Pulpit Fiction

She has written for the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and Maclean’s. She has produced for CBC Radio and has left footprints in the snows of Canada with her investigations of Conrad Black and Patti Starr, the former chair of Ontario Place. She has lost political races to two prominent figures, Chrystia Freeland and Bill Morneau. In 2016, this magazine named her Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths, an examination of the cost of deficit reduction, one of the twenty-five most influential Canadian books of the previous quarter century. Yet it’s possible that Linda McQuaig is destined to be remembered as a novelist.

To be sure, that may seem a bit like saying Benjamin Disraeli’s greatest legacy is The Wondrous Tale of Alroy rather than his work at 10 Downing Street. But give McQuaig her due: she has written a stunning debut, one that is captivating, fast moving, suitably perplexing without being overwrought, and infused with great moral power.

At the heart of The Road to Goderich is an ancient compulsion, dating to the book of Genesis (Jacob’s deception of Isaac, his blind father, by placing an animal skin on his own hands to seem to be Esau) and popularized by Sir Walter Scott in Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!”). This is a deceptively deep story about unusually deep levels of deception, some of them created by McQuaig. That’s because her readers (or at least this one) are artfully, maybe even sneakily led to believe they have a sense of where things are going by page 42, when in fact she takes another 300-plus pages to weave the surprisingly tangled web of Callandra Scott and the various colluding and colliding characters stitched inside this book.

The action takes place just before the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 in the 2.2 million acres on the eastern side of Lake Huron that began to be colonized by the Canada Company, incorporated in 1826 to develop Crown lands and clergy reserves set aside to support Protestant churches. The many twists reflect the mind of a skilled writer coming to grips, and then to peace, with her new role, perhaps even her new identity. They also reflect the harshness and hardships of this “promising land for settlement” at a fraught juncture in Canadian history.

Sexual mores were loose back then. In the social order of the region and the time, Anglican clergy outranked their Presbyterian peers. Dense brush, primitive byways, and brittle bridges defined the land. Recreation was often limited to the bottle and barn dances, though a quilting bee — no raucous diversion, that! — does come up. The almost forgotten words “strumpet” and “harlot” reappear in print, in what seems like the first time in the twenty-first century, a particularly delightful and surprising element of the prose.

As the characters move through thick woods on crude roads composed of rough-cut logs, the nature of the land becomes clear. “The fierceness of the forest was increasingly difficult to ignore,” McQuaig writes. “The road became slower and bumpier, too. It had been uneven since Hamilton, but now the ruts were deeper and more frequent.” The few settlements the travelling party sees along its rugged route west offer little comfort beyond that which can be found in alcohol. Barley soup, pork with gravy, and potatoes constitute a veritable feast.

The characters are well drawn: Reverend Norbert Scott, a cold and hesitant man whose eulogy for his father lacks familiarity and intimacy, two qualities also lacking in his marriage. Callandra, a young Scottish bride of her time and, in time, of her place in Canada, yet energized and radicalized by the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and by the grand contrivance that she helps enact. Lottie, the housemaid who becomes a confidante to Callandra. Sam, who accompanies the Scotts on their voyage to the Americas and to the new settlement of Goderich (today an Ontario community of roughly 8,000) and who harbours a secret himself. The thoroughly dreadful members of the Scott family, unimpressed with Callandra and unwelcoming to her.

A river runs through The Road to Goderich, or at least it shapes the storyline and both the principals and the principles of the plot. A bridge accident leaves the pastor dead by drowning before he reaches his pulpit in the Huron Tract. Sam, the hired man, survives and through a madcap misunderstanding assumes the identity of Callandra’s new husband and thus the identity of Goderich’s preacher. Much confusion and many contradictions ensue as a great artifice is set in motion. “Although his accent suggested humble roots, he displayed sufficient command of English grammar and vocabulary that it seemed plausible that he’d been educated for the clergy,” McQuaig writes of Sam. “Altogether, he was presenting himself convincingly as a Presbyterian minister without altering his look or behaviour much at all.”

Before long, however, a truth emerges from the falsehood: “a growing mythology in town about how the new pastor was exceeding all expectations, even renewing people’s faith in religion.” He ministers but is not a minister. He also stokes rebellion against the Canada Company and, implicitly, against the Crown’s rule of its distant colony. The supposed pastor becomes more populist than preacher, a Canadian incarnation of the populists who have sowed rebellion south of the border. In the late nineteenth century, there was William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska (eventually a three-time unsuccessful Democratic presidential nominee). In the mid-1930s, there was Huey Long of Louisiana (and his Share Our Wealth movement). And now, in the early twenty-first century, there is the MAGA ascendancy led by you-know-who of Manhattan and Mar‑a‑Lago.

As the novel barrels on, Callandra realizes that the toxic mix of deception and rebellion has only deepened the ruse and the risks and, perhaps, even the rewards. “He was less concerned about the dishonesty of his life in Goderich,” she muses of her phony husband. “She suspected this was because he now felt his deception served a larger purpose, an important political end. By posing as a Presbyterian minister, he was providing cover for the risky preparations needed for a rebellion.”

It all falls apart, of course, as all great lies inevitably do. The undoing of Callandra and Sam provides the final lesson they might otherwise have learned from Shakespeare: “To thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” In the end, the mystery that hangs over the novel is resolved. And it proves the redemption of the adage so often misattributed to Winston Churchill, which in applying to this tale we might adapt to read, “A lie gets halfway around Upper Canada before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

However, there is one mystery that remains in these pages. Did McQuaig give three of her most vivid characters the surname Scott as a homage to Walter Scott — though he goes unmentioned — and his tangled web? Or was this merely a coincidence with consequence? The question lingers, as does the aura of this well sculpted work.