In a longer piece I would have written about the mood around Whitehall, the “metonymic centre of the British government.” I would have mentioned the historical echoes of crisis and transition that resonated strongly when I was there. The creative spark for writing historical fiction, at least for me, ignites when the more one reads about the era one is trying to evoke, the more one can sense rhyming patterns with then and now.

However, taking in London in 2026 also affirms how different this particular “rupture” in the global world order is, and how difficult it is to lead a government through this period (on this platform, I’d highly recommend Ian Leslie’s and Claire Berlinski’s recent pieces for the best briefing). If so much of what ails London and the UK post-Brexit were sui generis, this would all be less relevant for readers here in Canada, but if you dip into Caroline Knowles’ Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London or Patrick Radden Keefe’s great new book London Falling, that sense of pattern recognition - the rhyme - is less historical than contemporary, not then-and now as much as there-and-here.

You could argue, however, that the popularity of Radden Keefe’s book here in Canada is simply the result of a multinational publisher launching a safe bet (Radden Keefe’s New Yorker piece on Zac Brettler’s death was one of the most widely read pieces in the magazine in 2024) and backing it with prime table real estate in Chapters/Indigo, as well as reviews in what’s left of the conventional media landscape.

And yet there are stronger arguments for the book’s success and relevance. We’re clearly as vulnerable to similar populist, separatist strains that have inflicted so much damage economically - and culturally - in the UK. We have experienced how the financialization of “heritage” real estate in our cities can hollow them out culturally. The high security condo blocks and hostile architecture erected to protect the interests of high net worth individuals exists everywhere now, as does the palpable sense of a corrosive class divide experienced in a stroll through gentrifying neighbourhoods.

When watching who picks up Radden Keefe’s book in bookstores, both here and in the UK, I think there’s something else going on as well. The book is, either intentionally or providentially (for Radden Keefe and his publisher), a work of brilliant microtargeting. The parent or grandparent who still reads The New Yorker and diligently completes everything on the reading list of the book club they attend, they’re largely propping up the market for narrative non-fiction now that podcasting has captured Waterstones Dad’s available attention. And when this parent or grandparent is ruminating on that son or grandson who, say, forsook his aspiration to be the next, Canadian-famous, indie music pop star in order to travel the world, on rich men’s money, to photograph fancy cars and post them on Instagram, or when another young son or nephew skips university for new opportunities in crypto (both factual, not fictional examples, readers), these readers are probably concerned, and they’re wrestling with their reservations about talking about it. The story of young Zac Brettler’s all-too-likely rise and fall in London’s griftworld poses questions we might not like answered in polite company, because we’ll come up against some uncomfortable truths about who’s being left behind and why; chiefly, what’s going on with these boys who see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires? And why are they so vulnerable to the grift?

I loved London Falling, and I could hardly be classified as a concerned parent (unless caring for an ageing whippet qualifies) but as I read about Akbar Shanji, "Indian Dave” and young Brettler’s inspired creation of his alter-ego, Zac Ismailov, it wasn’t Zac Brettler’s death I mourned as much as another Londoner’s: Martin Amis - the younger Amis who wrote London Fields and Money, specifically. There is much to be concerned about with the world London Falling depicts, but we don’t seem as comfortable with the Swiftian, savage indignation that has flowed like filthy Thames water through the under and over-world of London for centuries, the London of Hogarth and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and of Dickens’ underworld characters. There’s a kind of laughter in the dark that the story of a grifter’s self-invention inspires, with all its rich, dramatic irony. Amis used to mine that seam, glittering with fool’s good, so deeply, and to remarkable effect.

London Fields is a state of the nation novel that probably couldn’t be published now1 (the reasons have all been written about and at length, of course and yes, they depress me, as both novelist and reader, because they’re all so dumb and aggressively philistine) but what we’ve lost is this: the very people who should be reading such satire and laughing (while bleeding from the rapier wit on the page) are young men. Young men like Zac Brettler.

But to close on a brighter note, here’s that piece on the cultural treasure that’s only gotten better over the last few years: Canada House.

The Literary Ghosts of a London Landmark: Canada House, Then and Now

Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London/openhouse.org

By John Delacourt

July 5, 2026

It may seem counterintuitive — when the attraction of travelling far afield is about getting away from the familiar — to plan a visit to a place called Canada House. But this year, I had my reasons.

For generations of Canadians, discovering Canada House has been a backpacking rite of passage; stumbling upon the maple leaf-adorned cornerstone of London’s iconic Trafalgar Square while feeding the pigeons or, by necessity, scrambling to it to replace a lost or stolen passport.

My first recollection of coming upon any reference to the chancery of the High Commission of Canada in the UK was some years ago, when I finally tracked down author Norman Levine’s travelogue and memoir Canada Made Me, first published in 1958.

Levine, scandalously unread and all but forgotten now despite being one of our greatest short-story writers, was originally from Ottawa. After the war, he completed his MA at McGill before moving to England to pursue a never-completed PhD at King’s College.

But the writer in him couldn’t shake this country:

“The idea of writing this book on Canada came while I was living in St. Ives, Cornwall. But I did not know how I would go about doing this trip, for one would need both time and money. Instead, I found that whenever I came up to London, I would go into Canada House, look over some of the old newspapers, magazines, listen to the sound of the voices, look at the faces, just sit and watch …”

This notion — of a place in the heart of Trafalgar Square that was so evocative of the whole of Canada to a writer in exile — appealed to the novelist in me.

So much so that, when I discovered diplomat Charles Ritchie’s diary of his time at Canada House during the Second World War (compiled in one volume called The Siren Years), resistance was futile.

I needed to know more about the hold this one building had on those stationed there, especially at a moment in time that must have seemed like the original “rupture”: the collapse of the global order and the ensuing sense, as the bombs fell on London, that this was life lived in the eleventh hour.

From the first few pages of The Siren Years, it was clear to me that Ritchie was a born writer. Here he is, writing of spring in London:

“It was hot for the first time this year and everything was in bloom at once — lilacs (white lilacs leaning over the wall at Apsley House), hawthorn everywhere, and chestnut. The grass is long and shaggy — people have trodden paths across what used to be smooth preserved lawns. There are cigarette boxes and papers everywhere, but the trees are in full magnificence and there are lovers on the grass and solitary ladies reading library books in their deck-chairs, and old dirty human bundles of tramps, and everywhere soldiers. I think of last year walking in the parks after Dunkirk when they were full of the remnants of half the armies of Europe with foreign voices and tired strained faces. Again we are on the edge of something momentous. And next spring?”

On the edge of something momentous. That sense of the momentous was also personal, not just political, because Ritchie, then single, was falling in love with the married novelist Elizabeth Bowen. Their 30-year affair, begun after they met at an Oxfordshire christening during the height of the Blitz, is considered one of the great literary love stories of the 20th century.

When I turned to Bowen’s novel, The Heat of the Day, which features a character inspired by Ritchie, I began to get that inchoate sense that there might be a compelling story-behind-the-story in the first chapter of the Ritchie-Bowen romance, which unfolded during his Canada House years. It was then that The Innocent Canadian (former senior diplomat Colin Robertson’s Policy review) was born.

These “What if?” musings are rarely without consequence for me. I started drafting a novel in my head — a wartime thriller; historical fiction inspired by the Ritchie-Bowen romance — that I needed to authenticate with a pilgrimage to Canada House.

Getting to London while reading all I could about how Canada House was during The Siren Years, was a kind of secret mission (shared only with my wife, who’s worked in London and needs no encouragement to visit), one that I was fortunate enough to carry out.

My first visit to Canada House as research for The Innocent Canadian was during Ralph Goodale’s time as high commissioner, and it was confirmation of just how much of our history haunts the exquisitely appointed rooms inside the Greek Revival exterior of the landmark.

These were the stairwells and offices where Ritchie and Lester “Mike” Pearson, future prime minister of Canada, served side by side during a war that not only showed the world what England under Winston Churchill was made of but showed England what Canada was made of.

When, more than 20 years later, Pearson sent Ritchie back to Canada House as high commissioner, he must have felt the ghosts of those do-or-die years, and of the early intoxication of his romance with Bowen, which had by then settled into their later lives; still lovers, living mostly apart. The Siren Years was published in 1974, three years after Ritchie left Canada House for the second and last time.

Goodale was gracious enough to let us linger on our tour, and he didn’t seem to mind when I spent a bit of time in the Quebec room with the desk that Pearson worked from when he was there with Ritchie, serving under High Commissioner Vincent Massey.

Touching that desk gave me a vivid sense of the moment “Mike” looked out on Trafalgar Square, only to see a German bomb crash down just metres from the building.

My second visit came this spring, after The Innocent Canadian was published, and it was thanks to our new high commissioner, Bill Blair, and his team that I had the opportunity to put a few copies of it on the Pearson desk with another, serendipitously published book, Michael Pearson’s Private Letters, Public Matters. Michael’s is a great work of Canadian history that features his grandfather’s correspondence, over his years as a diplomat, to his family back home.

With fellow author Michael Pearson in front of his grandfather’s desk at Canada House/Courtesy

Our June 16th “double launch” at Canada House was a thrill for me and doubly poignant for Michael, standing beside the polished walnut surface upon which some of Mike Pearson’s letters home were written.

Many of the people who came to the launch were also expatriate Canadians like Levine, who had wandered the same rooms like a ghost all those years ago.

While it’s never not a mistake to glamourize war to the exclusion of its loss and suffering, it may be that the sense of the looming “momentous” that Ritchie wrote about finds its echo in the particular political moment we’re in now.

While in London, my wife and I would return to our hotel room in Kensington and turn on the news to see reports of a prime minister under siege, facing premature resignation, a casualty of his own, ineffective efforts to lead Britain through a whole new rupture in the world order.

There are still “foreign voices, tired, strained faces,” still “lovers on the grass and solitary ladies reading library books in their deck chairs” under the shade of the lime and sweet chestnut trees in Hyde Park.

And there is still a Canada, embodied in one well-placed house, alive with Canadian stories, their heroes whispering through its rooms.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa and a veteran Liberal strategist. He is the author of several novels, including The Innocent Canadian.

Adriaticljekarna Ljekarna Osijek Ljekarnaosijek

“Yes, you’re right. I probably should read more fiction - and sure, Canadian fiction. I guess some of it has to be good. So it’s Canada Day, I’ve got a bit of down time, but to start The Innocent Canadian today seems a bit too on the nose (and I’m still not convinced it’s going to be any good). Got any other recommendations?”

Why, yes. Glad you asked. Before you dip your toe in - and because like a lot of guys, you find the fiction thing itself kind of cringe, here are two books from a couple of great fiction writers who are not bad at non-fiction too:

I think Norman Levine’s Canada Made Me should be given to every Canadian aspiring to write of this place, not simply because Levine’s such a great stylist, influenced as much by Ben Nicholson and the St. Ives Group of painters as he was by some of the great modernist writers of the last century, but also because of his unsparing, unblinking eye on the Canada he left behind (the book was written in 1956, some years after he’d moved to the UK). I think it’s the best kind of love letter, because he felt this country, as a subject, demanded all of his considerable talent for this travelogue/memoir of his three month journey across the country. Levine always played for keeps, holding nothing back.

The second book there is one of the lesser known books by Andre Alexis. Virtually anything by Andre I’d (highly) recommend, but this is a jewellery box of essays he began after writing my favourite novel of his, Asylum. The last essay, “Water: A Memoir,” I’d add to Levine’s book for that aspiring Canadian author, a kind of last days document of literary culture in this country.

Now on to the fiction itself:

Oh it’s hard to pare this down, but here’s a sampling I chose with two primary considerations: 1. the underappreciated - a few books that speak to how deep the well of artistic achievement actually is in this country (Levine, as mentioned, Weinzweig, Miller, McCormack, Lawlor - and then some of the lesser known stories of the queen’s - Mavis Gallant) and 2. the current state of the art - Don Gillmor’s Cherry Beach and Alex Pugsley’s Silver Lake - the latter I’ll be reviewing for later this month. If you only had time to dip into one book today, I’d say you couldn’t go wrong with these last two.

So there you are, Happy Canada Day.

Below is the draft of a release, which will soon go out beyond this newsletter, regarding the June 16th event occurring in the Kanata Room at Canada House. This event is essentially a reprise of one Michael Pearson and I did here in Ottawa, thanks to the support of the Pearson Centre. It is also an opportunity, for this author, to go back to the location that inspired many of the scenes in the novel.

Of course, it is also an opportunity to meet Canadians living in London, Londoners who love history and historical fiction, and those who might simply want to learn more about the particular moment in history when Canada’s role was so pivotal during the Second World War - and this jewel of a building had Mike Pearson, Vincent Massey and yes, Charles Ritchie walking its floors.

You can find a couple of videos about Canada House on Youtube, but this one above is my favourite, done last year to celebrate Canada House celebrating its first century as the High Commission of Canada in the UK. About four and a half minutes in, there is a brief shot of Mike Pearson’s desk. We hope to be signing our copies from it on the 16th.

