‘Once We Had a Country’ by Robert McGill

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn  (originally posted Nov. 1, 2013)

What an absolutely great subject for a novel: the American draft dodger experience in Canada during the Vietnam War. I can hardly wait for an equally great novel to emerge. As regards Once We Had a Country, not that I advocate smoking, but this is close but no cigar.

For those who don’t remember – which is a phrase often used by grumpy party hosts while scraping morning sleep-overs off couches crusted with dried beer – the United States had a draft of eligible young men during the Vietnam War conflict until Richard Nixon ended it in 1972. Estimates vary, but there were in the ballpark of 30,000 such young men, some accompanied by wives or girlfriends, who made the run across the border to Canada. Some were rich, some poor, none were George W. Bush or William Jefferson Clinton, but all were running from dying in a dubious war.

The title here speaks to the totality of the plot. It is an uncompleted phrase. ‘Once We Had a Country’ where… we were safe, didn’t arbitrarily invade other countries, knew who we were, knew what it was. And that generally is McGill’s theme. Much like Graham Greene, McGill is fascinated by the concept of borders and frontiers both national and personal. To cross the border is to dare one’s self beyond that place that is known and secure, and instead emerge into a land either physical or emotional where everything is different.

And so enter Maggie Dunne, earnest girlfriend of Boston Brahmin princeling Fletcher Morgan and daughter of Gordon. Maggie and her father are estranged after her over-protected youth. Desperate for meaning in his life, Gordon has become a Catholic missionary in Laos. There is the first border crossing in Once We Had a Country. As to the second, because Fletcher’s Papa could not for some unexplained reason buy his son out of national service, and instead sets him up with a cherry orchard in southwestern Ontario, he and Maggie arrive there in early 1972 to set up house, propagate the orchard and host other draft dodgers as employees of Morgan Sugar.

A pause here. Forgive the language, but did it have to be a fucking cherry orchard? I just did a quick survey of my literary memory. Let’s see, outside of a cherry orchard, passim Anton Chekhov as a symbol of a decaying civilization tended to by the giddy and uncaring, are there any more obvious symbols available for authors to choose from? Well, outside of babies being born in mangers as a hope for a new and better order, or ghosts appearing on Danish battlements as harbingers of doom, I can’t think of any. Would apples have been such a bad idea?

And that is what annoys me with McGill’s novel to the point of Grrrr… everything that happens is exactly what I expect to happen.  Fletcher is the scion of American money so of course he is going to abandon Maggie and scurry back to cocktails and debutante tail as soon as the draft ends. The swarthy Jamaican farm worker George Ray is of course going to fall for the lustful, pink loins of Maggie, although at least we are spared the latest yawnerrific lousily written sex scene. And will the farm house burn down? Well darling, you actually have read a novel before, haven’t you? The only generic elements missing are the town coot and the hooker with a heart.

I looked in vain for a character in Once We Had a Country who wasn’t carved from not just stereotype but indeed monotype, and I ain’t found me a one. They don’t even require names. Swarthy man-servant; desperate female companion; confused young female neighbour. We have met the types and they are arch.

The closest to fully-fleshed characters are Maggie and George Ray. And yet, there is something missing here too. George Ray is quite careful in avoiding the womenfolk who come and go through the would-be commune, instead staying by himself in the workers’ barracks. He is loyal to his wife back home in Jamaica, even though he is in Canada six months of every year. Maggie too is loyal to her own sense of ethics and has no desire to intrude on George Ray’s marriage. Yet they do end up in the sack together. Why? How? There is a major emotional shift here that goes unexamined in terms of motive. It is not that absolutely every decision a character makes in a novel needs to be laid-out like the instructions for constructing flat pack furniture, yet when it is this sort of core change in principle, I think we as readers have some pointed questions that deserve quality answers.

Yet is Once We Had a Country altogether disposable? And tempting as it is to say yes, the answer must be No. There is value here, in the sense of the triumph of the personal over adversity, as well as a mentioned yet largely unexplored subtheme of how day-to-day journalistic necessities manipulate stories to support a theme. As this story takes place through 1972 and 1973, the characters in the cherry orchard watch the American news of the closing spasms of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, seeing their nation dissolve away from what they perceived it as – a land of truth and justice.

Both Vietnam and Watergate represented sea changes in how media covers the great issues. Lyndon Johnson may or may not have said, ‘If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the nation,’ yet he certainly must have thought it. In a sort of Marshall McLuhan meets quantum physics sense, how a major news item was observed by the media changes the dynamic of the observed subject. If the news media doesn’t like you, it says so and you are doomed.

As such, when a news documentary filmmaker comes to Canada to shoot background for a feature piece on Maggie’s father in Laos, McGill does expertly describe how the true story is shifted to the point of bordering on fiction in order to make ‘better television’. I wish McGill had done more of this within Once We Had a Country as it would have given more heft to the completed work.

I get what McGill was after, in both his title as well as his novel. Once there was a safe place where people could grow through their thoughts and into the dreams, whether that physical place was America, Canada, Laos or wherever. Yet the truth is that this place never has existed. And that truth is the substance of a novel never written, and sadly not written in Once We Had a Country.

Knopf | 416 pages |  $24.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0307361202