From the Somme to Guernica

Why do Canadian writers so love the First World War? It features in some of the nation’s most canonized novels, from Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising to Timothy Findley’s The Wars, while the past decade alone has brought us Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers,Frances Itani’s Deafening, The Sojourn by Alan Cumyn and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road. Perhaps it is because the war marked Canada’s coming of age, thus making the conflict a fit subject for national epics. Or maybe it is because, unlike World War Two, the First World War left behind few film reels, thus sparing it from the History Channel and giving novelists some room to manoeuvre.

Less charitably, one might point to the ready-made gravitas of war as a subject, the out-of-copyright archival material to be plundered and the easy politics of condemning a conflict everyone agrees was a bad idea. There might even be a voyeuristic attraction to...