The Pearson Centre Presents a Special Launch Event for

Michael Pearson’s Private Letters, Public Matters and

John Delacourt’s The Innocent Canadian

at London’s Canada House

June 1st, 2026

The Canadian High Commission in London England, in collaboration with the Ottawa-based Pearson Centre, is pleased to present a special launch event of two books that highlight the role of Canada House during the Second World War. Michael Pearson’s Private Letter, Public Matters, a biography of Lester B. Pearson based on his extensive family letters, includes a section when he was in London during the Blitz of 1940-41, and describes the destruction and bravery of the city and its people. John Delacourt’s The Innocent Canadian fictionally reimagines the romance and intrigue chronicled in the diaries and correspondence of Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie and Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen during this pivotal period for international relations. Pearson and Delacourt will be launching both books in the UK on Tuesday, June 16^th, from 4 to 6 pm at Canada House.

As former diplomat Colin Robertson wrote in his review of Private Letters, Public Matters for Policy magazine, Pearson’s book “is an important study of our greatest diplomat. Well-written and well-researched, it has insight and pace. Reading it reminds one that public service — as civil servant or legislator — is still a high calling, vital to national success.”

Initial reviews of Delacourt’s historical novel in Canada have drawn comparisons to the novels of Allan Furst, Robert Harris and Kate Atkinson, stating that, with this work, “John Delacourt joins those masters of suspenseful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber.”

Both authors will be present at the launch and available for book signing in Canada House’s Kanata Room, Canada House, Trafalgar Square, SW1Y 5BJ. Details on point of purchase will follow for all invitees and attendees.

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If you’re in London next month and/or know of someone based in the UK who might want to attend, just email me at johndelacourt1@gmail.com .

Here are early reviews:

“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

“Move over Allan Furst and Robert Harris. With ‘The Innocent Canadian’ John Delacourt joins those masters of suspensful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber. The twist here is the Bill Davenant - who has all the diffidence we would expect of a Canadian, along with the less noted quiet determination and resilience that are also part of our national character. Delacourt shows that when the chips are down, Canadians not only get their elbows up - they can land a well-placed punch or two!” - Peter Donolo, communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien from 1993 to 1999, and host of The Red Passport Podcast

Tomorrow, to celebrate Canadian Independent bookstores and all they do to put novels like mine in the hands of readers, this is happening:

If you’re in Ottawa, I’m hoping you can come by.

Next week, on April 29th, I look forward to the conversations at the table for the Writers’ Trust’s annual event here in Ottawa, Politics and the Pen.

And of course, if there are book clubs interested in The Innocent Canadian after reading this first review, I’d be happy to speak to you further in the coming days and weeks.

This is the last “Index” post that is solely focused on my forthcoming novel, The Innocent Canadian. Not a moment too soon with the strained, alphabetical framing device too, I suppose. The novel will be out in bookstores in just days now.

Here are early reviews:

“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

“Move over Allan Furst and Robert Harris. With ‘The Innocent Canadian’ John Delacourt joins those masters of suspensful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber. The twist here is the Bill Davenant - who has all the diffidence we would expect of a Canadian, along with the less noted quiet determination and resilience that are also part of our national character. Delacourt shows that when the chips are down, Canadians not only get their elbows up - they can land a well-placed punch or two!” - Peter Donolo, communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien from 1993 to 1999, and host of The Red Passport Podcast

The cadence of posts from here on in will be less frequent. These pieces were meant to contextualize and add additional colour to some of the themes explored in the novel. I hope to provide updates on events, reviews and … when possible, some reviews and essays of my own in the weeks ahead.

For those readers of this Substack who are in Ottawa on Monday, April 13th, you can still rsvp here for the Pearson Centre’s launch of The Innocent Canadian, in tandem with Michael Pearson’s Private Letters, Public Matters: The Family Correspondence of Lester B. Pearson.

And, as reported last week, if you can’t make it on Monday the 13th: as part of the Canadian Independent Bookstore Day activities on Saturday, April 25th, I’ll be at Ottawa’s Books on Beechwood signing copies of The Innocent Canadian from 2:30 pm to 4. Whit Fraser, journalist, broadcaster, and author who has served as the 56th viceregal consort of Canada since 2021, will also be on hand to sign copies of his book From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada.

Here are early reviews:

“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

“Move over Allan Furst and Robert Harris. With ‘The Innocent Canadian’ John Delacourt joins those masters of suspensful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber. The twist here is the Bill Davenant - who has all the diffidence we would expect of a Canadian, along with the less noted quiet determination and resilience that are also part of our national character. Delacourt shows that when the chips are down, Canadians not only get their elbows up - they can land a well-placed punch or two!” - Peter Donolo, communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien from 1993 to 1999, and host of The Red Passport Podcast

The Martello towers are small, circular defensive structures that were built during the French revolutionary wars. They take their name and design from an original found in Corsica, where the islanders rose up against the occupying French. The British government, sensing a strategic, imperial opportunity, gave the insurgents all the support they needed from the tower’s fortified position on Cape Mortella (hence the name “Martello”).

About a decade later (1804), in preparation for what seemed an imminent attack from Napoleon’s navy, the British erected about fifty similar towers along the Irish coastline (and on other vulnerable coastlines, there are towers in Quebec and Nova Scotia too). They were usually placed in such proximity that one tower could signal to the next if Napoleon’s frigates were sighted. However, as the threat of invasion passed, the towers remained as monuments to a battle that never occurred, relics of a fading empire.

The most famous Martello tower in literature is in Joyce’s Ulysses, from the opening scene in the novel where stately, plump Buck Mulligan shaves and does his morning ablutions. He and Stephen Dedalus go for a swim in the sea as (Leopold) Bloom’s day begins. A young Joyce stayed - briefly - in that particular tower in Sandycove, an outlying area of Dublin. He resided as the guest of Oliver St. John Gogarty, a literary man about town who figured the tower might be the ideal location for the young writer to complete the novel he was working on (Joyce lasted about a week there, however).

The tower is now a James Joyce museum and I wish I could say it makes for an unmissable visit. What I can recall were three sparely furnished floors, artfully lit; the experience was like a small tour of the home of a bookish lighthouse keeper, one who had a flair for interior design. Within the gift shop were copies of Ulysses, of course, along with the work of other writers and historians. The tower looks like it’s had a makeover since I last visited, but museums of this sort seem like exercises in pinning the butterflies of literary inspiration behind glass in wooden frames. Joyce’s ghost had left that tower long ago.

The tower that features in The Innocent Canadian is located at a different point along the coast: in Bray, County Wicklow, just off the Strand, the beachfront boardwalk that made this outpost something of a vacation town - a kind of Irish Brighton. I have visited this part of the world repeatedly over the years (family, my mother’s home town) and found that stretch of coastline haunted by old imperial misconceptions, and the Strand itself, on windswept rainy days, has the feel of a kind of Georgian era Coney Island or Atlantic City in the off-season. It’s effortlessly cinematic; indeed, Neil Jordan shot much of his film The Miracle along the Strand and up a craggy hill called Bray Head. Effortlessly cinematic hardly translates into effortlessly literary though; but my earliest thoughts of what a looming threat of invasion would feel like were vividly imagined decades ago, thinking of the original keepers of the tower and … clearly the image of the tower stayed with me as the draft of The Innocent Canadian came together. The towers were figments of one child’s over-active imagination originally, transmuted into the scenic components of this novel’s resolution.

Several of these towers have been privately owned. At one point, this particular Martello Tower in question was owned by U2’s Bono, and he installed a glass roof on it. I remember hearing that he had loaned it out to the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan to help him dry out and get down to work. The tower and its evocative setting might have inspired some memorable writing after all then.

There is, however, no record of Elizabeth Bowen ever visiting or staying in one of the Martello towers. Presumably, when she was living in Ireland, she worked out of Bowen’s Court, the family home in County Cork (which she writes a lot about in her correspondence to Charles Ritchie - you can find these excerpts in Love’s Civil War) and the house is featured in her novel The Last September. However, she did complete a work that documented all her intelligence on what was happening in Ireland: Notes on Éire": Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill by Elizabeth Bowen, 1940–1942. Like Colette Cluny in The Innocent Canadian, Bowen would have been a person of interest among those working with or for the Nazis if she’d returned to the country during the war.

It is still jarring to read how prevalent that complicity (or calculated, transactional diplomacy, if you’re charitable) was in those years. The open diplomatic channels affirmed something of a rapport with Hitler’s government, at least until the tide began to turn for the Allies. And even as late as May in 1945, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera visited the offices of the Third Reich’s Minister to Ireland to offer condolences on Hitler’s death.

Irish historian Mervyn O’Driscoll, in his book Ireland, Germany and the Nazis: Politics and Diplomacy, 1919-1939 writes of those in government in the years before the war as setting this course, laying the foundations for this Celtic Petainism:

“The notorious character and conduct of Charles Bewley, the Irish minister to Germany in the 1930s, would appear to substantiate this unkind depiction. Arriving in Berlin in July 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power, he betrayed a lack of professionalism time after time. Disturbing signs of his anti-Semitism, dogmatic Anglophobia and insolence are clear throughout his career from the early 1920s. After 1933 he engaged in an unashamed charm offensive to curry favour with the Nazi regime. During his accreditation ceremony with President von Hindenburg, Bewley referred to the ‘national rebirth of Germany’ in an unconcealed endorsement of Nazism. During his tenure, he recurrently endorsed Nazism as a safeguard against the expansion of Soviet Communism. He downplayed or apologised for the reprehensible Nazi regime’s negative features such as the persecution of Jews, the suppression of Christianity and its aggressive expansionism.’

‘However, Bewley was not alone. Joseph P Walshe, the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, was momentarily deceived by the intoxicating atmosphere of national reinvigoration that he found when he visited Cologne in 1933. He enthused about Germany’s ‘great experiment.’ Sections of the British and American conservative elites were also misled into believing that Hitler was an indispensable tonic for the chaos that Germany experienced during the Weimar Republic before 1933 …

‘However, in the final analysis, de Valera drew the line in 1939. The Irish Government did not recognise the German annexation of the rump Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Hitler’s employment of force, coupled with the absence of a German national claim on these regions, crossed the Rubicon.” Any support for Germany (by a Republican faction which would later rise to prominence within the IRA) was driven underground - or under the sea, like the German U-boats that prowled that coastline.

The more I researched this period, the clearer it became that those towers along the coast could indeed have been valuable assets at a time when the threat of invasion was palpable. Shifting loyalties, different adversaries … but that totemic line of defence remained.

In other news …

For those readers of this Substack who are in Ottawa on April 13th, you can still rsvp here for the Pearson Centre’s launch of The Innocent Canadian, in tandem with Michael Pearson’s Private Letters, Public Matters: The Family Correspondence of Lester B. Pearson. It’s the night of three by-elections, of course, but I think there will be more than a few guests able to provide real-time updates on the results throughout the night.

And if you can’t make it on Monday the 13th: as part of the Canadian Independent Bookstore Day activities on Saturday, April 25th, I’ll be at Ottawa’s Books on Beechwood signing copies of The Innocent Canadian from 2:30 pm to 4. Whit Fraser, journalist, broadcaster, and author who has served as the 56th viceregal consort of Canada since 2021, will also be on hand to sign copies of his book From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada.

This is the fifteenth “Index” post focused on my forthcoming novel, The Innocent Canadian. It’ll be out in April but you can pre-order it now.

Here are early reviews:

“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

“Move over Allan Furst and Robert Harris. With ‘The Innocent Canadian’ John Delacourt joins those masters of suspensful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber. The twist here is the Bill Davenant - who has all the diffidence we would expect of a Canadian, along with the less noted quiet determination and resilience that are also part of our national character. Delacourt shows that when the chips are down, Canadians not only get their elbows up - they can land a well-placed punch or two!” - Peter Donolo, communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien from 1993 to 1999, and host of The Red Passport Podcast

As art critic Laura Freeman writes, regarding “Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art,” a show that opened about a week ago at London’s Imperial War Museum, “the Blitz transformed London, turned it inside out and upside down. It had become a city like ancient Rome, with monumental ruins appearing overnight. Craters that were not there yesterday filled with water, creating sunken, uncanny lakes. Buildings that blazed in the night poured water from the eaves in the morning. If the fire didn’t destroy your worldly goods, the firefighters’ hoses would. Sodden houses without roofs rotted from inside.

‘Walking home after dark was a bewildering experience. The blackout rules meant there were no lights in the street or friendly lamps shining from rooms with undrawn curtains. The map changed each time you set out. The corner where you used to turn off was rubble, the railings separating pavement from garden square were sent off for munitions.’

‘Londoners described seeing homes like stage sets or doll’s houses, their front walls missing, mirrors and sinks hanging 30ft up. Doors flapped on hinges, blowing in the wind. The artist and illustrator Edward Ardizzone stood outside the Clarence, a pub, or what had been a pub, in Silvertown, east London, and sketched a sofa sliding off a 45-degree floor. In her diaries Virginia Woolf recorded the spectacle of a house knocked out of a row like a missing tooth. Many of the houses that still stood were boarded up and abandoned, their owners enlisted or decamped to the country. The indefatigable wartime diarist Vere Hodgson reported that a small virtue of London being so depopulated was that one could at least get the books one wanted at the library. Now that’s Blitz spirit.”

