Canada: More than America's polite neighbour

By Jennifer Szalai

 

True North: On the Road in Canada 

by Paul Theroux 

Published by Mariner

423 pages $32

 

Among Donald Trump’s signature achievements when it comes to Canada — starting a trade war, threatening annexation, insulting its people, wrecking a longstanding alliance just because he could — the president has also managed to make a travel book about Canada improbably timely.

 

In True North: On the Road in Canada, Paul Theroux describes how an exploration of his ancestral roots in Quebec grew into a cross-country account of what Canada is and what it means to the people who live there. Canadians happen to know plenty about the United States; with its comparatively tiny population of 41 million, Canada has long paid close attention to its hulking neighbour as a matter of necessity.

 

 

Theroux, 85, presents this travel book — his 12th — as his last. “The planet is overrun with travellers and tourists, like ants on a bruised peach”, he writes, with his characteristic mix of grumpiness and verve. Having chronicled his far-flung journeys to places like Patagonia and China in previous books, Theroux says he now prefers puttering around his homes in Hawaii and on Cape Cod, where he can also sit at his desk and write his (many) novels. As a self-identified traveller, he long eschewed a tourist’s comforts, enduring the ordeal of a “decrepit bus station” or a “malodorous flophouse” in order to talk to the locals.

 

And talk to the locals he does. Most of True North recounts his conversations across Canada, with only the occasional mention of anything as obvious as a monument or a museum. He presses Canadians to “generalise” about differences between them and Americans, and gets a range of answers. Some are familiar, like the notion that Canadians are more deferential to authority and willing to work for the common good. Others are more striking. A woman in Belleville, Ontario, the birthplace of Theroux’s grandmother, considers Americans “a fearful people”, and points to the fact that they have so many guns. She asks Theroux what Americans are so afraid of. “That’s obvious”, he says. “They’re afraid of other Americans with guns.”

 

The book, like Theroux’s journey, is mostly organised geographically, though he begins with some family history in Yamaska — a tiny municipality in Quebec, where a Theroux named Antoine settled with his wife and children more than 300 years ago. The long history of these Canadian forebears is lovingly reconstructed, in often inordinate detail, and it’s only when Paul Theroux himself crosses the border that the book’s pace picks up.

 

He took a trip to freezing Ottawa in early 2022, after he heard that truckers protesting anti-pandemic measures had descended on Canada’s capital in what they called a “Freedom Convoy”. Some of the organisers issued a written demand to replace the government. He wandered through the chaos, agape at the rare sight of Canadian disorder.

 

The non-convoy Canadians who talked to Theroux were almost unanimously appalled. He also notes that though about 20 per cent of Canadian truckers are Pakistani or Sikh, you wouldn’t know it from the protesters he saw. As it happened, nearly half the donations for the trucker protests came from the United States. As an article in The London Review of Books put it in April 2022, “Americans were directly funding a movement whose stated goal was to overthrow the democratically elected government of a neighbouring country.”

 

Three years later, shortly after Trump began his second term, Theroux found that the president’s barrage of insults had effectively united otherwise fractious groups of Canadians in their patriotism. Their rage has been sharpened by the sting of betrayal. Canadians put a lot of stock in fairness; a “nice country you’ve got there” shakedown is widely seen as repugnant — a violation all the more heinous when perpetrated by one’s closest ally.

 

True North isn’t a flattering one-note narrative of Canadian valour. Theroux talks to Indigenous people who share devastating stories of children being abducted and sent to the country’s notorious residential schools, the last of which closed in 1997. He wonders aloud whether Canada’s approach to immigrants — promoting a “mosaic” of variegated cultures instead of a melting pot of assimilation — may have encouraged some newcomers to stay in their unassimilated “ethno-bubbles” rather than to identify with their adopted country. “No bubble dwellers seemed much troubled by the American president’s threat to make Canada the 51st state”, he writes.

 

Then again, that “seemed” is doing an awful lot of work. True North is inevitably an impressionistic book, filled with Theroux’s observations and interpretations. He’s a rambler, weaving in bits and bobs of interviews, news reports, history and literary criticism. Theroux, for his part, is usually charming, even when he’s cranky, and even when acting the braggy American, recalling instances of Canadians telling him how much they love his work.

 

True North is the final book in Theroux’s North American road trip trilogy, which began with Deep South and continued with On the Plain of Snakes, about his travels in Mexico. During an especially spectacular drive in British Columbia, he has “as close to a spiritual experience as I’d ever had”.

 

He is already hoping to return. Crossing the border into the United States, he notices the inscription on the Peace Arch, with its lofty sentiment that now reads like a poignant memento: “Children of a Common Mother — May These Gates Never Be Closed”.

 

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The reviewer is a nonfiction book critic for The Times