his wife. They'll hike there together – Mrs Bodman always insists on accompanying him everywhere –  and he'll simply push her over the outlook's crumbling wall.

Set out they do, in a scene that affords the reader the first and only glimpse of their married life. As the couple approach their destination, the wife pauses. "John," she asks, "don't you think that if you had been kinder to me at first, things might have been different?":

"It seems to me," he answered, not looking at her, "that it is rather late in the day for discussing that question."
     "I have much to regret," she said quaveringly. "Have you nothing?"
     "No," he answered."
     "Very well," replied his wife, with the usual hardness returning to her voice. "I was merely giving you a chance. Remember that."
     Her husband looked at her suspiciously. "What do you mean?" he asked, "giving me a chance? I want no chance nor anything else from you. A man accepts nothing from one he hates. My feeling towards you is, I imagine, no secret to you. We are tied together, and you have done your best to make the bondage insupportable."
     "Yes," she answered, with her eyes on the ground, "we are tied together, we are tied together!"

Mrs Bodman becomes increasingly agitated:

"Why do you walk about like a wild animal?" he cried. "Come here and sit down beside me, and be still." She faced him with a light he had never before seen in her eyes — a light of insanity and of hatred.
     "I walk like a wild animal," she said, " because I am one. You spoke a moment ago of your hatred of me; but you are a man, and your hatred is nothing to mine. Bad as you are, much as you wish to break the bond which ties us together, there are still things which I know you would not stoop to. I know there is no thought of murder in your heart, but there is in mine. I will show you, John Bodman, how much I hate you."
     The man nervously clutched the stone beside him, and gave a guilty start as she mentioned murder.
     "Yes," she continued, "I have told all my friends in England that I believed you intended to murder me in Switzerland."
     "Good God!" he cried. "How could you say such a thing?"
     "I say it to show how much I hate you — how much I am prepared to give for revenge. I have warned the people at the hotel, and when we left two men followed us. The proprietor tried to persuade me not to accompany you. In a few moments those two men will come in sight of the Outlook. Tell them, if you think they will believe you, that it was an accident."
     The mad woman tore from the front of her dress shreds of lace and scattered them around.
     Bodman started up to his feet, crying, "What are you about?" But before he could move toward her she precipitated herself over the wall, and went shrieking and whirling down the awful abyss.

Bloody hell! What an ending!

Now, I warned you I was going to spoil things. I did so because I wanted to give a sense of why Revenge! is worthy of attention. A collection of well-crafted, imaginative, disturbing, entertaining tales, it is the best Victoria's Canada offered. There are nineteen more tales – some better, some worse, most on equal footing.

Give it a read. Do not wait for next summer; it is a book for all seasons. I'm betting Roald Dahl would agree.

A query: The 14 November 1896 Atheneum has it that "An Alpine Divorce" was likely suggested by an "'over-true' tale of some years since." Does anyone have an idea as to the incident the reviewer is referencing?

A second query: "An Alpine Divorce" is one of two Revenge! stories to feature suicide, and murder features in most, but not all are touched by death. An example of this last is "The Bromley Gibberts' Story," which Sladen likens to a roman à clef, adding "it is hard not to think that the alphabetical resemblance of the hero's name to that of a well-known novelist of the day is entirely accidental, or that the resemblance of the name Shorely to that of one of the cleverest and most popular of our editors is purely fortuitous."

I have no idea just who he's on about. Do you?

Object and Access: A trade-size paperback. I paid US$10.99 for my copy.

Of all the print on demand vultures, Dodo has the nicest cover – that's James Tissot's July: Specimen of a Portrait (1878). The strangest positions Robert Barr as a pulp writer, and reimagines Mrs Bodman as a woman who knows how to handle a gun.

The 1896 Stokes first edition I searched for isn't horribly expensive, but it exceeds my current budget. Copies begin at US$65 and, for no good reason, reach US$500. "Tastefully stamped with silver and colors," says the ad in the November 1896 edition of the Pocket Magazine. I've seen copies on yellow, red, green, and tan boards, with no indication as to which, if any, is the true first. A yellow copy of the Stokes edition can be read online here – gratis – at the Internet Archive.

An English edition was published the same year by Chatto & Windus.

Held by nine Canadian university libraries. All our public libraries fail.

