‘Mr. Jones’ by Margaret Sweatman

Reviewed by Elin Thordarson

It’s hard not to think of Winnipeg novelist Margaret Sweatman as, first and foremost, a writer of historical fiction. Though she is an accomplished playwright and a talented singer-lyricist, in addition to being a novelist, it’s her consistent interest and research into the past that seems to drive her as a writer. Her debut novel Fox (1991) is set in Winnipeg, and concerns the 1919 General Strike. Sweatman’s sophomore novel, When Alice Lay Down With Peter (2002), which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year, and several other awards, is set during the Métis Rebellion. Her last novel, The Players (2009), takes its readers back to Restoration England.

Mr. Jones, Sweatman’s new novel, represents her return to Canada and the twentieth century. It is an exploration of a particularly dark period in Canada’s history and in the twentieth century altogether, when countries sacrificed their own citizens at the onset of the nuclear age with the fear of a potential ‘domino effect’ where communism might increasingly encroach on the west. Citizens and governments alike were kept in the general imprisonment of paranoia. These were the Cold War years. Mr. Jones  is a story of personal betrayals and loyalties during that time.

The story begins in the middle. It opens on the summer of 1953 at Blue Sea Lake at a family cottage amid the rustling aspen of the Canadian shield, in a set piece that recurs through out the novel. Emmett Jones works in Canada’s External Affairs department. When we encounter him he is already a spiritually exhausted man. Sweatman introduces him as “intensely lonely.” He is informed over cocktails at the cottage that he is going to be investigated by the RCMP, because of his alleged past ties to communist activity. Espionage indeed works as a constant undercurrent throughout the novel.

The novel then jumps back to the beginning of it all, 1946, immediately postwar. And Emmett Jones swears he is not “going to be one of those veterans who couldn’t get over it.” During World War II, he was in Bomber Command: not a popular memory. Emmett Jones did not return home with a medal for heroism for his role in the Allied firebombing of six hundred thousand German civilians. Regardless, he swears he will not be one of those veterans who can’t move on: “Everything he had experienced… it had to mean something, there had to be progress, redemption.” And upon his return to Canada he finds this in the idealism of the student communist movement in postwar Toronto. For a man whose government had ordered him to bomb civilians, phrases like the dictatorship of the bourgeosie, the workers’ democracy, stateless and classless society, were pure magic.

It is here he that meets two characters of profound importance to the course his life takes. First is the compelling John Norfield, who was a POW in Hong Kong during the war. “That’s the most important thing about him. Everything else is an after-effect,” Emmett says. And second is Suzanne McCallum, who when we first encounter her at a student party, is horrified, reading for the first time John Hersey’s article on Hiroshima in The New Yorker. Together with Emmett, these two form one of a number of love triangles and strong character triptychs that Sweatman constructs in the novel. It is the relationships between her cast of characters that truly forms the arc of this story, their loyalties to one another as well as their betrayals. In connection with the murky quality that defines the Cold War period, characters constantly disappear and reappear like ghosts through out the telling of Emmett Jones’s story working for External during this period of global paranoia.

There does appear to be a magical element of recurrence to Mr. Jones. One of Sweatman’s characters regularly intones Nietzsche’s famous roundelay Ich schlief, ich schlief, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a reference to the recurrence of all things. And just as characters, both loyal and treacherous, come and go through out this novel, so do places. For instance, the cottage at Blue Sea Lake. And Emmett Jones returns again and again to Japan, a childhood home of his, during his work with External. It’s there that other love triangles play out, where they have been played out before.

Goose Lane Editions, Sweatman’s publisher, has made the comparison between Mr. Jones and John le Carré. Of course there are many novels set during the Cold War period. But I think the comparison is justified in the way much of the conflict is psychological, internal to the central characters, and ultimately invisible. The effect on the reader of both Mr. Jones and le Carré is a similarly stormy and paranoiac atmosphere on the page. Sweatman takes great pains to write in this style.

There are several uncanny moments in Mr. Jones, where Sweatman elicits from her reader a cognitive dissonance, a sort of fearful uncertainty in a world that would seem familiar, but that we don’t know our way about in. Take for instance when Suzanne, searching for John Norfield, goes to his empty apartment to wait for him to return:

The apartment prickled with silence and electric light coming through the window from the streetlamps. She heard a shoe move. Momentum, confusion, fear brought her to the doorway of the kitchen. She saw someone standing in the dark. She said, unreasonably, “John?” The dark figure moved slightly. Suzanne moaned. She stumbled to the door, fumbled with the lock, and ran out to the street.

The novel is wide-ranging in time and space. Its setting moves from 1946 up to the early 1960s. Mr. Jones must, by virtue of telling one man’s story during this turbulent time, only lightly touch upon the figures and political coups that marked this period of profound change: Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, Fidel Castro, General MacArthur, Senator McCarthy; the fight against communism in the Korean War, the impending communist uprising leading to the war in Vietnam, and the communist revolution in Cuba.

For a reader of this book it’s not a bad idea to have a good outside understanding of how the world’s politics were unfolding in those years. It’s beneficial to also have a good grasp of the appeal communism had, as well as its apparent dangers, in one’s reading of all the motivations at play in Mr. Jones. But perhaps this simply goes with reading historical fiction. Sometimes the research of the reader into a novel’s material enriches one’s reading as much as the writer’s research does.

Goose Lane | 484 pages |  $32.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0864929143