The Custodian of Paradise
by Wayne Johnston
Knopf Canada, 2006
528 pp., $35
by Wayne Johnston
Knopf Canada, 2002
486 pp., $22
Baltimore’s Mansion
by Wayne Johnston
Vintage Canada, 1999
288 pp., $21
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
by Wayne Johnston
Vintage Canada, 1998
608 pp., $22
For those unfamiliar with Waynejohnstonland, it perches along the far cliff-edge of our literary continent. Though already one of the more extravagantly charted terrains in Canadian literature, much of it remains, of necessity, terra incognita. By way of introduction, here are twelve key features of its known, sometimes unknowable, and often contradictory topography. All but a few of the excerpts quoted are from Baltimore’s Mansion, a manifesto about place nestled within a family memoir.
1. Waynejohnstonland is vast and sprawling. At the same time, it is also small and intimate. Finally, its size is indeterminate. “How big is ———land??” the son asks his father in Baltimore’s Mansion. Replying first that it is very big indeed, the parent adds, “Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one’s ever seen most of it.”
2. It is hostile to human habitation. Survivors of early attempts at settlement, safely back home in their beds, often woke up screaming in the dead of night. Only assurances from spouses that they no longer lived in Waynejohnstonland allowed them to find peace again. Alert to this, the German translators of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams initially suggested the title “The Territory of Unrelenting Nightmares.” Some of this ambivalence appears related to the weather.
3. In its “dimensions and variousness,” it is more a country than a colony or territory. “What a country we could have been,” the father tells his boy. “What a country we were one time.”
4. Living in Waynejohnstonland inclines thoughts and propels stories toward the mythic. The author himself hails from the Avalon Peninsula. In the fifteenth-century saga Le Morte D’Arthur, King Arthur crosses over to a different Avalon, saying it will “heal me of my grievous wound.” Avalon also conjures the Isle of Apples, “a pagan Garden of Eden.” As well, there is the “archetypal topography” of Ferryland, the town where Wayne Johnston’s ancestors were born and where, three centuries earlier, a Catholic colony overseen by Lord Baltimore failed to take root in the barren rock. Johnston’s blacksmith grandfather was known as “Ferryland’s Hephaestus,” in honour of the Greek god of the forge, and as a child Johnston imagined his grandparents “barge-borne by the hooded Queen and her assistant queens” for their crossing into Avalon — into the afterlife.
5. The topography is likewise totemic, often arrestingly physical and anthropomorphic, a character unto itself. Ferryland has a head, ears, and a gaze; the city nearby is notable for its brow. From page one of The Story of Bobby O’Malley, published in 1985, to the closing pages of The Navigator of New York, published in 2002, settings have almost always been first the small towns and then the one proper city of the land. Book after book animates the capital with the ardour of a tireless love poet. In one novel, it is compared not to a summer’s day, as Shakespeare portrayed the muse of his sonnets, but to constellations of stars, “all with their distinctive patterns of lights,” as Johnston describes the city’s various neighbourhoods.
6. Residents of Waynejohnstonland are similarly besotted. The society’s defining myth is that “the true king [is] always in exile or in rags while some pretender [holds] the throne.” Characters are indeed ragged true royals. They also tend to be misfits and loners, alienated from the mainstream and inclined toward private obsessions. Secrets abound, generally concerning parentage. Romances are brief and unsatisfactory. With their extravagant plot twists and old-fashioned interests in fortune and destiny, Wayne Johnston’s books share more in common with the tales of Daniel Defoe than with those of Douglas Coupland. “It was the stuff of boys’ adventure books,” explains the child in The Navigator of New York.
7. The land requires keepers for its lighthouse. It scarcely matters whether the applicants are fictional creations, like Sheilagh Fielding in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and now The Custodian of Paradise; real people rendered fictional, such as Joey Smallwood in the same books; or even real people rendered non-fictional characters, including the Johnston clan of Baltimore’s Mansion. The requirements are the same: tenacity, belief, and an appetite for lost causes.
8. Once you leave Waynejohnstonland, you stop believing it is real. Johnston writes of his relatives: “Home, when they left it, had ceased to exist.” Not surprisingly, you can’t go back either. The author has been in deep, possibly dispiriting exile for years. He lives in Toronto.
9. Waynejohnstonland is a space of “fancy and conjecture” and of yearning and nostalgia. “The past isn’t dead,” William Faulkner once wrote. “It isn’t even past.” All of Johnston’s major works, beginning with 1998’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, are set in the pre-present.
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