Women of the Unchanging East

A follow-up to Monday's post on Robert Barr's The Unchanging East:

I'm not sure that I've seen a more generously illustrated Victorian travelogue; plates account for over thirty percent of the page count. Unfortunately, not one of the images – photographs all – bears a credit. While I suspect that at least a few of the more touristy shots are nothing but reproductions of postcards, I'm more confident that many of the images  – the grainy one of Black John, for example  – were taken during Barr's travels and troubles. Sadly, there are no images of the author himself, but we do find some portraits of people who figure in the book, including two of genial Maronite dragoman Selim G. Tabet.

However, the vast majority of the portraits are of anonymous women. Postcards perhaps, but these make for the most interesting images in the book. What follows are the finest, beginning with a Damascus girl and ending with an image that I imagine was consulted repeatedly by more than few adolescent Victorian males. Today's teenage boys will be less interested.

Related Post: 

Through the Unchanging East with Robert Barr

Through the Unchanging East with Robert Barr

The Unchanging East; or, Travels and Troubles in the Orient
Robert Barr
Boston: Page, 1900

Robert Barr died one hundred years ago yesterday. I spent much of the morning, afternoon and evening with the man. Yes, I did. The Measure of the Rule (1907) may be Barr's most autobiographical novel, but it's with The Unchanging East that you really get a sense of his character:

When the steamship company sent me their printed rules and regulations, one item therein immediately attracted my attention. It was to the effect that no passenger was allowed to bring liquor on board with him, so this reminded me that certain decoctions were grateful and comforting, as the advertisements say, besides there always being a pleasure in breaking the rules; so I at once brought four bottles from Caledonia in case I should meet some personal friend...

Only a fool or a teetotaler – same thing, really – would pass on the opportunity of joining a man such as this on his travels.

Barr begins in a hansom cab bound for the Manchester docks:

A thick autumn fog, saturated soot in suspension, enveloped the town. The drive from the station proved most unattractive – I should not care to liken it to a trip in Hades for fear of exaggeration, because Hades at least is warm, and I believe the atmosphere must be more clear than that of Manchester.

Mancunians are not alone. The overly sensitive will wish to gird themselves; nearly every place and every people come in for a ribbing on this voyage. Not even the people of Scotland, the land of Barr's birth, are spared. Witness, if you will his comments on that petite Maltanese land mass we 21st-century English speakers know as Gozo:

The island should by right be inhabited by Scotchmen, for it possesses a coin valued at one-sixth of a cent, and if, as the saying has it, the farthing was invented to enable the Scotchmen to contribute to the cause of religion, then the islands of Goza [sic] and Malta should be three times more attractive to us Scotchmen than any other spot on earth.

The only people to draw complete and unqualified praise are "the Druses", whom Barr describes as "a most admirable people, extremely hospitable, ready to share their last crust with any stranger who happens along, invariably refusing money for the services they may render a traveller, and they are always fond of a joke."

Where other fin de siècle travelogues glaze the eyes, Barr's dry humour and observations make this a book that I would not put down. This isn't to say that there is not unpleasantness, but for much of the journey, our author's "troubles" are trivial: street vendors try to take advantage and trips by rail prove uncomfortable. He witnesses no violence, and relays old news of massacre and slaughter with the cold hand of a statistician.

The unchanging east? No longer. Much as I enjoyed the journey, throughout it all I couldn't help but wonder about the grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of the Syrian women who looked out from the frontispiece.

Object: Two compact, bulky volumes bound in white cloth. Each is 256 pages in length and features 41 plates, one of which captures Black John, "a character the like of which is probably to be found nowhere else than in the Levant."

Access: The problem, of course, is that sets are so often broken up. Only two complete sets are listed online, but both are crummy ex-library copies. Ignore the dealer who describes his offering as "Very Good" – for library discards this is an impossible condition. Putting a set together is a tricky thing in that the work was issued in two separate bindings – one green and one white. Just one copy of volume one is listed online (US$20.00). Volume two (US$18.95 - US$25.85) is three times as plentiful, which is to say that it's not plentiful at all.

Headaches might be avoided by simply buying the single-volume English edition, published in 1900 by Chatto & Windus, except that it seems an even more uncommon beast. The only copy listed online is another library discard. The bookseller is honest – perhaps because it came from a church – describing its condition as "Fair". There was no Canadian edition.