My interest in many of these paintings in this show began in the early stages of the draft for The Innocent Canadian. Though the atmosphere of wartime London permeates the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen from this period (and of course in her novel The Heat of the Day) as well as Charles Ritchie’s diary entries collected in The Siren Years, nothing distills all of the influences of the period - any period - like painting for me. The artists recruited by the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1939 were filtering all of the modernist innovation that had gathered momentum over the previous two decades, and with the Blitz, it was as if say, De Chirico’s haunted surrealism or the spatial deconstruction of Braque’s cubism were no longer abstracted; they were made vivid and all too real.

The painter Graham Sutherland is, for me, the one artist whose emerging aesthetic seemed perfectly attuned to the times. He’ll be familiar to those who watched “The Crown” TV series as the portrait artist whose commission to paint Churchill was never put on display, purportedly because the Prime Minister said it made him look “half-witted.” In this scene below, the American actor John Lithgow chews up the scene and turns Churchill into some humourless gorgon, slowly turning to marble, but the actor playing Sutherland (Stephen Dillane) does manage to hew closer to a recognizable human:

Prior to the war, Sutherland’s influences, while he was studying at Goldsmith’s, looked back to British artist Samuel Palmer and forward to Picasso and the Surrealists. But his particular technique and his rigorous investigation on what the texture of paint could render vivid - and moving - really began with his wartime assignments, which included depicting the damaged buildings of Manchester, Cardiff and London. As his profile from the War Museum site states:

“He made notes and sketches on the spot, then worked them up into finished drawings back in the studio. Recalling the bomb damage he saw, Sutherland said: ‘I will never forget those extraordinary first encounters: the silence, the absolute dead silence, except every now and then a thin tinkle of falling glass – a noise which reminded me of the music of Debussy.”’

The first work I saw of his in person was at our own Canadian War Museum here in Ottawa. The plate above hardly does it justice. However, after the war, Sutherland’s fame as one of Britain’s trailblazing modernists was chiefly based on his portraits of public figures like Churchill and Somerset Maugham. The latter is at the Tate and it’s testament to Sutherland’s particular vision: scorched yet elegantly refined. It’s a vision not dissimilar from Ritchie’s or Bowen’s. And it leads to the question of how else could one possibly come out of those years and paint - or write - what’s true?

In other news …

The invitation from the Pearson Centre’s launch of The Innocent Canadian, in tandem with Michael Pearson’s Private Letters, Public Matters: The Family Correspondence of Lester B. Pearson, is out now far and wide. For those readers of this Substack who might be in Ottawa on April 13th, you can rsvp here. It promises to be a fabulous night.

Also, I’m grateful for the Elizabeth Bowen Society’s interest in the novel, and for their amplification of the release of the book. The society is doing valuable work keeping the Bowen flame burning bright.

Lastly, as part of the Canadian Independent Bookstore Day activities on Saturday, April 25th, I’ll be at Ottawa’s Books on Beechwood signing copies of The Innocent Canadian from 2:30 pm to 4. Whit Fraser, journalist, broadcaster, and author who has served as the 56th viceregal consort of Canada since 2021, will also be on hand with his (great) book From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada.

More than ever, an author is lucky for any review of his/her new novel, the media landscape being what it is. However, it was a little daunting to discover that the reviewer asked by Policy magazine to take on The Innocent Canadian was Colin Robertson, former diplomat, fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa and host of the CGAI’s Global Exchange podcast. Colin not only knew Charles Ritchie; he also wrote, to my mind, the best obituary upon Ritchie’s passing back in 1995. I’d say it is one of the best tributes I’ve ever read for a Canadian figure of some note - one who quietly and elegantly left his mark on so much of Canadian history in the last century.

Here’s a little of that obit1, where Robertson recounts meeting Ritchie for the first time:

“‘Angular, beak-nosed and narrow-chested’ was how Ritchie accurately described himself in Appetite for Life [the first volume of Ritchie’s diaries]. Fifty years had not made much difference. I watched and waited my turn for an introduction. I had recently read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. So this was Stella’s Robert! He balanced a glass of white wine in one hand and a cigarette, which he appeared to suck the life out of, in the other hand. The voice was high, nasal and marked by that mid Atlantic twang of the Canadian who has gone ‘up’ to Oxford or Cambridge. From across the room, with his toothbrush moustache and languid manner he even looked like an aging William Powell …”

Clearly, I should have gone to Colin before I even attempted the first draft of The Innocent Canadian. He’d already written the definitive portrait.

Colin’s review can be found here, but I’ve also provided it for you in full, below.

‘The Innocent Canadian’: Diplomacy and Intrigue in Wartime London

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

March 18, 2026

The Innocent Canadian is John Delacourt’s deftly observed new historical novel, this one set in Britain during the early years of the Second World War.

Part romance, part murder story, part spy thriller, part social satire, and part historical reflection, the book unfolds in wartime London amid the political and moral ambiguities of a society under immense strain of Nazi bombing and the constant threat of invasion.

The novel is inspired by the 30-year affair between Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie and Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen — already immortalized in Victoria Glendinning’s nonfiction Love’s Civil War — but uses that relationship as just one thread of intrigue in a wartime cat’s cradle.

Delacourt places his protagonists, Canadian diplomat Bill Davenant, “awkward and lanky, bespectacled and thoroughly unglamorous”, and his Irish-author lover, Colette Cluny-Wolseley, in the salons, embassies, and intelligence offices of the British capital. Delacourt uses these vantage points to explore the elite culture of wartime Britain and Canada’s evolving place within the emerging Anglo-American alliance.

The novel’s literary lineage is clear. Delacourt’s tone and observational precision recall Ritchie’s diaries, especially The Siren Years – which, after reading it at university, convinced me to join the Foreign Service.

The mood and setting evoke Bowen’s own wartime fiction, notably The Heat of the Day. Like Ritchie and Bowen, Delacourt captures the peculiar psychological landscape of a society living under bombardment yet continuing its rituals of social life, intellectual debate, and romantic intrigue.

The action unfolds during the Blitz, when London endured nightly German air raids. Delacourt emphasizes not only destruction but continuity. Clubs remain open, diplomats gossip, and intelligence officers cultivate contacts in drawing rooms and discreet restaurants.

War, in this portrayal, is conducted not only on battlefields but through conversation and social connection.

The bureaucratic world of intelligence and diplomacy hums with speculation and nervous energy. In one vivid description, in “an office that ran on caffeine, nicotine and anxiety” everyone “from the cleaning staff to the career diplomats would be speculating on the circumstances of every call and the risk involved.”

Within this milieu, Delacourt examines the ideological uncertainty that characterized sections of the British elite in the 1930s and early war years. Fascism and communism alike were debated in aristocratic drawing rooms long before the moral clarity of total war emerged.

The spectre of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley lingers in the background, a reminder that authoritarian politics once had sympathizers among “respectable” society. One character notes that he had been briefed about Mosley and the Blackshirts, before observing that similar currents could be seen across the Atlantic: “the America Firsters, Lindbergh, the Ku Klux Klan” and “the Canadian priest who’d set up shop in Detroit, Father Coughlin.”

In invoking figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin, Delacourt reminds readers that the ideological struggles of the 1930s were international and deeply unsettled.

Communism provokes equally ambivalent responses. Delacourt captures the curious mixture of fear, fascination, and snobbery with which some European elites regarded the Soviet experiment.

One character reflects that “the Communists were at root so vulgar,” and that this vulgarity would repel aesthetes more than “the dark seam of cruelty and brutality that ran through Stalin’s patchy fabric of empire building.” The remark exposes the moral evasions and prejudices that shaped the political thinking of the era’s elite.

Running through the novel is a subtle exploration of Canada’s position in the wartime alliance. Delacourt introduces real figures from Canadian diplomacy and intelligence, including the legendary spymaster William Stephenson, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, diplomat and future prime minister Lester B. Pearson, and high commissioner to Britain Vincent Massey, who later became our first Canadian governor general.

Their appearances ground the narrative firmly in the real diplomatic networks linking London, Ottawa, and Washington during the war.

Yet Delacourt avoids romanticizing Canada’s role. Instead, he captures the insecurity and self-consciousness that often marked Canadian diplomacy at the time.

The legacy of the Depression still hangs over the capital; “Ottawa had become introverted and self-involved.” Even the Canadian foreign service is gently mocked, with Pearson complaining about attitudes that were too “goddamned mandarin.” Such moments capture the mixture of ambition and uncertainty that accompanied Canada’s gradual emergence as a more independent diplomatic actor.

The novel’s title reflects its central perspective. Delacourt’s Davenant moves through British elite society as a perceptive outsider. Curious, observant, and underestimated for his intelligence and diplomacy, as one character suggests, he operates merely “in the periphery. The innocent Canadian.”

That apparent innocence becomes an advantage. Free from the ingrained hierarchies of British society, he notices its contradictions more clearly.

Delacourt’s prose is particularly effective in these moments of social observation. His writing combines wit with an anthropological eye for status and behaviour.

Describing the swagger of American officers compared with their Canadian counterparts, he writes that they were “bolder, brawnier and brassier than the Canadian forces, who were like the farm-team version north of the border.”

Elsewhere, he skewers the biological arrogance of elite social circles. In one passage, he observes that “the male with the most charisma, broad chested with a deep, sonorous baritone, would just naturally seek out the woman who embodied the most desirable qualities for mating… They were beautiful Americans, the envy of crumbling Europe and the colonies, not least the English and their hick cousins, the Canadians.”

The language, half-ironic and half-evolutionary, exposes the social Darwinism lurking beneath elite confidence.

Yet beneath the satire lies a more earnest moral thread. Davenant reflects that his primary motivation is simply the desire to see people treated honourably and fairly, even if such impulses seem naïve in a world of intrigue and deception. “It was embarrassingly boy-scoutish but true.”

The line captures the novel’s central tension between cynicism and idealism.

By drawing not only on the relationship between Ritchie and Bowen, but on their observational and atmospheric descriptions of wartime London, Delacourt has crafted a thoughtful and engaging work of historical fiction.

The Innocent Canadian recreates the mood of life during the Blitz while exploring Canada’s gradual emergence from colonial deference toward a more independent diplomatic identity.

Seen through the eyes of its perceptive outsider, the war becomes not only a military struggle but also a revealing drama of ideas, loyalties, and character.

Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa and host of the CGAI’s Global Exchange podcast. He is Policy’s principal global affairs book reviewer.

This is the thirteenth “Index” reference for the influences that informed the writing of my forthcoming novel, The Innocent Canadian. It’ll be out in April.

Here are early reviews:

“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

“Move over Allan Furst and Robert Harris. With ‘The Innocent Canadian’ John Delacourt joins those masters of suspensful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber. The twist here is the Bill Davenant - who has all the diffidence we would expect of a Canadian, along with the less noted quiet determination and resilience that are also part of our national character. Delacourt shows that when the chips are down, Canadians not only get their elbows up - they can land a well-placed punch or two!” - Peter Donolo, communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien from 1993 to 1999, and host of The Red Passport Podcast

The image above is a shot of the cover of Michael Pearson’s new book on the family correspondence of Lester Bowles Pearson. Private Letters, Public Matters will add to a number of great books on “Mike” published over the years. The story of this particular Prime Minister’s remarkable 20th century has attracted such writers as Andrew Cohen, John English and John Ibbotson. It’s not hard to understand why; how can you resist such episodes where, Pearson, campaigning in his riding of Algoma East, begins to explain what he had accomplished by resolving the conflict in the Suez Canal and is met with a shout from the crowd: “yeah, but when are we gonna get us a new post office1?” Or Pearson’s meeting with Lyndon Johnson, where the Canadian position on bombing North Vietnam so incensed the President that he grabbed Pearson by the lapels and had to be restrained from decking him2? Or, for this author’s purposes, the stories from Pearson’s time working at Canada House for Vincent Massey during the war, when a bomb dropped just metres from his office in Trafalgar Square?

I am one of those nerds who is addicted to such stories; they fill in the colour behind the monochromatic first drafts of history that ‘straight’ reporting from the period provides. But Michael Pearson’s book is different. Throughout his grandfather’s very public life, during which there was no shortage of events, dear boy, these are the letters that bridge the personal to the very public (and political).

The effect of reading such correspondence is similar to the deep immersion that occurs when you discover great diarists from this period; here is a curtain drawn back to reveal a time when private lives were not curated for public consumption, and public lives were not refracted and mediated through the echo chambers we all wander through online every day.

Thanks to the Pearson Centre for Progressive Policy, Michael Pearson will be launching this book here in Ottawa, along with The Innocent Canadian, on the evening of April 13th at le Metropolitain Brasserie. A fictionalized version of his grandfather has something of a walk-on role in my novel, as both mentor and ally for the protagonist Bill Davenant. He is higher up the ladder than Davenant, among the staff at Canada House working for Vincent Massey, and he makes an art of affability while still being “button downed and sharp as a tack.” From all accounts of the real person, I don’t think I strayed too far in my depiction, but Private Letters, Public Matters will assuredly provide some more colour and complexity to such a portrait. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Here is where I say I’m hoping you might too. Watch this space, as they say, for further information about the launch of both books, where we’ll be on hand to sign copies, meet other avid readers and kibbitz with other not-so-innocent Canadians who work and loiter with intent around Parliament Hill.

