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Broken Ground
by Jack Hodgins | History
Registered by goatgrrl of New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Saturday, May 15, 2004
This book has not been rated. 

status (set by ruthwater): available


2 journalers for this copy...

Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Saturday, May 15, 2004

This book has not been rated.

This 1998 novel by award-winning Canadian novelist Jack Hodgins is set in the fictional community of Portuguese Creek, British Columbia (based on the real-life hamlet of Merville, on Vancouver Island), a Returned Soldiers Settlement established by the Canadian government for veterans of World War I.

Set in 1922, the story in Broken Ground is told in three parts. In the first part, "Voices from Portuguese Creek" (narrated by ten different members of the community -- among them, eleven year old Charlie MacIntosh and Great War veteran Matthew Pearson, who become the book's central characters), the establishment and character of the settlement and its citizens is described. Although the story is -- to the mid-point of the novel -- basically light-hearted, past and a future threats blaze away in the background: memories of the slaughter of WWI, and a forest fire up in the hills above the small community's wooden homes (based on the real-life Comox Valley fire of 1922*). When the fire eventually overtakes the settlement at Portuguese Creek, the consequences are devastating. The second part of the novel, "The Fields of France: 1918 - 1919", is a short epistolary sequence containing some significant -- and surprising -- background information about some of the characters introduced in Part I. In Part III, "A Helmet for the Bees: 1996", we are reacquainted with Charlie MacIntosh, now eighty-five years of age.

I found Broken Ground to be beautifully written, its characters and atmosphere vividly, cinematically portrayed. Perhaps it was particularly evocative for me since I'm familiar with the geography of the area in which its set (the relentless dark and damp of Vancouver Island forests, and the indestructability of old cedar stumps, many of which have barely begun to rot ninety years after the trees were felled!). I would highly recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in books set in the Great War era, or to anyone with a taste for quality Canadian fiction.

Interviewed by BC Book World in 1998 (read full interview here), Jack Hodgins said this about the writing of Broken Ground:

I feel as though I've been waiting all my life to write this one. I grew up listening to family stories of the Merville Fire of 1922, which completely surrounded my father's family house, cutting off escape right through the night. It burned their farm buildings and killed their animals. I remember the ageing settlers who fought in the Great War. I lived in a house built by a Returned Soldier, and played as a child amongst the giant stumps blackened by the fire. All of these seemed like extensions of my own being. Writing the fictional account was a way of re-living something I never exactly lived in the first place.

Hodgins won the 1980 Governor General's Award for Literature for his novel, The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne. Broken Ground won the 1999 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

*Queen's University Doctoral candidate James Murton wrote a paper about the community of Merville and its decimation in the 1922 fire entitled "Soldiers, the Land and the Nature of Modern BC". An abstract of Murton's paper is available here. 

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Friday, October 08, 2004

This book has not been rated.

I have no idea why, but I'm always fascinated to read books set in the Great War era. Others I've read and appreciated include Pat Barker's Ghost Road, Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, and Timothy Findley's The Wars.

(Photo at left: Canadian soldiers on Salisbury Plains, Winter 1914 - 15, courtesy of Canadian Heritage Gallery.) 

Journal Entry 3 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Friday, October 15, 2004

This book has not been rated.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this book (I'm afraid I cared about it too much to risk a wild release!), but it just occurred to me my friend ruthwater might enjoy it, so off it goes -- on a bit of a whim -- to Manchester. No pressure to read this one, Ruth, if it doesn't seem like your cup of tea -- just pass it along. Happy Hallowe'en and a blessed Samhain from New Westminster! 

Journal Entry 4 by ruthwater from Manchester, Greater Manchester United Kingdom on Friday, October 22, 2004

This book has not been rated.

Thanks so much for this. A book out of the blue is always something to lighten the day. I'll give it a try and see what I think. Took a look just now at the first two paragraphs - I'm certainly drawn in by his style. Takes an expert to make writing look so effortless.

Samhain greetings to you, also. 

Journal Entry 5 by ruthwater from Manchester, Greater Manchester United Kingdom on Tuesday, November 02, 2004

This book has not been rated.

It's been a real struggle to get into this. I've never cared for First World War books (too much compulsory red poppy poetry at school, probably). I know nothing of Canadian pioneer settlements where vast tree stumps need to be blown up. But the greatest barrier was the multi-viewpoint first-person narrative. I think you need to set aside a few hours and completely immerse yourself in this quirky little community before you begin to "get it".

I was on the point of giving up when Pearson, quite without warning, launches into his wartime experiences and there I was crying. Suddenly there was a connection with a very sensitive, and rightly much admired writer I heard speak about a year ago, the British Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo. http://www.childrenslaureate.org/biography/html
He's one of those rare people who can do grief, and animals, without sentimentality. He also happens to be obsessed with the Great War, and particularly with an aspect of it still too shameful to be openly discussed in Britain, the shooting of terrified young deserters. His last book, "Private Peaceful", enters the mind of one such boy on the last night of his life. Morpurgo says that as he wrote the book he was sometimes so angry that he had to put down his pen and weep. He is actively campaigning for deserters to be pardoned by the British Government, so far without success.

So anyway, I'll stay with it. And thanks for the background information - it really has helped.

 

Journal Entry 6 by ruthwater from Manchester, Greater Manchester United Kingdom on Wednesday, November 10, 2004

This book has not been rated.

Well, I finally finished this. It was quite brilliant in parts, yet I found it somehow un-satisfying. There seemed to be so many themes going on at once, each one worthy of an entire novel. The formation of a distinctive community. The horrors of war. Regeneration, coming of age, the way stories change and develop over time. It's not simply that I dislike multi-theme books. They can work brilliantly, but the shifts between themes, and the contrasting tones, didn't quite work for me.

I think that if I wrote a book based on my parents' reminiscences, I'd probably make the same mistake (if mistake is the right word). Human lives don't come neatly packaged in narrative structures. Maybe he was making a conscious break with the heroic journey kind of novel and writing something more complicated and realistic. If so, he succeeded well. This strange little community, initially so alien to me, gradually worked its way into my being until I felt I'd known them for ever. People don't discuss the horrors and confusions of their inner world, however much it clamours for attention. At least, they didn't in 1922. As Charlie observes, "I suppose Pearson wrestled with his demons in the privacy of his skull like most of us, knowing that what was important to him could not be resolved by others. If he spoke little of his doubts, or of the insights that came from his reading, this was probably because he lived in a community that thrived upon the sharing of nearly everything else - work, joys, disappointments, recipes, machinery, expertise, gossip, good news and sorrows - except for those intimate matters of life and death that, it is suggested in books, people elsewhere in the world debate constantly."

Hmm.....I think that's the nub of it. It's a realistic book, in the truest sense of the word. We survive as social beings. No matter how appalling our experiences, that's how we learn to deal with them, and eventually heal. It's a very unfashionable observation in this therapy generation. Think of all the stories that we read for entertainment and instruction - movies, novels, soaps, even "human interest" stories in the papers. They are all packaged, as if we need that order and simplicity imposed on the muddle of daily life. "Broken Ground" makes absolutely no concessions. A rotting body on the Somme, or a suitor's boots burning in an oven; no judgements are made on the relative importance of each. No wonder it's a tough book to get through. But it's certainly an interesting one.
 



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