The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, by Wayne Johnston, Knopf Canada, 1998.

What would we do without Newfoundlanders? Would we laugh? Would we cry? No doubt we would, but not as hard and not as often. Now that The Divine Ryans has gone to movie land, Wayne Johnston is back with a new novel to tickle simultaneously our funny bones and our sad bones; and notjust with a new novel, but with a "new" novel, a new form. Or at least as far as I know it is a new form of novel: it is at the same time a fictional history of a country and a fictional biography of a politician, Joey Smallwood, who transformed his country into a province, a bit of an inverted exemplar for Lucien Bouchard et.al.

Like The Divine Ryans, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams plots the progress of a malfunctioning family plying malfunctioning trades in a malfunctioning country/province with hilarious and heart-rending consequences. But the new novel is more ambitious, indeed, like Anne Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees' it has an epic quality, it is full of larger than life characters, extravagant speeches, incredible, improbable joumeys, and it parallels the fate of the nation with the fate of the hero.

The unlikely epic hero is Joey Smallwood, Father of Confederation, who, having many times failed to climb various ladders to success, finally stumbled up the stair to become the popular hero and achieve what prime ministers of two countries could not. Did he do it, or was he a mere instrument of forces neither he nor anyone else understands? Who knows. His unlikely, but true in her fashion, Penelope is Sheilagh Fielding, a woman too taken with scotch to focus her attention on tapestry, but she is a writer, a journalist of rich and vitriolic prose and in her columns andjoumals and her history of Newfoundland she weaves together the past and the present of the country and of the people whose interest she shares. She is the constant antagonist, foil, source of inspiration and closet lover of the hero' Sheisthe one person who understands, the one who shapes the chaos of events into intelligibility, although she is incapable of mending her own fences or shaping her own life, or even, for all her communicative skills, of establishing contact with the people who should be the beneficiaries of her substantial capacity for love. She is the real tragic hero of this tragic/comic tale. She appears to be the only fully fictional characterin thenovel. But who knows? She is unforgettable and will live long as one of the great Canadian fictional characters.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a fictional history of Canada as well as of Newfoundland, and Johnston has neatly captured Newfoundland's version of the Great Canadian Ambivalence. Sheilagh Fielding, writing during the nine month period between the referendum, won by the "confederates," and the date for implementing confederation, captures the feelings of Newfoundlanders of the time and perhaps the onagain off-again feeling of all "provincial" Canadians:

 We have been in limbo for the past
 nine months, neither country nor
 province. Only a few would understand
 that is the old abiding limbo made
 manifest, that we have always been in
 limbo and perhaps always will(p.493).

And in chapter twenty-nine, entitled, "The Ode Not Taken," Fielding writes: "Boyle develops a love?hate relationship with Newfoundland and, never able to resolve this ambivalence, writes two odes..." (verses of which are alternated).

 When the sun rays crown thy pine-clad hills,
 And summer spreads her hands,
 When slivem voices tune thy rills,
 We love thee, smiling land.

 (When men do drown for lack of gills,
 And, dead, wash up on land,
 Their wives their silvem tears do spill,
 And keen and wring their hands.

Wayne Johnston's novel is a wonderful compendium of stories and characters and an insightful tour of Newfoundland geography and culture, agood and entertaining substitute forpeople who have not lived any of their lives there.

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