Here are early reviews:

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“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

“Move over Allan Furst and Robert Harris. With ‘The Innocent Canadian’ John Delacourt joins those masters of suspensful, historically on-point and atmosphere-drenched tales of a continent tipping into disaster in the early days of WWII - and the brave few willing to stake everything while others slumber. The twist here is the Bill Davenant - who has all the diffidence we would expect of a Canadian, along with the less noted quiet determination and resilience that are also part of our national character. Delacourt shows that when the chips are down, Canadians not only get their elbows up - they can land a well-placed punch or two!” - Peter Donolo, communications director for former prime minister Jean Chretien from 1993 to 1999, and host of The Red Passport Podcast

Back in the early nineties when, to me, Elizabeth Bowen was just a highly recommended author on a must-read list (her work was, at the time, republished by Virago), and I hadn’t even heard of Charles Ritchie or his diaries, I was figuring out how to write in an era when an interest in filmmaking didn’t seem commemorative. I had discovered, in a Shakespeare course at U of T, that Orson Welles was actually a very interesting filmmaker rather than an odd, cloaked ham of an actor featured on Dean Martin roasts and commercials shilling for bad Californian wine. I finally saw Citizen Kane and discovered the brilliance of Welles’ cinematographers, Gregg Toland and James Wong Howe. That led me to Welles’ Othello and the great noir films like The Lady From Shanghai and A Touch of Evil. I read a little bit about the Mercury Players, the repertory theatre company Welles had founded with John Houseman and learned there was so much more to their work than the storied War of the Worlds radio broadcast. It seemed that Welles was not just a fully formed genius by his early twenties (he directed Citizen Kane at 25), he was someone who could bring out extraordinary work from those around him.

Over that summer, with reading assignments behind me, I broke a rule I tried to uphold about biographies, one I had first read in a book of Hungarian-Canadian author Stephen Vizinczey’s collection of essays1: to wit, “almost everything that comes to you about artists through the media is sheer bunk, written by lazy hacks who don’t have the faintest notion of either art or hard work.” Welles struck me as such an outlier in the American studio system that when I saw a paperback copy of Frank Brady’s biography of him, Citizen Welles, in a thrift shop, I immediately dove in, largely, memory serves, in an effort to sound as sophisticated as the video store clerks on Queen Street.

From Brady’s biography I discovered that, as a teenager, Welles went on a spree with a small fortune he inherited, traveling through Europe in the early thirties. He conned his way into some theatre gigs in Ireland, One was a somewhat prominent role in a production at Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Apparently he convinced the manager of The Gate, Hilton Edwards, that he was a rising star on Broadway. He had figured out for himself that we become who we pretend to be, so it’s wise to be very particular about the role we take on.

I suspect that Welles probably learned this through his mentorship with the actor, director and impresario Micheál MacLiammóir in Ireland. Their relationship flourished over the forties and fifties, long after Welles left the Gate Theatre behind. MacLiammóir was a flamboyant figure, with a performance style well suited to the more expressionist aesthetic Welles was honing for stage and film; his Iago in Welles’ Othello was representative of their collaboration.

In the eighties, Welles spoke of his time in Ireland in a series of conversations with the director Henry Jaglom.2 As one reviewer wrote about some of the memories Jaglom extracted: “Welles … recalled seeing Irish literary celebrities at parties during his time in Dublin, including William Butler Yeats – ‘makes me shiver’ – and Lady Gregory. Despite their meanness, he had a soft spot for the Irish but intensely disliked Irish-Americans. He asked Micheál Mac Liammóir, Edwards’ partner at the Gate, on the set of Welles’s film version of Othello in 1952, to describe the Irish in one word. ‘Malice,’ Mac Liammóir replied.”

Welles again: “Look, I love Ireland, I love Irish literature, I love everything they do, you know. But the Irish-Americans have invented an imitation Ireland which is unspeakable. The wearin’ o’ the green. Oh my God! To Vomit!” he told Jaglom. America changes the Irish, he said; when they cross the Atlantic, they become ‘a new and terrible race, which is called ‘Irish-Americans.’”

Welles was a bit of a Zelig-like figure during most of his active years of filmmaking. Whether it was Washington, London or Los Angeles, he knew everybody. His relationships politically were established early on; he made a series of propaganda films for the US to counter some of the criticisms about his patriotism and the skepticism about his four F status as a potential enlistee. The character based on Welles in The Innocent Canadian, a filmmaker shilling for a series of Shakespeare films, spouting his Irish bona fides with embassy officials from Joseph Kennedy’s time as ambassador, is deliberately playing to political interests in the room - and parodying the “imitation-Ireland” in order to charm those with money and influence.

For Colette Cluny (my character based on Bowen), everything about this “Wilson Bell” character allows her to see, in stark contrast, the difference between American and Canadian sensibilities (the latter embodied in Bill Davenant, the character based on Charles Ritchie). Her husband Padraig Cluny, an Irish actor and sometime director, has been swept up in the spectacle of Bell’s genius, like an extra recruited for the floor show this auteur’s performing in Grosvenor Square. And she wants no part of it. Davenant, her innocent Canadian, rescues her from the indignities on display.

Although there’s some documentary basis for the foregrounding of the Bell-Welles character in these early chapters, he’s representative of something else that seems worth remembering, as we watch, aghast at what that country’s becoming. Because Colette is not exactly right about the American. He’s more complex than the caricature she’s repelled by. The showman / raconteur Welles could be when he was between movies and on the hunt for money was very different from the uncompromising visionary he could be when his talents were led by the better angels of his nature.

As is clear with just this clip from Welles’ Othello:

Compare this with Welles the raconteur in his later years, talking about raising money for this movie. At around the ten minute mark, he talks of being in Venice with Churchill:

Unable to make the movies he was capable of, by the seventies he really only had his floor show to fall back on - as charming and engaging as it no doubt was. He was a casualty of the business. So much of his time - and his creative energy - was spent raising money for projects rather than doing the projects themselves. Joan Didion said about filmmaking that “art isn’t the art … business is the art.” Where Welles could once summon great creative energy around him, most of the relationships that Welles developed in his later years were nothing but transactional. He was always, as they say, “behind the counter.” Self-invention was fundamental to his art; self promotion was fundamental to his career.

In this, the Colette Cluny character does intuit something true about “the American energy.” She resists the temptation to live like an exile there with her husband.

Wartime was something of a clarifying agent for many writers and artists, from Janet Flanner to Hemingway to Bertolt Brecht (who ended up in Hollywood briefly, mixing with other exiles like Schoenberg, Thomas Mann and G.W. Pabst3). Priorities and commitments that were no longer urgent or necessary - to no one but the writer or artist herself - emerged from this state of crisis. Writing this now, as we seem to be teetering towards a serious “global conflict,” that clarity, as elusive as it might seem in an attention economy, seems more urgent and essential than ever.

In other news …

Oh what surprises the mail can bring:

You’ll be able to read more about the launch events here in the weeks to come.

Also, in other publishing related news, a great imprint out of Atlantic Canada (that you’ll also read more about here in the weeks to come) is managing to publish some great work on a shoestring budget. Here are a few ways to support them.

Here’s an early review:

“In The Innocent Canadian, John Delacourt’s considerable writerly powers are on full display. He transports the reader to a completely different time and place yet makes us feel as if we’ve always lived then and there. Combining lush prose, fascinating characters, and a gripping story rooted in truth, the pages turn themselves. Masterful storytelling.” - Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour

It’s a rule made to be broken, but it stands for any novel I’d care to reread: a plot driven story requires a villain. Conflict, overcoming adversity, the basic decision points a protagonist has to make are the components required so a reader will want to turn the page, care about what happens next. But I began The Innocent Canadian with characters inspired by real-life, and Charles Ritchie and Elizabeth Bowen were public figures who, in their own writing, rarely mention any larger battles they’re waging against personal adversaries beyond sundry quotidian “challenges” - the homogenized way we speak of conflicts now. So there had to be an imaginative imposition, the creation of a character who embodied the larger, darker themes that were dictating and directing their actions when they first came together in London during the war.

The more I read of that time though, the more those themes seemed to rhyme with our own. To live in such a period of tumult, anticipating that the larger currents of global conflict might surge and get very personal, very fast (cue the sound of air raid sirens) questions about loyalty and betrayal, who is on the right side versus who would ‘turn’ for an occupying force, become fundamental. George Orwell wrote of a kind of parlour game he and friends would play where they would name public figures - writers, politicians, journalists - and debate whether each was for turning. Who would position themselves as either fascist or fascist-adjacent? Who’d be able to do a rewrite on their own politics, in real time, to cosy up to the new regime? Who’d speak of hissy fits in reaction to an aggressor government that disappeared people from its streets and quietly built concentration camps? Lively conversations ensued.

“On or around December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered or a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that, but a change there was, nevertheless …” That’s Virginia Woolf, from her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” She’s writing in defence of modernism, but she’s also saying something about the imprint of a new reality on everyday lives. What she was intuiting was real; a kind of Edwardian romanticism had curdled, and rigid class divisions had hardened. The “ruling class” had drifted further away from those negotiating (read reeling from) rapid technological change. Over the next two decades into the dark valley of the thirties, the landed gentry, like the Gatsbyesque speculators and stock millionaires across the pond, found common cause with fascist populists who promised to beat down the threat of socialism in the manner of Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Italy and Hitler’s Brownshirts in Germany. It was a dangerous marriage of minds.

There was no more famous an embodiment of this than when, in 1936, Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, former MP for Harrow and founder of the British Union of Fascists, wed Diana Mitford in Germany, at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler as guest of honour.

How to explain the Mitfords? One of the six sisters, Jessica - or Decca - the card carrying Communist in the family - tried with Hons and Rebels. It was a bestseller when it came out in 1960, and I’d suspect its popular success was owing to what a well written document of cultural history it is. It charts, by way of sister Unity Mitford’s doomed, fangirl infatuation with Hitler and Diana’s romance with Mosley, that turn when the eccentricity of the upper classes morphed and all manner of extremist flirtations were in vogue.

Hons and Rebels, and sister Nancy’s novel Wigs On The Green, a starter novel meant as a satire on Mosley’s BUF romping among the landed gentry, were rich sources of inspiration for the character that would become The Innocent Canadian’s antagonist, Viscount Geoffrey Longwood. With Orwell’s “Who Would Turn” parlour game, I like to think that Longwood would be a top ten candidate. One Mitford gets a brief mention as a friend among his milieu in The Innocent Canadian, but this occurs in the months after the Blitz, when there was nothing amusing about speculating who was a traitor anymore.

That seems a transformation with some contemporary relevance. When you Google what the word creep means (the noun, not the verb), there will be a range of definitions that you’ll find, but one way of describing a creep’s behaviour that has a certain precision is “disturbingly eccentric.” Harmless eccentricity, of the Wodehousian variety, was often amusing. There is a fecklessness and obtuseness with Bertie Wooster that softens the edges of privilege and the sharp divide of a master and servant dynamic. But when eccentricity turns darker, nerds with money simply become creeps - dangerous ones.

With the revelations of the Epstein files, Prince Andrew’s fall from gracelessness, the parallels are all too apparent. The rise of the creep class was occurring under the radar over the last couple of decades. It may have taken a Trump to manifest it, in all its metastatic obscenity, but, as it was in the early part of the last century, it had a couple of decades to seep into the foundations.

During this period, there was a growing consensus that a kind of mass migration of cultural capital was occurring here in our hemisphere - and in Europe, to a degree. The easy read on it for a headline was “the revenge of the nerds.” The aspirational figures who were producing premium export goods of soft power - movie people, pop stars, sundry political figures and pundits and (wipes eyes misting over with tears) yes, even novelists - were on the downward arc of influence and another aspirational ideal had emerged, personified by tech entrepreneurs, policy wonks, assorted superstars of STEM and finance. There was a sense that these nerds would be welcome dinner guests in the mansions of the cultural figures that preceded them, that they all shared the same progressive ideals, believed in ESG and DEI and the rules based, international order. Jeffrey Epstein courted and played to the vanities and vices of many of these representative figures, and straddled these two worlds - the end of old soft power and the ascendant, first wave of tech bro culture.

In that Woolfian sense, where “character” was really about a dominant sensibility, things were changing rapidly. The nerds weren’t necessarily aesthetically challenged as they were embodiments of a “pretense of stylelessness,” as critic Becca Rothfeld has defined it.1 They were still traveling with the progressives - even if at times they seemed just fellow travelers at best - on that road to a better, brighter, just and prosperous future for all.

This narrative was consoling, and it seemed to be promisingly inclusive. It let into the club members from nations that were subjected to the charms and wiles of soft power for three generations. Surely the influences of, say, Bruce Springsteen and Star Wars and, later, Taylor Swift or the West Wing would ensure we all agreed about what defined the levers of hope and change globally. Soft power would be like an emollient, smoothing over the complexities of cultural friction.

