As a veteran journalist, children’s author, and memoirist, Don Gillmor has long reserved a novel-shaped space in his eclectic oeuvre. That Kanata, his first long work of fiction, is admirable and almost absurdly ambitious comes, then, as little surprise. A national epic that crosses centuries and continents with sprawling ease, his most recent wrangle with the elusive character of Canada and its people is also his most engrossing.

Yet this is more than a literary companion to Canada: A People’s History, the non-fiction work he produced in conjunction with CBC in 2000. Taking an epigraph (“Longing on a large scale is what makes history”) from one of Don DeLillo’s mad, messy portraits of American life, Kanata reads like a catalogue of unscreened Canadian heritage minutes pulled inside out, thrown into a blender, and then arrayed across some 450 pages—something more provocatively complex, and less aridly affirmative, than one might expect from a project of this sort. Gillmor switches perspective and time period, sometimes surveying Canada’s political scene from the viewpoint of a painfully indecisive John Diefenbaker, elsewhere giving now familiar landscapes their beautiful first traces through the measured view of an eighteenth-century cartographer.

Much of the book centres on Michael Mountain Horse, an Alberta-born historian whose experiences and reflections encapsulate many of the early twentieth century’s landmark moments: the battle of the Somme, the Great Depression, the Regina riots, the first Alberta oil boom, and the Cold War, to name just a few. When channelling Mountain Horse’s sweeping narrative, the story rampages through bar fights and battlefields with all the intensity, tragedy, and scope that define the epic aesthetic. Visceral descriptions and startling imagery dot nearly every page: wolves stand “on their hind legs in a grotesque dance, as if they were in the throes of becoming human”; a gangrenous foot looks as though it “died years ago, a separate death, but [is] still somehow clinging to its host.”

Entwined throughout are chapters demythologizing our major historical figures, one indignity at a time. Macdonald appears as a “bewildered animal” after lighting his bedsheets on fire in a drunken accident, while Mackenzie King’s spiritualism is played for laughs as he pursues communion with his dead dog.

However, for all their welcome humour, these chapters often feel external, muddling the book’s overall structure. Compounding the muddle, other chapters retreat from the compelling guts of the story to let Mountain Horse deliver heavy-handed monologues of historical exposition and theory. These passages can be wincingly self-conscious: musing on a mural of Canada, Mountain Horse surmises that “if the individual elements were irregular in scale, and the artistic sensibility discrepant and crude, there was a naive grandeur...It was huge, for one thing, and who doesn’t admire the epic?” For all his evident intelligence, Gillmor would do well to let readers admire the grandeur of his novel without so blatantly asking us to do so, for despite the irregularities and discrepancies inherent to its remarkable scale there is without question much to admire.