As with so much of our literary heritage that is now in the public domain, print on demand monstrosities abound, Most are offered by folks who don't do the courtesy of indicating exactly which of the two volumes they're crapping out. Pictured right, with a cover photograph of the great northern pines of the Mediterranean, is the excrement offered by infamous Nabu Press.

Twenty-one of our academic libraries, the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and the ever reliable Toronto Public Library have copies.

Related post:

Women of the Unchanging East

Ralph Connor's Beautiful War of 1812

The Runner: A Romance of the Niagaras

Ralph Connor [pseud. Rev. Charles W. Gordon]

New York: Triangle, 1939

481 pages 

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Getting to the Fenian Raids

In the Midst of Alarms

Robert Barr

New York: Stokes, 1894

With St Patrick's Day on the horizon thoughts turn to the Fenians. And why not? Their ill-considered incursions helped induce the birth of this country. Tragicomic, the Fenian Raids seem suited for satire, so why is that after nearly fifteen decades this forgotten novel stands alone in using those troublous times as a backdrop?

Never having before read Barr, I had more than modest expectations for this book. After all, the writer was very much respected in his day. True, he was "popular", but so were his friends Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle. And consider this: as a volunteer soldier, Barr helped defend the Niagara frontier during the raids. Sadly, nothing of his experience seems much in evidence here.

The novel begins well with a strong chapter focused on the reunion of old school chums Stillson Renwick and Richard Yates in a Fenian infested Buffalo hotel. Fifteen years have passed since their last meeting, during which Renwick has become a proper, polite professor at the University of Toronto. Yates, in stark contrast, has quit Canada for a fast-paced life as a New York journalist. He is a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer and overall bon vivant, a man whose drive has very nearly put him behind asylum gates. A change of pace is required – so he's been told – and the journalist has decided a week or two of camping with his passive pal Renwick is just the thing to cure his ills.

The next day, the pair crosses the Niagara into Canada, leaving behind all intrigue and excitement for woodland pleasures. "The Odd Couple Go Camping" isn't much of an idea; Barr seems to recognize as much by introducing Kitty Bartlett and Margaret Howard, two attractive farmers' daughters for the men to pursue. Further pages – chapters, in some instances – are devoted to topics such as soap making, bread baking, and the dueling roles of the rural blacksmith and village grocer in the years preceding Confederation. All quite accurate observations, from what I can tell, but it does become a bit tiresome. The chapter devoted to the mid-19th-century public library policies of Canada West bores even a bookish fellow like myself.

But where are the Fenians in all this? They're rarely mentioned; no one takes the threat of invasion seriously. "They won't venture over", predicts journalist Yates, the man with his ear closest to the ground. "They fight with their mouths. It's the safest way."

When the Fenians do finally invade, well over half-way through the novel, encounters are fleeting. Renwick and Yates are captured, marched to the Fenian camp, have a brief exchange with "General" John O'Neill, and are released. The professor and the journalist are far away when the fighting begins. Barr's description of the absurd comedy of errors that was the Battle of Ridgeway is limited to a dispassionate, two-page factual account that reads like something ripped from an old high school textbook.

"The farce is known as the Battle of Ridgeway, and would have been comical had it not been that death hovered over it," Barr concludes.

Too soon?

Bloomer: "Touch a man on his business, and he generally responds by being interested."

Object: A small volume with microscopic type, this "SECOND EDITION" features five substandard illustrations by C. Moore Smith.

Small wonder that later editions featured scenes imagined by the talented Harrison Fisher.

Access: Our academic libraries succeed while our public libraries fail. Those of Fort Erie, Port Colborne and Welland, all key communities in the Battle of Ridgeway, lack copies. In Canada, only the taxpayers of Toronto and Vancouver are properly served. The novel is much more common south of the border.

In the Midst of Alarms was a bestseller in its day, and was reprinted for many years thereafter, but there isn't much evidence of this online. The armful of 19th-century copies currently listed range between ten and thirty dollars. As might be expected, print on demand farms dominate, displaying editions of ugliness and ineptitude. Nabu Press is the worst offender, offering the booklover a choice of covers depicting the snow covered mountains of southern Ontario and the ancient ruins of Fort Erie.