However, what this transition patched and glossed over was that a lot of that soft power “content,” even in its later phase, still bore the fading imprint of cultural production the ascendant masters of the universe had less exposure and interest in, beyond figuring out a way to hack, crib note and name check when necessary. The old canon and the Western Culture 101 syllabus were relics of the institutions whose commitment to meritocracy was performative at best. The smart nerds could read those rooms. Aaron Sorkin’s depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in the movie The Social Network, was one of the first characters that drew the veil back on the inner creep beneath the cuddly nerd.

Now we’re finally realizing that the masters of the digital universe like Musk, Peter Thiel2 and Sam Altman, along with the acolytes that have followed them3 are different. Their lovable nerdiness is so 2015. Maybe it was inevitable, the culmination of what the Darwinian ethos of capital markets and the hyper-competitive nature of startup culture would spawn. Or maybe, going back to those earlier causes, this could all be predicted once the erosion of trust and belief in those institutions that implicitly affirmed a meritocracy sunk into quicksand. With our new digital overlords, the thirties vibe is real; the new Mosleys - or Longwoods, if you will - own the future, it seems. And brother, it might be murder. It’s the return of disturbing eccentricity, the second coming of the creep.

There is an interview that critic, novelist and biographer Victoria Glendinning, author of Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, gave to Canadian broadcaster Craig Rintoul about Bowen and Ritchie (the inspiration for the protagonists of The Innocent Canadian, for those first coming to this newsletter). Glendinning describes how Bowen met Ritchie, and what London was like in this period:

“They met in the Second World War, in 1941, in London, and I think it was … well, you know what London was like during the War … if you had read Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories, she writes a lot about London in the war … the people who stayed and didn’t leave, this atmosphere of dangerous glamour and broken glass and bombs every night and everybody drinking a bit too much and everybody having affairs because you might be dead tomorrow … and people were being killed in the, you know, civilians being killed as well as friends at the war … so the affair started passionately in that atmosphere …”

Bowen did not keep a diary but there is an entry from Ritchie’s that vividly describes the controlled chaos he tried to manage every day at Canada House:

“My office is the door of escape from hell. Day after day the stream of people press in. Today, for example, some of the Austrian Rothschilds (escaped from a concentration camp) are trying to pass their medical examination to go to Canada. Would I arrange a financial guarantee for them? The wife of one of the wealthiest men in England is trying to get out of the country. Her husband is a Jew and a leading anti-Nazi. Will I get her a letter to prove (on very flimsy grounds) that she is a Canadian? Lady B, looking radiant, comes to ask if I would arrange for her son’s prep-school to be affiliated with a boys’ boarding school in Canada and to migrate there en masse. The Marchioness of C, in the uniform of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary Unit, wants to get three children out to Canada at once. Two Canadian journalists want to get their wives out but there is a mysterious delay in getting their exit permits. The Spanish Ambassador wants us to get accommodation for his daughter, his mother, and a troop of maids and governesses on board the next ship. They are going to Canada for a little rest from the nervous tension of the war. He knows he is slipping with his own government and may be in exile himself any day. The Polish Ambassador wants us to take the wives and daughters of one hundred high political and diplomatic dignitaries. Count X, the anti-fascist with a price on his head, must leave for Canada at once on a mission of great importance. I have only touched the edge of one day’s work. I do not mention my own friends and relatives who want to get out. Here we have a whole social system on the run, wave after wave after wave of refugees, and these are only the people at the top, people who can by titles, letters of introduction, or the ruling manner force their way into Government offices and oblige one to give them an interview. What of the massed misery that cannot escape?

‘The sense of the dissolution of civilized society is overpowering.’” (26 June 1940)

Something happens when a city, not least a country transitions into such a state of dissolution: art responds in profound, transformational ways. Evidence for the jury: Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, Picasso’s Guernica, Goya’s Black Paintings. In London, during the war, as Martin Gayford’s Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters chronicles so well, the atmosphere of “dangerous glamour and broken glass and bombs every night” was a catalyst for some incredible work from a long list of painters: Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon1, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield - and that’s hardly a complete roll call.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see a lot of this work in person. I had a favourite uncle, an art history professor who left the priesthood for Cambridge and then the Courtauld, who implored me, in my early teens, to get in front of as many actual paintings as I could and not to form my impressions from the photographs in books (this was way before we could even imagine the world would go online). It was the best advice ever given to me, not only as someone who loves painting but as a writer. Trust yourself, but only after you’ve looked long and hard, and thought as deeply as you can about what’s in front of you. Another quote that’s stayed with me was in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard: it’s simple to understand modern art, really. Just look at a million paintings.

We’re well into that era now where many of the artists listed above have their paintings featured in epic, career retrospective shows - Hockney’s last year in Paris, at Fondation Louis Vuitton, was one of those where you come out of the building and feel that you can die happily now. But of all the modernists and mavericks Gayford writes about, none can compare, for me, to Lucian Freud.

I’ve seen as many Freuds as I could over the years, after encountering his work at the Tate Modern. Like the Paula Rego and Marlene Dumas paintings on those walls, here was work that defied photographic reproduction for its effects and impact (another dictum from that uncle of mine: if the photo of a painting is not any different from the actual work in front of you, it’s “probably not very good”). Solely out of an irrational love for his paintings, and against my better judgment about trusting the pâté, not the duck, I dove into William Feaver’s The Lives of Lucian Freud: The Restless Years as soon as it was published.

And much like Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, Feaver’s biography stands out for how he captures London during this fraught, troubled era - the main difference being the action and the dramatis personae move from Earl’s Court to Soho. From this milieu, the one character in The Innocent Canadian who is truly representative is Colette Cluny’s friend Dermot Keogh. The inspiration for him, though there are important differences, was the photographer John Deakin, who took this photo, below.

Deakin was quite a character: “by all accounts, not an easy man to like. As well as having a tongue like a file, he was a notorious miser and leech. Francis Bacon’s description offers some insight as to why. ‘A very amusing man,’ he said. ‘Very sarcastic. But he needed drink more than anything else.’ Deakin was a chronic alcoholic, but Bacon was the one with the limitless bar tab: his status as a photographer is almost obscured by his role as the painter's court fool. Descriptions of Deakin are not kind: he had the ‘gait of a midget wrestler,’ ‘Mickey Mouse ears,’ and his pock-marked face was ‘wrinkled like a bloodhound's.’” But likeability was probably not a high priority for him. Much as it was for Freud and his fellow painters, making art that would survive him - as well as basic survival itself - was everything amid the broken glass and the bombs.

In other news …

Dan Synikin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, posted this recently:

“A publicist I spoke with about her time in the Big Five:

‘I wanted to know how a Big Five publisher really works, and how those decisions are made. I was there during this funny transitional time where editors were still acquiring books basically based on author platforms, authors with large social media platforms. But at that time, and we’re still seeing this, that just does not move units anymore. They would acquire books, they’d say, oh, this is a no-brainer, this person has over 100,000 Instagram followers. And that book might sell, like, 400 copies. Even if the author was gung-ho about marketing their book, doing interviews, I mean, it just doesn’t…. Those…those metrics don’t really mean that much anymore…. Maybe this is just, like, really wishful thinking on my part, but I really feel like the trend now is people are interested in picking up books because they’re good.’”

This is great news if true. I was dutifully cross-posting this “Index” series on Facebook and Instagram - rarely if ever on X - because I’ve been trying to be a good soldier for the cause, doing all the things publicists, agents and publishers themselves have insisted were essential for authors. I think all of these platforms - and all of this DIY publicity - matters less than ever.

And I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve been locked out of Facebook for about two weeks. I have nothing against those who are still on it - especially fellow authors who are doing the work of trying to find readers one at a time - but what a relief it is not to be on it. As for X, my goodness … there are few things more depressing than seeing how badly that platform has been enshittified. If you’ve been looking for me in those places, hello! Over here!

This platform remains an island of sanity and substance, so I don’t mind being here, and I’m thankful for those who continue to read these pieces. But the novel’s the thing, and if readers only come to The Innocent Canadian without any advance knowledge from here or from, wishful thinking, an actual review, and if they find, after a few pages, that the novel’s actually good - deeply entertaining - that’s satisfaction enough. I’m a Canadian author, after all, not published with a multinational where the sales revenues are funneled down to New York, and it’s been years since I was innocent enough to believe there was any kind of functional infrastructure for Canadians to be exposed to independently published books by Canadian authors. All one can do is write the best novels one can and hope they find readers one at a time.

And of course, try to contribute to the infrastructure itself, such as it is. I still try to write reviews, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be published in outlets where the circulation numbers are pretty good (though of course the bigger outlets have all but eliminated reviews altogether, save for what they can run from syndicated services based in the US). Indie booksellers are essential. They are places where the most interesting, well read people in your neighbourhood are found, both in front of and behind the counter, and any launches or events I’m involved in work with some great ones here in Ottawa: Octopus Books, Perfect Books, Books on Beechwood, The Spaniel’s Tale, to name a few. And where there are events and launches that need support, I try to do what I can to get readers out to them. Also, where there are writers’ festivals, like the new one in Brockville, it’s been a great pleasure to appear and meet readers - and other writers - who attend. Lastly, I’m involved at committee and board levels respectively with The Walrus and the Library and Archives Canada Foundation, two institutions doing all they can to celebrate and recognize Canadian culture, history and identity - our country thinking out loud.

My larger point here is that nothing compares to finding your readership one by one, building an actual - not virtual - community of those who care about Canadian culture for one fundamental reason: they love the product. They think it’s good, not simply, as the kids would say, mid or cringe-but-well-intentioned. No, I mean actually good. Not virtually (or virtuously) good.

In that world of the actual not virtual, I will soon have announcements here about events coming when The Innocent Canadian is released and on the shelves: in Ottawa, April 13th at Le Metropolitain, for starters. But more on that in the weeks - or letters - ahead with this Index.

Also, I received word this week that the novel I spent most of ‘24 and ‘25 working on, The Rewilding, has just been accepted for publication. More on this new work in the weeks ahead too.

“To paraphrase Italo Calvino’s comment on The Ruins of Kasch by Roberto Calasso, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon takes up two subjects: the first is Yugoslavia, and the second is everything else. By the time it was published - in two volumes totalling half a million words - West was somewhat at a loss to discover why she had been moved ‘in 1936 to devote five years of my life, at great financial sacrifice and to the utter exhaustion of my mind and body, to take an inventory of a country down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view’. As the ‘mass of [her] material’ swelled and changed, so this ‘inventory’ became an immense and immensely complicated picture not simply of her own soul but that of Europe on the brink of the second world war. The result, which she feared ‘hardly anyone will read by reason of its length’ is one of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th century.”

I really had no idea what I was in for (I never read reviews or criticism of anything I’ve chosen to read before I dive in) but, only about a hundred pages in, I knew West’s work was going to be one of the greatest books I’d ever read. It remains so. Its evocation of “Europe on the brink” sparked an interest in this period that transcended my initial focus on the Balkans.

It led me to hunt down other books of hers1 and to discover all of her journalism from the thirties and forties. By 1947 her work was famous enough that Time called her “indisputably the world’s number one woman writer.” She filed for a wide variety of publications: The Times (UK), the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic. Some of her best writing is collected in the book A Train of Powder, featuring her reporting on four trials. “Greenhouse with Cyclamen,” her piece on Nuremberg, is particularly strong. Her journalism also informed her work The Meaning of Treason, which examines the motivations of spies who betrayed the UK for both the Nazis and the Communists. I think her reporting was so singular for the same reason Black Lamb and Grey Falcon became a work of a half a million words: her curiosity, her inability to take a light touch with big themes and big questions. She must have been hell on wheels for editors who harangued her about deadlines.

The great critic Diana Trilling, in ‘55, wrote of West’s strengths as a journalist:

“Miss West’s method of study in her present book is familiar from her justly famous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon -- it is the method of conveying generalities, not by summary statement or exhortation, but by the amassing of particularities. Her historical, political, social and psychological discursiveness (of which the psychological, though not negligible, is the weakest) is her way of telling us that no individual or individual idea or individual situation is without connection with the whole past, present and future of mankind, and that this is so even while we hold fast our image of the uniqueness of each human instance.’”

I’m less convinced about Trilling’s critique of West’s “psychological discursiveness.” Norman Mailer’s virtual monument to psychological discursiveness, The Executioner’s Song, she praised effusively, calling it “supremely abundant and sympathetic,” so that’s an interesting contrast. However, I think Trilling’s right about that “amassing of particularities,” and that implicit drawing in of greater connections - '“past, present and future of mankind.” When I began broadening the scope of research for The Innocent Canadian, what I was hoping to find were journalists of the war years in London (and the rest of England) who might be West’s equal.

And there were quite a few, thankfully. Namely, Mollie Panter Downes, A.J. Liebling on occasion, Martha Gellhorn, and of course Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts from London that you can still get online.

The cliche about journalism is that it is the first draft of history, but for a fiction writer, I think there’s an important, valuable nuance with this truism. Like diary and journal entries from the period, the impressions recorded and written down capture the moment, prone to misconceptions, misreadings of motive and eventual designs of enemy and ally alike. No revisions for posterity, no 20/20 hindsight. Like Stendhal’s smoke and confusion at the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma, it’s hard to depict a kitschy, heroic march into history once you realize how many were stumbling blind.

