Review — Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose

Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose
by B. W. Powe
Thomas Allen Publishers (2007), 256 pp.

Consider the pirouette. In May 1977, at a reception in Buckingham Palace, the prime minister of Canada spun away from the Queen of England. When Elizabeth, along with Prince Philip and Prince Charles, went one direction, Pierre Trudeau went the other: toward the west, toward home. Though he made the pirouette look spontaneous, he had rehearsed it beforehand. Though many considered the spin rude, Trudeau offered no defence or explanation afterward. He let the gesture stand, elegant and enigmatic; he left the image to seed in the minds of the millions of Canadians who saw the photos that he knew would be taken.

For B. W. Powe, the pirouette dramatized the “fire” in Pierre Trudeau, along with “the unfolding rose of identity breaking through.” Trudeau’s political engagement was from the start about “mind, intelligence, society and culture directed towards a new kind of inspired consciousness.” He was a singular man whose complexity and charisma were irresistible. Canadians sensed in their prime minister both greatness and opportunity — to spin away from received ritual, to think newly about nation.

Mystic Trudeau likely makes of its subject only what Trudeau privately made of himself. Powe knew him in his final years and kept records of their conversations. Expanding on Trudeau’s pithy remarks, Powe offers a reading of his character and legacy that is as challenging as many of Trudeau’s own public assertions. The book is determined to credit Canada with a mystical tradition and to deliberate in that tradition’s arguments, employing language that is poetic, emphatic, and occasionally obscure.

“We were still in the grip of Trudeau’s idea of country,” Powe writes. “No principle or idea, narrative, image, symbol or myth had fully succeeded his dream.” If those seem like fighting words, wait for the book’s kicker: a call for the establishment of a republic in a twenty-first-century Canada that has likewise pirouetted away from “the last vestige of colonialism and empire.”