But there are moments in these reports where no matter how faded the copy can seem, vivid colour bleeds in to the frame. Reporters like West who are so astute about character and motivation confirm the truths that the best historical fiction aspires to leave with a reader: everything changes, but nothing changes.

Admittedly, the phrase Irish Ratline requires an explanation. I just Googled it myself and it was some consolation to learn that the Irish author Stuart Neville has written a novel called Ratlines which can lay claim to popularizing this term first (I have yet to read Neville’s thriller but it looks very good). Quite simply, the term ratline refers to escape routes provided for Nazi war criminals by those who, for whatever transactional or ideological rationale, aided and abetted the criminals’ escape attempts – usually to South America.

The book that did exercise some influence on The Innocent Canadian was Philippe Sands’ The Ratline. I have written previously about Sands’ work; non-fiction investigations that read like great detective fiction, the themes of which draw from his experience as an international human rights lawyer, his family’s history and, not incidentally, a kind of creative dialogue that flourished for years with his neighbour and friend David Cornwell (yes, that David Cornwell).

The Ratline is a sobering read if you presumed that all the prominent political actors, post-1945, took a great interest in bringing fugitive Nazis to justice. Prominent political actors including the Vatican and the Catholic Church.

Here’s Sands from his Reddit AMA, describing what the spark was for The Ratline:

“10 years ago I met Horst Wächter, the son of Charlotte Bleckmann and Otto Wächter, an Austrian, the Nazi governor of Krakow and later of Galicia, based in Lviv. Wächter the father was indicted for mass murder but never caught. He died mysteriously in Rome in 1949, in the arms of a Nazi-loving Bishop.

‘5 years ago, Horst gave me a copy of his parents’ entire archive – letters, diaries, postcards, photographs. From this, I was able to piece together the true story of the life of a Nazi couple, what he did, how he escaped, how she helped. It’s a tale of love lies and justice.”

Yes, a “Nazi loving bishop.” Now there is a story in just those three words.

Sands’ book stayed with me. It was the complexity of motivations, the complicity of some surprising historical figures, the darkest secrets that were kept for years where, presumably, there should have been the most light emanating, after the Second World War, with all its devastation. So much of Sands’ narrative was there in the background as I researched and started writing the initial draft of The Innocent Canadian.

But it made its way into the draft through character, first and foremost. The more I learned about Elizabeth Bowen’s intelligence gathering during the War, which culminated in her book Notes on Eire: Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill, 1940-2: With a Review of Irish Neutrality in World War 2, the more a subplot of an Irish ratline started to feature in my notes. It became a significant part of the novel Colette Cluny, based on Bowen, would have written, if she didn’t feel compelled to protect her privacy and her sources. Bowen’s The Heat of the Day could be considered a spy novel too, but it’s one that left me wondering if she too had a “hidden” story the novel could only obtusely, or indirectly, leave traces of in the pages of her published work. Stories within stories.

Which leads me to my own reckoning as to why, in at least two novels now, the theme of Irish complicity during the Second World War, rather than neutrality, has reemerged. Like Sands, I can’t really elude disclosure of my own family history.

To explain it, I have to begin with something that the great Canadian director and playwright Robert Lepage said about his own compulsion to create and tell stories. He attributed it to his father who was a taxi driver. As the elder Lepage drove passengers through the towns that mark the shoreline of the St. Lawrence in Quebec, the narrative threads would meander like the river, but they’d have their beginnings, middles and ends shaped by the distances of each fare. Lepage felt he had subconsciously inherited or absorbed this approach to stories as a child.

I had an Irish grandfather who was a taxi driver (I retain Irish citizenship). I was too young to really know him when he died, but from what I heard from my mother, he told stories in a similar fashion, shaped and timed by the fares he’d take in a small, seaside town in County Wicklow.

He also, unlike many of the friends and acquaintances he’d drink with and regularly take on as fares, had his own thoughts about Europe heading into war in 1939 - and about Ireland’s neutrality. It was not for him: he signed up with the British army and was in Dunkirk and then the north of Africa, fighting Rommel’s forces.

He made it back. But in the town where his business once thrived, he was something of a pariah. He could not pick up many fares - if any - some days. He and my grandmother, both well into their forties, made the difficult, if not desperate decision to relocate to London for a time, where things really weren’t much easier for them.

His war stories, indeed his stories of work in London, have been lost. This whole era, and the hidden stories within it, carry all the fascination for me of mysteries that reveal themselves - and their many layers - in the telling. I sometimes wonder if my own efforts of research and crafting stories about this time are ones of recovery. No answer, unfortunately; no neat bow to tie.

As one particular Russian put it, in a letter: “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

This is the seventh “index” reference for the influences that informed the writing of my forthcoming novel, The Innocent Canadian.

I realize this instalment follows another mention of a London square, but Grosvenor Square is markedly different from the world “minor” novelist Patrick Hamilton created from the seedy haunts of Earl’s Court in thirties London for this novel that, barring maybe George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air, is like nothing else you’ll read from this period.

Hangover Square is among the few novels that informed the atmosphere of The Innocent Canadian. It is ostensibly considered to be a pulpy thriller about the murder of an underemployed actress, Netta Langdon, by the protagonist, George Harvey Bone. However, we realize Bone is a schizophrenic and a desperate character from the first page. And then there’s this paragraph, just a few pages in:

“For two or three minutes he walked along in a dream, barely conscious of anything. The motion of his body caused his raincoat to make a small, thundering noise: his big sport shoes creaked and rustled on the grass of the cliff-top. On his left, down below, lay the vast grey sweep of the Wash under the sombre sky of Christmas afternoon; on his right the scrappy villas in the unfinished muddy roads. A few couples were about, cold, despairing, bowed down by the hopeless emptiness and misery of the season and the time of day. He passed a shelter, around which some children were running, firing toy pistols at each other. Then he remembered, without any difficulty, what it is he had to do: he had to kill Netta Longdon.”

So, where’s the tension and suspense, yes? We already have a good idea who will commit a murder. But Hamilton has his own Raskolnikov here; he’s really interested in the why. Key to this are the atmospheric cues in that paragraph: the “small” sound of thunder, the sombre sky, the “cold, despairing … hopeless emptiness and misery of the season” and notably, those children: guns in hand with make-believe murder on their minds. This is Christmas day, 1938. It’s three months after the Munich Conference, where Chamberlain presumed he’d struck a deal with Hitler to guarantee “peace in our time.” Yes, don’t pay any mind to that small sound of thunder, or the misery evoked with that sunless sky on a Christmas morning. We’re approaching the fag end of Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” and murder will soon be literally in the air, with Luftwaffe bombers tearing across the London sky. Like a low note on a cello, gradually increasing in volume, timbre and vibrato, that impending sense of catastrophe is masterfully, elegantly modulated right up to the final chapters, when you look up from the page and realize Hamilton has taken you to the summer of 1939.

Novelist Nick Hornby has described Hamilton as an “unparalleled” social historian of this era, the writer who maps a distinct territory in English fiction, “as if they’ve finally finished the stretch of motorway running from Dickens to Martin Amis.” But it’s not simply the atmosphere so meticulously evoked in Hangover Square that’s so vivid - the dingy pubs, the bedsits with dust and cigarette ash a finger deep on the coffee table and window sills - it’s there with Hamilton’s characters.

Specifically, it’s most representative with George Bone’s nemesis, Peter, the man who has a friends-with-benefits relationship with Netta. Here’s how Hamilton describes him:

“Peter now stood leaning against the mantelpiece, the glass of beer in his hand, warming his legs at the gas-fire. Underneath his grey check jacket he wore a navy blue sweater with a polo collar. On top of this collar was his nasty fair face, with its nasty fair “guardsman’s” moustache, which, in combination with his huge sneering chin, made him look not unlike the Philip IV of Velasquez.”

Peter and Netta are not quite British Union of Fascists party members, but they’re more than a little intrigued with all that’s happening across the Channel: “They went raving mad, they weren’t sober for a whole week after Munich – it was just in their line. They liked Hitler, really.” Netta fancied “the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots…” And Peter was thrown in jail for a spell for “socking a left-winger” at a political rally.

Reading Hangover Square for the first time, as I was writing the first draft of The Innocent Canadian, I felt as if I was getting something, through these characters of London’s demi-monde, that was integral to the texture of the era. So many historical accounts portray the resistance to fascism, especially by Londoners, as emblematic of the plucky, inherently democratic spirit of the people. Yet the thirties was a hard decade marked by tumultuous change, dizzying reversals of fortune - and for many,1 a ceaseless grind of weeks and months living on the edge of poverty. Populism and fascism flooded in where hope dried up.

How very familiar this all seems now.

This added complexity to the political and cultural currents that were roiling under the streets of London put the era into sharp focus for me. The perspective from Hangover Square had a kind of ineffable rightness, a corrective lens put on the draft I was working on; I had been struggling to get beyond the reductiveness of a class dynamic at work regarding the response to the German threat. Though there was a lot of talk about peace in our time “pragmatism” from the upstairs class, there was also a fair amount of working class support for what Hitler represented from the downstairs folks as well. Once again, it was not hard to discern a correspondence with what we’re seeing now, starkly, south of the border.

In other news …

Speaking of that mess, Prime Minister Carney’s speech in Davos clearly represented a moment when the terms of engagement for Trump and his gangster government were articulated for Canada, and for many of the “middle powers.” I have a piece in Policy that speaks to why the speech stood out, not just in content but in form. Let’s hope there are more speeches like it.

“Little America,” the Grosvenor Square site in London where the US Embassy used to be, is one of the settings in The Innocent Canadian where place is doing a lot of work in this novel, underlining a theme in bold font. And as I write this, the news is offering up some unexpected parallels, given the direction Trump is taking his country.

There’s this, from one short essay on the history of Grosvenor Square as the site for the American centre of operations during the war:

“With so many American connections, it is not surprising that Eisenhower (who was known as ‘Ike’) chose Grosvenor Square for the site of the US embassy in London. It is even said that Eisenhower, when he met the Duke of Westminster at a cocktail party, told him to name his price for Grosvenor Square, as the USA liked to own the land on which their embassies stood. The Duke took him up on the offer and agreed to give Grosvenor Square to the USA if all the land which his family had owned in America before independence was returned to him. As this included the city of Miami in Florida, that deal never came about. The Duke rewarded American involvement in the war by only charging a nominal rent for the use of the land.”

Now there’s a lost hinge moment in history: when the UK could have reclaimed Miami and presumably other parts of Florida. Maybe even Mar A Lago. Of course, by now, like much of London, the land would have probably been sold to Russian oligarchs, so maybe there would be little difference with how things have turned out.

Anyway, the US insistence on owning the land with Mayfair’s Grosvenor Square (this coming from a future Republican President, no less) is an interesting historical rhyme. It is unclear whether Eisenhower gave his rationale as “psychological.”

The more relevant parallels for me, in my research regarding the American stance on Germany prior to 1941, were there in how congenial to fascism certain figures were in America - figures with considerable influence and political capital. In 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy, paterfamilias for all things Camelot in sixties America, was appointed as the US Ambassador to the UK. Susan Ronald’s biography of him, The Ambassador, provides a portrait of an American whose sensibility reads as all-too-contemporary in this review:

“Notwithstanding FDR’s unprecedented provocation of sending an Irishman with no diplomatic skills to Great Britain, Kennedy immediately sided with Prime Minister Chamberlain and the appeasers, believing that any deal with Hitler—no matter how humiliating and lethal to the lives of millions—was preferable to war. Kennedy never stopped believing that Hitler could be bought off, that businessmen could do business with fascists.

‘But appeasement, in and of itself, is not, of course, a form of fascism. Even Neville Chamberlain eventually realized that Hitler’s cruel lust for power could not be satiated by offering so much of Europe to his suzerainty. FDR understood that Hitler could not be appeased and became increasingly wary of Kennedy, but kept him in England because the President felt the Ambassador’s defeatist attitudes would demoralize the American people and undermine democratic life. Kennedy, on his leaves home, lectured FDR and said ‘very frankly’ that the United States ‘would have to come to some form of Fascism here.’ He did not believe Great Britain could survive a war against the fascist powers and that America would become increasingly isolated and lose control of its markets if FDR’s government did not take over control of the economy to counter Hitler’s hegemony over his capitalists. Kennedy proposed that the President ‘organize a small powerful committee under himself as chairman and this committee would run the country without much reference to Congress.’

‘Kennedy thought solely in terms of economics. Although he said he cared about the fate of Jews and persecuted minorities, in the end he thought they would have to be sacrificed for the greater good of the United States and its allies. Like Hitler, Kennedy believed in a Jewish cabal, which had thwarted him and that was intent on instigating incidents that would draw America into a disastrous war. ‘To defeat fascism,’ Kennedy argued in a memorandum, the United States would ‘have to adopt totalitarian methods’ and strike deals with dictators.”

As I write this, two days after Prime Minister Carney’s speech in Davos, it’s instructive to contrast Kennedy’s view of the world with his son’s: specifically John F. Kennedy’s speech to congress on US Foreign Policy in 1962. It’s a clear eyed yet generous and expansive vision of America’s place in the world. He opens with this broadside about America First isolationism: “Faced with the chaos in world trade that had resulted from the Great Depression, disillusioned by the failure of the promises that high protective tariffs would generate recovery, and impelled by a desperate need to restore our economy, President Roosevelt asked for authority to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions with other nations of the world in order to spur our exports and aid our economic recovery and growth.”

Six decades later, listening to Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, as I did at the Eurasia Summit in Toronto a few months ago, it was remarkable to hear how the elder Kennedy’s view of the world was far more closely aligned with Lutnick’s than it was to John F. Kennedy’s. Lutnick, aside from offering up his own potted, largely fictional history of the “success” of US tariffs over the last two centuries, shared the same implicit belief in mercantilism and an underlying cynicism about diplomacy based on anything more than the exercise of power and strength to compel submission from countries who might not be, as Trump would say, “holding any cards.”

In The Innocent Canadian’s London of 1941, in accord with the historical record, Joseph Kennedy is no longer the US Ambassador (Roosevelt replaced him with John Winant). The new ambassador, notably a Republican, had a very different perspective on the Allies’ prospects for victory in Europe, not least Churchill’s capacity to defeat fascism, across the Channel and in the UK itself. As it is in the novel, this appointment made a material difference in the war years.

However, I wanted to depict the legacy of the elder Kennedy’s years in Grosvenor Square, the way that sense of defeatism and cynicism about any other course but appeasement was still very much a presence, and how it brought some strange bedfellows together. This scene where Collette Cluny, novelist and Irish citizen (inspired by Elizabeth Bowen), meets William Davenant (inspired by Charles Ritchie), dramatizes a milieu that was representative of Kennedy’s political flirtation with fascist and fascist-adjacent influences. To channel the bewildering feeling that Cluny and Davenant experience - of seeing those you never imagined would be so defeatist, cynical, compliant and complicit with dangerous, populist “chaos agents” - was less of a challenge than I thought back in 2022. It is even less so in 2026.

The building that used to house the American embassy in Grosvenor Square is now a luxury hotel and “cultural epicenter,” quite a home away from home for the Davos crowd. If you put that detail in a novel, given the current president’s long history with hotels, it would be too on the nose. Reality continues to outpace art - bad art - with history’s rhyming couplets.

In other news …

I’m in a couple of pieces over the last week here in Ottawa, offering my perspective on Prime Minister Carney’s current approach to explaining this very 1938-like crisis we’re in and the choices this government is making to weather this geopolitical “rupture.” How was I to know, just days later, the guy would pull off the speech of the century at Davos? I hereby take credit for this remarkable course correction.

In all seriousness though, it is worth reading in full. I’ve mentioned Kennedy’s foreign policy speech in ‘62 above, which it would compare favourably to, and others have astutely mentioned Louis St. Laurent’s Gray Lecture at the University of Toronto in 1947 to underscore how consequential these remarks are in defining the world we’re living in now and what we need to do to - here the cliche applies - meet the moment.

A moment increasingly - and worryingly - familiar. And one that we can’t play innocents about.

In the late eighties - a million years ago, really - when I began to read Canadian fiction avidly, amazed and inspired by what Michael Ondaatje accomplished with In The Skin Of A Lion, I had a limited understanding of the possibilities and the potential for historical fiction. I quickly realized, however, that I was cutting my teeth in a period when this particular genre was coming into its own. Ondaatje came out with The English Patient in ‘92 and Margaret Atwood followed in ‘96 with Alias Grace, and there seemed a great deal of momentum gathering for work that took on historical themes without sacrificing the advancements in interiority and the line by line lyricism brought into the mainstream by some of the great modernists of the last century.

There is a new book coming out by Richard Stursberg, whose former roles include head of English services at CBC and Executive Director at Telefilm. It’s Lament For A Literature, and it looks to be essential reading for those who care about our culture. In one of the first reviews for it, critic Steven Beattie makes mention of an essay by Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Henighan which provided an early diagnostic analysis, tangentially related to Stursberg’s argument: “in a signal essay from the 2002 collection When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, Henighan argues that the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992 coincided with ‘Canadian novelists los[ing] the thread of contemporary Canadian experience.’ Rather than extending the cultural examinations of Canadian society found in the early work of Atwood or the novels of Richler and Laurence, writers in the ’90s increasingly gravitated toward a globalized approach to literature that abandoned the local in favour of settings overseas or in the distant past.’”

I’m not so sure about this thesis; that somehow, writers like Ondaatje, Atwood or, say, British novelist Hilary Mantel, who came out with one of her first great works of historical fiction, A Place of Greater Safety, the same year as The English Patient1, suddenly saw dollar signs with a new global market they could access, publishing with a multinational company, and this development somehow weighed heavily on these novelists’ creative decisions. If you were Ondaatje in 1992, or even if you were of that extinct species, the Canadian midlist author, once you had a few books under your belt and did not behave too scandalously, you weren’t not going to get published, even if you had never come close to earning out an advance (“Earning out? It is to laugh!” said the editor to the author, as they clinked glasses in the Park Hyatt’s rooftop bar, c. 1994). In addition, I don’t think editorial decisions were consciously or unconsciously made by publishers to “abandon the local” or shut down any “cultural examinations.” Any novelist who’d tell you they want to “extend the cultural examination” of Canadian society with their latest opus has made a grave category error about their metier or simply gotten high on their own supply - of Brussels sprouts.

This is not to chip away at the foundations of Stursberg’s arguments, however, not least before I’ve read his book and it’s out on the shelves. But a cursory look at the Booker winners and nominees over those years suggests another influence; a lot of authors were taking big swings with the novel, unafraid to abandon the local and to take on large historical themes. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that writers can be a little competitive and that just maybe ego and the, um, sportive impulse with the whole venture cannot be underestimated. And with works by Rushdie, Barry Unsworth or Pat Barker, this wasn’t historical fiction as the first draft of a TV costume drama. Midnight’s Children served as the inspiration for a film version but much of its success as a novel is based on what the form can do better than any other medium: with character and voice, with time, with the intersection of historical themes and the personal.

I’d also suggest that here in Canada, when a writer like Ondaatje will freely and frequently cite Mavis Gallant’s short stories as inspiration, the scope of ambition with larger historical themes was not limited to the longer form. Some of Gallant’s work has the historical sweep of novels. And Alice Munro’s innovations with the short story from this period often work in the same way; read The Albanian Virgin from 1994 and you’ll see what I mean. Genius is a great motivator, more than any diktat from a publisher’s head office.

Which brings me, finally, to the above index mentions, and specifically to a Canadian novel, published in 1981, that had an outsized influence on The Innocent Canadian: Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words.

When I bought a second hand copy of this novel, at a yard sale in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, I was skeptical and snobbish in my ignorance about Findley (wasn’t he, as a Canada-famous author put it to me, “a failed actor?”). I questioned his bona fides writing about an imagined, pro-fascist alternative government in England during the war, a cabal scheming under the leadership of the Duke of Windsor and his American wife Wallis Simpson. On top of this, Findley had the temerity to have his conspiracy-flavoured plot narrated by Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the fictitious alter-ego of Ezra Pound from the old fascist’s eponymous poem. A few pages in, it was also clear that the story’s told years later, at the “Grand Elysium Hotel” in the Austrian alps - shades of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.

Ah, to be young and an idiot. Findley didn’t ask anyone for permission to take on these larger than life historical characters, including Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, Rudolf Hess, Walter Schellenberg, the Fuhrer’s head of foreign intelligence, Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Ciano in Italy and the fascist-adjacent Charles Lindbergh in the US. Findley’s no longer with us so no one can ask him, but I suspect he just found these individuals inherently fascinating - at least as much as the trio of characters he focuses on: Edward and Wallis and Sir Harry Oakes, the real-life Canadian mining tycoon who becomes a key figure for the Duke of Windsor in his Bahamian years in exile. The unsolved murder of Oakes is inextricably linked to the wartime plot for a new world order under fascist rule, led by the Duke - in Mauberley’s telling.

Famous Last Words is, according to the internets, still considered to be Findley’s best work, even a “masterpiece.” That seems right. It was Findley’s clear fascination with his era, his mingling of historical fact and fiction, that was a revelation to me - and a slow burn inspiration for The Innocent Canadian. There’s a similar conspiracy-flavoured plot at the heart of my novel, which makes that inspiration all but explicit. And Edward, speaking fluent German (as he did in actuality) makes an appearance.

At some point, you realize, as a writer, you’re going to have to swing for the fences with what inspires you, the story you’d love to read yourself. Famous Last Words, more than any other novel from Findley’s contemporaries, is the one I’ve returned to and reread, the novel that gave this writer permission to read, research, plot and plan … and get the damned draft done.

In other news …

I’ve got a review of Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives in Policy magazine this week. It’s a brick of a book, but a perfect read if you are starting to feel like I was over Christmas, dealing with an irritating flu-cold virus that hit like COVID, and you want something substantive but absorbing and entertaining to get you through.

Ken Whyte is publishing Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, that I mention above, in just a few days. Full disclosure, Richard introduced me to some publishers that I helped out last year, speaking to government about the state of the publishing industry here in Canada. Whyte provides a fabulous introduction to Stursberg’s book with his Shush Newsletter this week. Highly recommended.

The title of this piece suggests some mention, first and foremost, of John Ibbitson’s significant contribution to our understanding of Diefenbaker and Pearson with his book The Duel. As to why it mattered for The Innocent Canadian, permit me this diversion on one element of craft: distinctive voice and dialogue.

It is still probably a liability, when you’re writing fiction in 2026, to put too much emphasis on the merits of dialogue with character development. It’s been deemed a touch passé and gauche within the MFA industrial complex1 to care about such matters. It still flourishes with thrillers, thankfully; Joseph Kanon’s dialogue, for example, has the jagged music that can crackle like David Mamet’s. It might simply be the legacy of autofiction and its proponents that caused the turn against voice, dialogue and their importance for plot- driven fiction. There’s an allegedly creaky, inauthentic trunk of props, costumes and dramaturgy that fiction written in the 19th century, realist mode requires.

However, voice might be primed for a critical reevaluation, it’s been that long in the wilderness; one of the few still cogent essays on fiction in the New Yorker from last year (from a film critic, notably) was on Elmore Leonard’s perfect pitch, and some of the more ambitious new fiction writers on this platform have been brave enough to suggest some great American writers of voice-forward fiction, Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal, are worthy of appreciation once again. Hopeful signs from the margins - or the new centre of the publishing microverse, depending on where you’re standing, I guess.

If there is a ghostly remnant of voice that still exists in fiction-land, currently, I’d submit it probably approximates something like Rachel Cusk’s2 or Katie Kitamura’s - at least, in an aspirational sense for those emerging from the hothouse workshop environment. Picture a gallery curator, dressed in shades of taupe, their accent vaguely mid-Atlantic, the kind of character who not only uses the term ekphrasis but actively employs it as, um, a component of the ‘narrative strategy.’

The larger point here is that voice and what it says about character is dynamic rather than static; we used to speak very differently, as old speeches and interviews from the last century will confirm, and the paradox with historical fiction is that the closer you might get to how people authentically spoke from the period, the more artificial it could sound.

As I’ve argued in a previous post on diaries versus memoirs, I believe the former are in so many ways superior as documents that capture what’s authentic about time, place … and character. And though it’s hard to contend that any diarist’s ‘voice’ would approximate how they spoke, the diaries of, say, Mackenzie King give you something more: a kind of steadicam, fixed individual perspective that reveals motivations, intuitions, preconceptions … actions and their consequences - all without the shaping (read distorting, consciously or unconsciously revisionist) hand of the memoirist3.

Lester B. “Mike” Pearson is a minor character in The Innocent Canadian, depicted as both mentor and ally for my protagonist during his time in Canada House in London. The real Pearson, as the papers in Library and Archives Canada will attest, was not much of a diarist, however - nothing like the writer Charles Ritchie was.

Yet for some invaluable insight into what Pearson’s character might have been like during this period, the portrait John Ibbitson provides in The Duel - specifically, how Pearson compared and contrasted with Diefenbaker in his formative years - seems at least as rich as what John English accomplished with the volumes of his more conventional biography of Pearson (which are a considerable achievement in and of themselves). There are different aims, approaches and perspectives with both books, but contrast with character is inherently dramatic, and for a writer on the hunt to capture voice and dialogue, The Duel served to spark the kind of 360 degree thinking necessary to lay strong foundations.

There are a few good reviews of Ibbitson’s book for those here who’d want to read more on The Duel before diving in, thankfully (I say thankfully because reviews in Canada are increasingly hard to find). I’d also recommend Steve Paikin’s interview with John in the West Block, as both interviewer and interviewee stood behind the portraits of Diefenbaker and Pearson.

As for some great diaries of the thirties and forties that helped inform The Innocent Canadian, here’s a quick list:

1. King’s diaries. Thankfully, Library and Archives Canada can get you them. They’re fascinating, to say the least. The entries on meeting Goering, Hitler … there is so much here. Here is King, in 1937, getting assurances from Hitler that he has no expansionist plans in Europe:

   “‘We feel the necessity of getting ourselves equally into the position where we would be respected. We have had once or twice to decide on certain moves which was a choice which we did not ourselves really like. We saw that we were either to be kept down and become permanently a subject depot, or take a step which would preserve us in our own rights. All our difficulties grew out of the enmity of the Treaty of Versailles, being held to the terms of that Treaty indefinitely made it necessary for us to do what we had done.’ He spoke of the advance into the Ruhr as being a part of that assertion of Germany’s position to save perpetual subjugation. He went on to say, however, that now most of the Treaty of Versailles was out of the way, moves of the kind would not be necessary any further.”

   This reader couldn’t help but think of similar delusions about an isolationist agenda after that particular passage.

2. Charles Ritchie’s, especially The Siren Years volume - as mentioned ad nauseum on this Substack.

3. The uncensored Chips Channon diaries. “Channon, an upstart Chicagoan who’d unaccountably managed to marry the daughter of an exceedingly rich Anglo-Irish Earl, moved in vertiginously high circles. As a friend of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, he had enjoyed a ringside seat during the abdication crisis; as the Conservative MP for Southend he had looked on with fawning admiration as Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler, and abject horror as Winston Churchill succeeded him as prime minister (Channon was in favour of appeasement).” So much of this is a reminder of how much resistance there was, from the one percent in America and Britain, to taking any threat from Hitler seriously, and how congenial this cohort was to fascism. My, how things have changed now.

4. The diaries of Victor Klemperer . What was it like to be an academic in a country turning fascist? Again, the sense of deja vu, reading this, regarding all that’s happening south of us, is instructive.

5. John Colville’s The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries: Volume One: 1939-1941. Colville was there for all of the crucial Cabinet decisions made under Churchill in a crucial phase during the war. You get the sense he didn’t begin working for Churchill with a great deal of enthusiasm but, as Bob Caro has said (my last mention, promise), power doesn’t corrupt as much as it simply reveals character, and Colville soon realized the kind of leader he was serving.

Some diaries I hope to dip into in the future, of mention for fellow nerds who are obsessed with this era like me, include Unity Mitford’s (more on the Mitfords in a forthcoming Index post) and the diaries of William Dodd, who was the US Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937.

With the latter, Erik Larson’s In The Garden of Beasts uses Dodd’s diaries as a primary source. Given what’s going on with ICE in the US and how the Trump agenda continues to reveal itself in all its debased, gangster-land thuggishness, I’ve been thinking a lot about that book. Somebody might want to give it to Mark Wiseman before he heads down to Washington. Great bedside reading for some sleepless nights ahead.

I can’t write of Canada House, or of having a novel published with the title The Innocent Canadian, without beginning with a confession: for a few years, as ambitious as I was for a readership beyond the usual few hundred here in Canada, I hoped to have a novel published that Americans would buy in the thousands (and ideally Europeans too - you can always fantasize, in fact it’s an occupational hazard).

This aspiration was based on responses to my last novel, The Black State, as it made the rounds with publishers considered multinational, with their branch plant operations here in Canada (Penguin Random House, Harper Collins). It was consoling to hear that upon reading the draft, they knew I could write, but those complimentary thoughts were qualified with an admission, from one, that they “wouldn’t know how to market this novel.” In effect, I had written a Canadian political thriller, with a senator as its protagonist, and as much as it might have international topicality (the Arab Spring, renditions, black sites in such places as Morocco), much of the plot was based in Ottawa. Imagine: me, an Ottawa based writer, who took his inspiration from work he actually did on the Hill; what was I thinking?

In essence, no one - not a publisher, not an agent, was going to make any money on a Canadian story, really. You might ask: so if you’re writing in Canada, and a Canadian-based editor admits the writing is of quality but they can’t “market” a Canadian book, what exactly is their imperative? Why have a branch plant in Canada at all? Good questions, especially now. Elbows up, yes?

But reader, it gets worse. After hearing the same thing from another one of “the bigs,” one editor suggested that if I might re-locate the novel in the US - Ottawa becoming Washington - maybe The Black State would be worth another look. So I went back to the drawing board.

I was capable of rationalizing this; after all, one of my favourite novels, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, was originally an Australian story but she redrafted it for the same reason - to get her an American readership, her publisher some assurance she could earn out her advance. And from what I knew of a number of authors I’d admired, working in my particular genre (Furst, Harris, Kanon), much of their research happened in a library rather than ‘in the field.’ There were some imposing precedents for this approach. It was worth a shot.

But what a curious, weightless feeling it created, once I sat down and began to rewrite with some imaginary America in mind. I had to plod through with some assumptions I just didn’t trust: that Washington’s political culture was in some way like Ottawa’s (reader, from all reliable accounts, it’s not), that our party politics could be swapped out for Democrat-Republican dynamics (once again, no), and that details, like the quality of light in Ottawa boardrooms, the salt stains on shoes and pant cuffs, could be judiciously altered or erased altogether. Fundamentally, the very sense of place that shaped my main character - his British Columbian roots, his backroom dealings in this logging town, my home - had to be transformed into ersatz Netflix-America1, much like downtown Toronto or Vancouver will be set-decorated to become Manhattan for film crews shooting up here.

In the end, I finished my American draft. I even bought a couple of bottles of Canadian wine for the Americans in Washington who helped me out with some of my questions (that poor version of the Potomac with its vistas stolen from the Ottawa river banks … sad business all around). Even I hated it, however. Black State 2.0: Diplomat version went nowhere.

I was lucky to find a great independent Canadian publisher who took a chance on the original version, and for this I remain grateful. It’s the same stalwart believer who’s publishing The Innocent Canadian. I know how blessed I am, and how my particular story of getting these two books to print could probably be told, with some variations, by any number of Canadian authors (behind closed doors however - elbows furtively dipping down).

Anyway, this all leads us back to Canada House, I promise.

There were two nagging quotes that guided me, the second following in succession from the first, when I sat down and started plotting my next novel after The Black State back in 2022. The first was the dictum I’ve always trusted: start with character, and with this in mind, the most interesting person or people you can’t stop thinking about (which makes sense, a writer’s going to spend years with them). The characters that interest me most have lives that are infused with themes that are complex, hard to distill into fixed moral and ideological certainties. It’s probably why I find contemporary discourse novels so tedious; I could not imagine writing about, say incels and rubes addicted to online dating platforms because it’s quite easy to be certain about such subject matter, no stretch of empathic imagination required or presumptions challenged. The characters that inspired The Innocent Canadian I’ve already written about here and elsewhere, but they led me to be reminded of that L.P. Hartley quote, the first lines from The Go Between: “the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” If I was going to write about the past - one I didn’t live through - I better get as much grounding in place and time as I could, in order not to go through what I suffered with my ersatz-American misadventure.

A lot of the reading and the photographs I pored through for months helped of course. As mentioned previously, diaries were invaluable, as were reports like Mollie Painter Downes’ letters from London . How Charles Ritchie wrote about the city in the first months of the war has a surreal quality: “at the end of the quiet stuccoed streets hang the great silver elephants of the balloon barrage floating airily high in the evening sky. These captive monsters may be seen between their ascents pinned to the ground in the parks or public spaces - lying exhausted, breathing faintly with the passing puffs of wind.” A writer sleeps on these images and scenes and wakes to find each paragraph improvable, possibly more vivid and resonant.

But place, when possible to experience, is equally invaluable. Ottawa was easy, of course, as was the Ireland and the particular Martello tower in the third act chapters of The Innocent Canadian - I’d been multiple times, walked the Strand, paced every inch of that particular setting. But Cockspur Street, Trafalgar Square, all of the London locations particular to my characters I had only briefly visited. And there was a huge gap with the place of work of my main character: Canada House.

I’ll forever be grateful to our High Commissioner who gave me some time there, who let me linger like a weirdo and feel the texture of that desk, photographed above, and who allowed my wife and I to walk up these stairs, below, to retrace the steps of Mike Pearson, of Vincent Massey - and of Charles Ritchie, of course.

There is a scene in the first pages of the second chapter of my novel that is really all about these stairs, the moment my main character is ascending to face a scene that will change his life. There was no way I could have known I needed them. Until I was there. Fiction writing may be a kind of alchemy (though I’m generally skeptical of such mysticism). If that might be true, it’s best to start with the truest metals that you can.

One coda to this, from the era before maple washing. Once I finished the first draft of The Innocent Canadian, almost a year before Trump 2.0, I told someone, publishing-adjacent, about the title, and they assured me it would cause editors here to “roll their eyes.” How jejune, how parochial, how little-Canada it sounded. I suppose it amounted to commercial suicide for those without the confidence to do what, say, Scandinavian publishers had done for their writers, pushing them out to the world without turning Reykjavik into Anchorage. Now, of course, we’re all elbows and high-five-Canada. It’s great to hear that American-born Linwood Barclay refuses to set his novels back there, because he feels the country “has lost its mind” and that Louise Penny has pulled out of events stateside. And yet, meanwhile, as Ken Whyte reported, “95 percent of Canada’s book industry is now in the hands of foreign multinationals; three New York firms—PRH, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster—account for almost all of that.” I had terrible timing with my innocent Canadian, apparently. Too soon, too soon! Thankfully, my unabashedly and authentically Canadian publisher’s sense of occasion is better than mine.

I’d like to say that, given how good Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories and novels The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and The Heat of the Day are, that I’ve spent decades reading and re-reading her work. But I came to her through the diaries of Charles Ritchie, who was posted in London at Canada House when the two met, in 1941, at a christening. She was 42, a successful, Anglo-Irish novelist based in London, and she had been married for 18 years to Alan Cameron, who was working for the BBC. Ritchie was seven years her junior, still single and something of a serial monogamist, but he was smitten with her from the first meeting and the interest was mutual. I was curious, given how passionate and enduring their relationship came to be1, how the Bowen Ritchie wrote about compared or contrasted to Bowen the novelist, so I began reading her with the work she dedicated to Ritchie, The Heat of the Day.

It is ostensibly a spy novel - if you’d imagine, say, Virginia Woolf taking to the genre. There is the rich interiority, the ‘psychological intricacies’ so elegantly realized with her protagonist Stella Rodney, who’s made aware, by an enigmatic intelligence agent named Harrison, that her lover Robert Kelway is a German spy. Harrison offers to shield Robert from arrest if Stella will become Harrison’s lover. Much of the plot hinges on the fundamental question of whether she believes Harrison, and whether she feels committed enough to Kelway to protect him, regardless of how essentially treasonous he might be. In broad strokes, the plot could be said to focus on Rodney’s investigation of how plausible Harrison’s claim is, followed by Kelway’s ultimate confession and the fallout for his relationship with Stella. However, what interests Bowen are not the plot points of a suspense narrative so much as the way the theme of trust and betrayal is explored, scene by scene. Bowen’s interested in the layers of authenticity love is constructed upon, and how they can be peeled back upon reflection, revealing uncertainties conveniently papered over - the willed denial of the one who loves, and the deceptions of the one who consents to be loved.

The parallels with Bowen’s own life during the war are provocative. She began seeing Ritchie while married, and this was not long after her dalliance with Goronwy Rees, a committed Marxist and possible spy. She also took on intelligence work herself while serving under Duff Cooper at the Ministry of Information; she compiled a dossier for the government on Irish attitudes toward the war ( Reports on Eire: Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill by Elizabeth Bowen, 1940-1942) .

For this writer, the wheels began turning. I was initially struck by how evocative, how beautifully written Ritchie’s diary entries from his first stint in London’s Canada House were (collected in the volume The Siren Years), but after reading Bowen’s novel, I couldn’t help wonder about the particular approach she took with her material, in relation to her own dalliances and divided loyalties. The critic and historian Jacques Barzun, in a Harpers review in 1949, offered a backhanded compliment about her writerly intentions: “A writer of mysteries would have to give an embarrassed cough or two to help us swallow so lumpy a conception, but Miss Bowen is of course saved by her manner and her power to suggest at every point that she has some deeper intent than has yet been disclosed.” What else could have been disclosed by Bowen? What did her “manner” save her from disclosing?

The Innocent Canadian imagines a “real” story of espionage, like pentimenti barely discernible in a canvas mounted and presented in a very different style from the tracing of the particular origin story.

The Heat of the Day, along with Bowen’s other novels of the period, has been the subject of a critical reassessment over the last couple of decades. The critic Jane Miller, in the Raritan back in 2000, succinctly summarizes how her work was received when it was first published: “The charges against her were of snobbery, of having ‘the moral intransigence of the interior decorator’ (Elizabeth Hardwick), of ‘special pleading,’ so that ‘the reality of society is excluded’ (Charles Williams), and of inhabiting ‘the land of the middlebrow’ (Angus Wilson). These charges seemed to many of her readers unfair and malicious, and to some extent familiar and typical of how serious novels written by women were often read.” By 2015, The Heat of the Day had begun to outlast its initial detractors; writing in the Guardian, the novelist and critic Robert McCrum placed it at number 69 in its list of 100 Best Novels. McCrum described Bowen herself as “more than just a great writer of the blitz, she is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis.”

That state of “in extremis” and the very real threats of treason and betrayal in the London of 1941 was the starting point for The Innocent Canadian. Even if the narrative was in any way based on real events, it would have assuredly been a story neither Bowen nor Ritchie would ever tell - not even in their most intimate letters over the years.